[Vision2020] The Punishment is the Crime (Rick Reilly)

[Tom Hansen]

>From the "Life of Reilly" (by Rick Reilly) column in the November 26, 2007
edition of Sports Illustrated.

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The Punishment is the Crime
By Rick Reilly

The smallest-brained crustaceans are water fleas.  The smallest-brained
parasites are flatworms.  And the smallest-brained mammals are the men and
women who run high school athletics in the state of Washington.

Listen to what they did, and tell me it doesn't make you want to chew
through concrete.

Archbishop Murphy High in Everett opened the football season this fall with
a dying coach, the legendary Terry Ennis, whose 287 wins are second most in
state history.  The school had begged him to come out of retirement seven
years ago to kick-start the Wildcats' new football program and be the
athletic director.

Ennis then did what he'd been doing for 29 years.  He turned Archbishop
Murphy's kids into young men who wear ties and look you in the eye and win
football games.  He won two state titles and went 73-12 in his first seven
seasons with the Wildcats.

But before this one, Ennis told his players that his prostate cancer had a
hold of him, bad.  He was going to keep working, though, because Terry Ennis
would rather have worn a tutu than quit on his team.  Coaching sometimes
from a chair, he won the first two games, then died three days later.

"We sat in that locker room and cried for hours," says senior co-captain
Ryan Bourke, "and we all talked about how we wanted to win state for him."

And so they won their next seven games - under Ennis's brother-in-law Rick
Stubrud - then won a district qualifier and got ready for state.

But then fell a tiny little raindrop that turned into the Johnstown Flood.

Two weeks ago, a new co-athletic director Patti Means was looking over
players' physical-exam certificates - sifting through all of Ennis's cartons
and confusion as she took over some of his old duties - and discovered one
player whose physical had not been updated.

Pretty understandable mistake.  The guy in charge of those kinds of things
died four days after the kid's physical expired.  Plus, this kid's home life
was going through a blender.  His mom had moved to Yakima, his dad was gone,
and he was living with friends.  Stuff tends to slip through cracks that
big.

Means told the kid to go get a physical that day, which he did, and passed.
Then she notified the conference of the clerical error.

"We thought they'd look at these extraordinary circumstances and use
discretion," Stubrud recalls.  "I mean, it's not like we're trying to fudge
the rules.  This happened the very week Terry died."

But instead, the conference - without allowing Archbishop Murphy a formal
defense - made the Wildcats forfeit every game they'd played after the
physical expired and kicked the team out of the playoffs.  Worse, that
ruling was rubber-stamped by the Washington Interscholastic Athletic
Association.

So much for discretion.

Again, the players sat in the locker room and cried.  And why wouldn't they?
In one season they'd watched their coach die and then their dreams.

If those one-celled organisms on those boards had any sense of right and
wrong, they would've given Archbishop Murphy a punishment that fit the
crime.  Maybe suspend the kid from the playoffs.  But throw the Wildcats out
of the postseason, over paperwork?  That's like giving a jaywalker the
chair.

How could the state come to such a flatworm-headed decision?

"Well, I'm not sure you know the whole story," said Al Falkner, WIAA
executive board president.  "The school admitted that in August they
notified [the player] that he would become ineligible on Sept. 8 and he
should update the physical.  Apparently, in all the things that happen
sometimes, that was forgotten."

In all things that happen sometimes?  You mean, like the kid having his home
pulled out from under him and his coach dying in the middle of his season?
Boy, what kind of rotten kid would forget something during all that?

Make me want to ralph. 

As usual in these things, the kids are acting more adult than the adults.
Bourke and his fellow seniors have dedicated themselves to getting the rule
changed so that other teams don't have to get the frying pan in the face
that they got.

Meanwhile, Bourke keeps thinking about what Coach Ennis would be saying to
them right now.  "He'd be going, 'Men, it's not about what happened.  It's
about what you do from this point forward that will define you as a man.'"

Ennis was a cool guy.  Too bad he never coached the dolts in charge.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"Don't tell me why I can't.
Show me how I can."

- Author Unknown