Stand for Something

by John Kasich

  We also cut them way too much slack, wouldn’t you agree? Lately, our police blotters are filled with the names of star athletes commanding special treatment on account of their celebrity. Fleet-footed shortstop Rafael Furcal was allowed to play in the 2004 Major League Baseball playoffs for the Atlanta Braves despite a drunk driving conviction that would have landed most of us directly in jail. I mentioned this story earlier, but it deserves another nod here as one of the most disgraceful headlines in recent memory. “I don’t know what the Braves would do without him,” Furcal’s attorney told a state court judge, who was either a fan or a fool because he put sentencing on hold until Atlanta completed its playoff run.

  Baltimore Ravens running back Jamal Lewis pleaded guilty to drug charges just prior to the start of the 2004 season, but was allowed to schedule his prison term at the end of the NFL season.

  Even synchronized swimmer Tammy Crow was free to participate in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens after being convicted of vehicular manslaughter, before beginning her three-month sentence a few days after the closing ceremonies. Here again, the disgrace runs to all of us, for placing these athletes on such a pedestal that even a bronze medal in synchronized swimming counts for something beyond a deserved punishment meted out in a timely fashion.

  A DIFFERENT STANDARD

  Apparently, when athletes get together to talk about the fringe benefits of sports, the benefit of the doubt must rank pretty high on their list, because these examples of slippery justice just go on and on. I don’t mean to suggest that every athlete who winds up facing charges gets a lighter sentence than anonymous individuals facing the same charges, or that they get to schedule their prison terms whenever it’s most convenient, but there’s a pattern here, and an undeniable connection between the athlete who grows up under the silver lining of preferential treatment and second chances and the belligerent professional who is so emboldened by his fame and fortune that he just can’t help himself. At some point, we have to take some of the responsibility for all this on our own shoulders, because we’re the ones letting these athletes off the hook. We’re the ones setting this new standard, because by looking the other way from all this bad behavior, or reducing or rescheduling their justified punishments, we’re really just encouraging more of the same.

  Just look at Major League Baseball’s policy on steroids, which has lately commanded front and center attention in baseball circles and in Congress. In one respect, the league’s message is clear: Steroids are illegal, and dangerous, and irresponsible, and those who take them are gaining an unfair competitive advantage that threatens not only their health but also the health of impressionable young athletes who model their training and conditioning after their favorite ballplayers. They threaten the integrity of the game. And yet in another respect, the message has until recently been mixed, because a player needed to get caught five times before he could be thrown out of the league for taking these banned substances. Five times! Where else but in the arena of professional sports does an individual get five strikes before he gets what’s coming to him? Apparently owners and players have responded to public sentiment on this one and have agreed to tougher penalties for steroid use beginning with the 2006 baseball season, penalties that include a 50-game suspension for the first offense, 100 games for the second, and a lifetime ban for the third.

  Mercifully, there have been some other hopeful developments regarding athletes and the coaches and agents and university officials charged with their safekeeping. It’s not all shock and awe out there. In fact, the only good thing about this never-ending lowlight reel from the world of sports is that it sets us up for the highlights that find us every time an Ozzie Guillen or Lance Armstrong alights on our radar. One of the happiest surprises to emerge from the world of sports in 2005 was the principled stand taken by Bill Brogden, the men’s golf coach at Tulsa, during a sudden-death playoff with SMU to decide the Western Athletic Conference championship. The two teams were playing a course in Choudrant, Louisiana, about a half-hour from the nearest airport, and as the day drew long Coach Brogden realized he was getting perilously close to his team’s scheduled departure for the last flight of the day to take them home.

  The playoff format meant it would be at least another hour before a winner would be decided, and by that point the team’s plane would be on the tarmac, awaiting takeoff. Coach Brogden knew full well that three of his five players had final exams first thing the next morning, and that four of them maintained grade point averages of 3.2 or above, and that he couldn’t afford to let them miss that plane, title on the line or no. So what did he do? He conceded the championship by forfeit and made certain his players were on the last flight out of town. How about that? In a world where winning at all costs is too often prized above else, Coach Brogden let it be known that some things were more important than winning. Surprised the heck out of his own administration, too, so much so that the president of the university sent a memo to every faculty member at the school, in which he indicated that he had never been more proud of a coach or a team, and that Coach Brodgen’s decision “shines brighter than any trophy.”

  Yes it does.

  Sometimes, the shining examples hit closer to home. Consider the recent choices made by the Miami Dolphins’ Tebucky Jones, who woke up one day and realized his three kids—with their Xboxes and iPods and Abercrombie & Fitch wardrobes—had it a little too soft, especially compared to his own hardscrabble upbringing. Realize, Tebucky Jones had it pretty rough as a kid growing up in New Britain, Connecticut. His family was evicted twenty-three times before he got out of high school. He kept warm in his unheated apartment by sticking a lit match in a mayonnaise jar. He got a girl pregnant when he was just fourteen years old.

