Under Public Eye, Murphy Battles for Beleaguered Titans

A man is dead, this much we know. His name was Richard William Bottjer. He was 30, a Marine staff sergeant and aviations specialist at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. He died in an April 7 fistfight that also involved two Cal State Fullerton football players.

To say that his death was tragic is to say that the sky grows dark at sunset or that dogs bark and grass grows. If you value human life, you don’t quibble over adjectives. He is gone and those who loved him--his family, his friends--will certainly miss him.

Fullerton Coach Gene Murphy didn’t know Bottjer. But he does know John Gibbs and Carlos Siragusa, the two players directly involved in the fight. According to leaflets recently distributed on the Fullerton campus, that makes Murphy and his two players partners in murder.

“What are you teaching these guys?” read one of the flyers.

At last look, Murphy’s daily course load included tackling and blocking and catching and throwing. It featured honesty and integrity and a now telling and ironic piece of advice that graced each Fullerton player’s playbook. Wrote Murphy: “Keep this point in mind all year--there are critics of football, both on and off our campus . . . who think our game is useless. They would be very happy to see football dropped at Fullerton. . . . Therefore, the negative actions of one player will give these critics reason to find fault with the whole group. The negative actions of one Titan football player is a direct reflection of the Titan football program and his Titan football teammates and coaches.”

Murphy isn’t paranoid, just careful. After all, this is a beleaguered group. The Fullerton football program exists on a budget stretched so thin that Murphy must take his team on the road to survive the financial realities. Hawaii was kind enough to provide Fullerton with a guaranteed payday last season if the Titans would visit. They did, and were soundly beaten. Louisiana State brought Fullerton in for an all-expense-paid trip to Baton Rouge. Have rout, will travel. Florida also enlisted Fullerton’s help for a fee. The Titans responded predictably with another loss, this one equally embarrassing but necessary if the program was to avoid red in its ledger.

Through it all has stood Murphy, clinging to his dignity, defending his program’s financial motives. He could have, perhaps should have, left Fullerton several years ago when head coaching positions became available at more prestigious and appreciative schools. He stayed, partly because the job he really wanted (the Missouri vacancy) went to someone else and partly because he felt an allegiance to this curious and quixotic program.

Now he is called, by a yet unidentified faction of leaflet distributors, an accomplice to a Marine’s death.

Murphy is a football coach and not a bad one at that. He is also a baby sitter of men caught between adolescence and adulthood. It is an exasperating predicament, one shared by all coaches. You are responsible for your players and yet are humanly unable to monitor their every move. In short, a fight like this could have happened near almost any college campus. But since it happened near Fullerton, Murphy stands partly accused.

Truths get muddled in the confusion and bitterness of tragedy. It was reported shortly after the fight that Bottjer had been beaten and kicked by eight other men, reports that later proved false. Rumors filled the air, each one more incendiary than the next.

Sadly but not surprisingly, Murphy and members of his staff and team received death threats. An Us vs. Them mentality took hold: Fullerton football vs. the United States Marine Corps. Wrenching, useless arguments took place.

What would have been the consequences had one of the players and not Bottjer died?

How could Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown call Bottjer’s death “excusable homicide” and choose not to press charges?

Why didn’t someone stop the fight?

What? . . . How? . . . Why? There are no simple answers to this sort of thing. You could debate the merits of excusable homicide for years and not truly know if it was a proper decision or a celebrated case of semantic tap dancing. You could condemn the sometime macho actions of football players and Marines, and it solves nothing. Or you could do as Murphy has done, which is grieve in his own private way, extend his sorrow to the Bottjer family and move on. For Murphy, that means trying to reassemble a football program under scrutiny.

If anyone has a chance to replace uncertainty with calm, it is Murphy. He reacted correctly when he suspended Siragusa and Gibbs from the team pending results from the investigation. He has kept his public comments concerning the incident to a minimum. He decided it would be best that the two players did not participate in the remainder of spring practice.

But come fall, the controversy and memories most likely will return if Gibbs and Siragusa take the field. There probably will be taunts and criticisms, and no one will be spared, most certainly not Murphy. It will be a sad, sorrowful sight.

Gibbs, whose father is a former Marine, and Siragusa could transfer to other Division I schools, but it would require a one-year absence from play. And why, they could argue, should they leave when a prosecutor could find no criminal wrongdoing?

Whatever happens, Murphy will be there, doing what he can to keep a program afloat. It won’t be anything fancy, but it will be done with a conscience.