Oklahoma State coach Gundy blasts Oklahoman columnist

No columnist should be allowed to turn her column into a crappy hit piece on a good kid. Too many do, and it needs to stop. What do YOU not get?

 

Trying to date back to my com law days, but the thought was that if you are writing about someone in their time in the public domain, they are fair game.

 

I AM NOT DEFENDING HER COLUMN.

I AM DEFENDING HER right TO WRITE THE COLUMN.

And I am against the right of a coach to turn a press conference into a bully session.

 

for your reading ...

Exposed: Coach's inner imbecile


September 26, 2007


Tom Knott
Washington Times

Mike Gundy is the sniffling, whiny face of the Oklahoma State football program.

His intellectually inept diatribe against a Daily Oklahoman columnist is wrong on so many levels that you wonder whether he is mentally fit to be a coach.

Here is the thing: Gundy could be correct in his assessment that three-fourths of the facts in Jenni Carlson's column were inaccurate. And Gundy clearly felt compelled to defend the quarterback who was the object of Carlson's story.

But you do not go about it in the unhinged manner that he did. You do not refer to the 21-year-old quarterback as "a kid" or respond as a parent who is being protective of his child.

News flash, coach: Your quarterback is not "a kid," and he is not your child. He is a grown man who could be dodging bullets in Iraq.

If he is criticized because of his physical and mental failings as a quarterback, so be it. He will face far harsher truths in the decades ahead, and if he has any inner strength about him at all, he will deal with them and move forward.

In our hypersensitive, grievance-filled culture today, we seem to have forgotten the benefit of developing thick skin.

Gundy certainly has forgotten that.

"If your child goes down the street and somebody makes fun of him because he drops a pass in a pickup game or says he's fat and he comes home crying to his mom, you'll understand," Gundy says at one point in his three-plus-minute rant.

No, I do not understand, coach.

If your child comes home crying because of a disappointment or being called a name, then, coach, you need to start the process of helping him grow up.

You do not coddle the child, as so many parents do today. You let the child know that life is fraught with disappointments and the comments of the insensitive. That is just the way it is and the way it always will be.

The 40-year-old Gundy must have missed that lesson plan in his development.

This is not intended as a defense of the print industry. Ours is often an intellectually dishonest industry, which a good portion of the public recognizes, thanks to the explosion of alternative news choices.

Gundy is a quasi-national celebrity this week because of YouTube.com.

He lamely says at one point that he is embarrassed to be part of athletics because of Carlson's column.

I am certain Gundy will continue to cash his fat checks, no matter how embarrassed he is to be part of the big business of college football.

Being a cog in the NCAA's hypocrisy machine is embarrassing, all right, although Gundy undoubtedly does not see it that way.

No, he is embarrassed because of a columnist who makes her living outside the NCAA umbrella, which merely exposes his lame reasoning ability.

"Come after me," Gundy says. "I'm a man. I'm 40. I'm not a kid."

You are not a man, coach. You are a bully who could use a good smack down.

You could have requested to meet the columnist in your office. You could have sat down in a private setting and articulated your case in an even-handed way. And you know what? The columnist would have taken notes and probably addressed your concerns in a favorable manner in a subsequent piece.

But, no, you are the self-esteem police. You are a bad man in Stillwater, Okla.

You are above the customary rules that cover interpersonal relationships.

You can be a lout or boor because you are defending your "kid."

Coach, you are an imbecile. You have an incurable infection of the brain.

By the way, coach, if a kid is a fatso, then he is a fatso.

You do not give a fat kid a hug. You introduce him to a proper diet and exercise.

It works every time.

 

His attorneys could argue his public domain is the football field ...

 

So reporters have free speech and a coach doesn't?

 

I said he doesn't have the right to be a disrespectful bully -- which is the same thing everyone here is accusing Carlson of.

 

Exactly. We can write, and have published statewide, whatever we feel like, even if it's bullshit. We have that right.

But a coach can't defend a player, in public. He has to do it one-on-one, in private. So that no one ever knows the columnist wrote a bullshit column.

 

He does have that right. He might be wrong but it's his right.

 

You need to review the libel laws if you think she'll be sued.

 

What a moron! Duh. He was benched because his mother gave him a bite of chicken. That's like the most important thing in the column. The coach probably saw it and immediately replaced him with a new starter.

And everyone knows that use of "apparently" replaces any need for actual verification and also relieves the author of any accountability for the comments. For example, if I yell "Fire!" in a theater, I can be arrested. But I become teflon-coated if I yell "Apparently, fire!" in a theater.

Also, perhaps you missed that Carlson brought in a team of doctors from John Hopkins every time Reid was injured, and it was their expert opinion that, well, he's a pussy.

There, I said it. The word that has been dodged from the start. And that's really what this is all about, whether it's okay for a columnist to assert that a 21-year-old football player is a pussy based largely upon anonymous sources.

Or, I suppose, maybe she was saying that he's a little baby, someone who would be too immature to handle her harsh words, someone who wouldn't be the mature adult that some folks around here think everyone becomes when they turn 21.

 

please link to any of these columns referred to by whitlock (and no, i haven't read roughly pages 4-18 of this thread). personally, while i think gundy is a pathetic moron, i didn't expect him to be suspended/fired).

--
for sir whitlock...

What’s embarrassing is reading all of these columns calling for Gundy to be suspended or even fired for defending his player and calling out Carlson in public.