  That he ended up marrying the girl, and going on to become one of the NFL’s brightest stars, didn’t change his backstory, and yet his own children never knew what it meant to struggle. They can still remember the day their dad’s $2.65 million signing bonus arrived in the mail, after he was made a first-round draft choice of the New England Patriots in 1998, and it seemed like all the money in the world because it was. Just a few years earlier, living up in Syracuse, their father didn’t even have enough money to buy them a Christmas tree, and all of a sudden he was rolling in it.

  “I wanted them to know how lucky they were, that when I told them stories about my life it wasn’t bull,” Jones told ESPN: The Magazine. “A lot of kids are snobs. But I wanted them to know we’re all human. I wanted them to see both sides of life.”

  So what did Jones do? He piled his kids into his fancy car, drove them back to his hometown, and dropped them off at the curb in front of the Boys and Girls Club—the same club he went to when he was a kid. Not much had changed over the years, and his pampered kids stood out like the rich kids they were, but Jones pulled away and left them to their own devices. The following week, they returned to the club. And the week after that. And the week after that. It took a while, but his children began to develop a tougher exterior, and a fuller appreciation for the world around. They watched each other’s backs, and helped each other grow. Jones wanted them to learn to take care of themselves, to value what they had, to gain some much needed perspective, and he knew enough to realize it wouldn’t come by words alone.

  And what about Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals football player who walked away from a $1.2 million professional contract to enlist in the U.S. Army Rangers shortly after September 11, 2001? This was a guy who had a standout college career at Arizona State, and who was a starter at the professional level, but he was largely unknown outside Arizona until he decided his place was in the military, where he could fight for his country. Folks across the country responded to his decision as if they’d never heard of such a thing—a professional athlete walking away from a lucrative contract in the prime of his career to fight for the U.S. Army because he believed it was the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Tillman’s reputation grew when he returned home from his initial tour
in Iraq and decided to reup for a second tour instead of seeking his discharge and returning to professional football, because he felt strongly that some things were more important than professional football. Four months later, on April 22, 2004, he was shot and killed in Afghanistan, leaving behind a legacy of selfless leadership without peer among contemporary athletes.

  Pat Tillman also left behind a legion of friends, in the world of football and beyond; actually, he made such an impact that the NFL decided to honor his memory by having all players wear a decal with Tillman’s number—40—on their helmets during one week of league play. One player, Tillman’s former Arizona State roommate Jake Plummer, who was now playing quarterback for the Denver Broncos, was so moved by the tribute that he wore the decal again the following week, only this time the league didn’t think this was such a good idea. Plummer was fined $10,000, for donning an item not covered in the league’s elaborate uniform code, which prohibits the display of personal messages on uniforms and helmets, and warned that the fine would double each time out, which struck me as one of the most absurd rulings I’d ever heard—especially since the very decal had been designed by the league and authorized for just this purpose for games played the week before. Plummer didn’t know what to do, and thought initially that the best way to memorialize his fallen friend was to play by the rules, so he peeled the decal off his helmet for the next game. The following week, he put it back on, and I looked on at home and cheered. Fans across the country must have done the same, because hundreds of them pledged to pay the fines if they were ever assessed—and when they were, Plummer asked the NFL, which donates fines to charity, to give the money to the Pat Tillman Foundation.

  As long as I’m on it, how goofy is it that the league itself, which already has an image problem with so many players facing criminal charges for dubious conduct off the field, and so many more facing public disapproval for dubious conduct on the field, calls an upstanding guy like Jake Plummer to task for doing something that most of us regard as moral, and right, and true? Makes you wonder what these people are thinking.

  Then there’s high school basketball coach Ken Carter, who once padlocked the gymnasium doors at Richmond High in northern California because nearly half his players were ditching their classes, and who suspended practices and forfeited all his team’s games until his players improved their grades. Next, Coach Carter made his players sign contracts promising to sit in the front row of their classes and maintain grade point averages a full grade higher than the state-mandated minimum for student athletes. His players had to call him “sir,” and they had to wear coats and ties to school on game days, and pitch in around the school on various fund-raising and cleanup efforts. They were expected to be model citizens, or they would be cut from the team. He taught them that instead of dreaming of becoming the next Michael Jordan, they’d do well to be the guy who signs the next Michael Jordan’s paycheck. He commanded respect, and he gave it in return, and I can’t shake wondering why we don’t see more Coach Carters celebrated in our sports pages.

  His methods weren’t all that popular at first, but Coach Carter struck such a chord with his players and his community that Hollywood producers turned his experiences into a recent movie, Coach Carter, starring Samuel L. Jackson. “What I want people to take from this movie is that respect, self-discipline, and being kind will never, ever go out of style,” Carter told the New York Times upon the movie’s release.

  No, Coach, they won’t—but we will lose sight of them from time to time, particularly on and around our playing fields. See, this win-at-all-costs mind-set has permeated the culture to such an alarming degree that a tossed-off rallying cry once attributed to legendary football coach Vince Lombardi has become a justification for just about anything: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Nothing against Lombardi, whose words might have been a powerful motivational tool when shouted out in a locker room full of professional athletes, but they carry a different message as the phrase takes root in the culture, don’t you think? I hear that phrase, out of context, and I think we’ve lost our sense of place and purpose. I hear that phrase and I get these feelings of outrage, at the way we’ve allowed these gifted young men and women to poison our shared notion of right and wrong, or the ways our university athletic directors have pushed student athletes to value their points-per-game average over their grade point average, and if I’m being completely honest I’ll allow that a good chunk of that outrage is directed at myself. Let’s face it, I’m like most people I know—in business, in politics, in the world. I’m competitive. I like to win. Why? Well, it’s a whole lot more fun than losing, and it opens many more doors besides. It’s thrilling, and validating, and in many ways it justifies the point of the whole darn enterprise, whatever it happens to be. Plus, I don’t much see the point in running a campaign, say, if you’ve got no hope of winning, or going through the motions on a particular project just to see a thing through. Sure, I can recognize the value in doing something well, simply for the sake of doing it, but we’re conditioned to think there’s an endgame to everything. Something has got to be at stake to make it all worthwhile.

  I catch myself thinking this way, but then I think of my daughters, and the lessons I want them to take away from each and every day. Do I really want them to go to a high school where the phrase “winning is the only thing” might hang on a banner from the gymnasium ceiling? Once again, this is not a rap on Lombardi, who by all accounts was an inspiration to his players and a stand-up guy, but I don’t think so. Granted, my daughters are just starting kindergarten, but I fast-forward their little lives to where I can layer what I know onto the young women they will too soon become, and I don’t always like where they appear headed. I don’t like what lies in wait. I don’t like the cultural indicators that will be in place as they get older to help them discover right from wrong, and I particularly don’t like the ones that might flow from the world of sports, because they’re shot through with so many mixed messages that even we caring, well-meaning adults sometimes have trouble figuring them out.

  THE PRICE OF WINNING

  I’ll tell a story on myself, to illustrate just how much I want to win, and just how much that wanting to win can sometimes get in the way of my better judgment. I think we all struggle with this dichotomy, to a degree, and the key here is to pay attention to these base impulses and do what we can to keep them in check. Here’s what happened: I was playing golf with a group of friends. We take our golf seriously. There’s money on the line, but it’s not a great deal of money, and whatever the amount it doesn’t come close to the ego that’s involved. It’s a pride thing, with our group, a bragging rights thing, more than it is a money thing, and it was beneath the cloud of this type of thinking that I approached my ball on the fairway this one afternoon. I’d been playing well, the bragging rights were within reach, and then I shanked a shot. Happens all the time to us duffers, right? So I told the caddie to chase down that first ball while I hit another one, and after I drove this second shot onto the green I realized none of my buddies had seen my first shot, and for a moment in there I got so completely caught up in this warped, win-at-all-costs mentality that gets some of these athletes and coaches into so much trouble that I wasn’t thinking all that straight.

  I walked to the green and putted out, and as I reached down to pick up my ball I thought to myself, What am I doing here? This was supposed to be a game. These were supposed to be my friends. And besides, I realized, the caddie had seen that first shot. Heck, he chased down the ball for me and returned it to my bag. And yet there I was, thinking about taking a five on the hole instead of the six I deserved, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. For a couple beats in there, I didn’t quite know how to play it, as my buddy with the scorecard crossed over to me and said, “That’s a five, isn’t it?”

  I froze. It was just a split second or so, but in my mind it was an eternity, until I finally said, “No, it was a six.”

  “
What do you mean, a six?” my buddy shot back.

  I said, “Well, I missed a shot.”

  It would have never in a million years occurred to this guy that I was thinking of shaving that mulligan off my score, even for just that split second, and even as I write this I’m wondering why I’m copping to it here, but I think it reinforces an all-important point. We’re human. We can’t help ourselves. I’m human. I can’t help myself. And yet, with reflection, most of us manage to get it right, most of the time.

  After I put in my score, I crossed over to my caddie and said, “I want you to know, I recorded a six on that hole.”

  He nodded, like he expected nothing less, and in the exchange I wondered what kind of leader I would be if I let this guy go home thinking I had cheated my friends out of that one stroke. What would my daughters have thought, if they’d been watching? It goes back to that daddy-cam notion I wrote about in my opening remarks, the concept of living each day as if our children are watching—because they are. All the time. And there’s a record button built into the thing, too, because our kids will replay our missteps over and over and over again.

  What we all need to recognize is that it’s not just the players. The bad behavior has spilled into the stands as well, while the bad judgment has reached all the way to the front office. One of the most horrifying stories to emerge in the months surrounding the writing of this book was the bench-clearing brawl that erupted between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons during the opening weeks of the 2004-2005 NBA season—and it was horrifying at every level of the game. Players, fans, management . . . they were all out of line, as I will attempt to explain. If you were anywhere near a television during the week of November 19, 2004, you probably saw some of the footage, because it was played over and over on every network and cable news channel. The fight itself was bad enough, but it appeared to have been jump-started by a Detroit fan who must have thought his ticket to the game at the Palace of Auburn Hills entitled him also to dump a cup of beer on the Pacers’ Ron Artest, who happened to be stretched out on the scorer’s table while officials attempted to sort out the worst offenders from the preliminary round of the fight.