McGee Reprimands Gillespie for Memo : USC: Message from baseball coach to athletic director might have been a joke, but it has become a large issue in a discrimination suit.

Mike Gillespie, USC baseball coach, said he was formally reprimanded for sending a memo that might have been meant as a joke to Athletic Director Mike McGee. The memo has become the focus of a discrimination suit by a university athletic administrator.

Gillespie, responding to an amended suit filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court by assistant athletic director Marvin Cobb, said in a written statement: “While I said nothing that could be construed to be racially motivated, I should not have been joking about a personnel grievance. . . . (The memo) was a misguided attempt at tongue-in-cheek-humor and has proven to be in bad judgment.”

McGee administered the reprimand, which consisted of a letter and lecture. Gillespie, in his fifth season as Trojan coach, said Wednesday the written reprimand pointed out the seriousness of the issue, and said it was inappropriate, unprofessional and unacceptable to have sent it.

“Dr. McGee certainly understood that I was attempting to bring some lightness to the situation,” Gillespie said.

The handwritten memo on Trojan baseball letterhead was sent three days after Cobb filed suit last November. It reads:

“Memo to: Dr. Michael McGee, Director of Athletics “From:

Mike Gillespie

Frank Sanchez

Wm. (Bo) Hughes

Abraham Flores

Sheriff Robert Klein

“Please be informed that you have at least the moral support of your loyal baseball staff in your pending litigation with the Assistant Athletic Director. If it will help, Detective Klein is willing to bury him with a phony drug bust. “P.S. “Promote me to head football coach with a guaranteed L.A. Gear shoe contract or the Association of Americans of Scotch-Irish Descent will have you in court also.” The memo was not signed.

Gillespie said in the statement that he apologized to Cobb. He said his assistant coaches were not involved in the incident. Klein, a voluntary coach, is a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff.

“I think people reading the memo won’t think I’m a real genius, but they will see that I was trying to inject a little humor in the situation,” Gillespie said.

Cobb, whose suit contends he was not promoted to a promised position because he is black, said Wednesday that he did not believe Gillespie’s apology was sincere.

“Giving Mike Gillespie the benefit of the doubt that he intended it to be a joke, why didn’t anyone come to me and offer their hand in friendship and professionalism,” Cobb said. “No one has ever done that to this day. He didn’t say to my face, ‘I’m sorry’ or express regret.”

Cobb, a former USC scholar--athlete who played for the Cincinnati Bengals, also said McGee never mentioned the incident to him.

Tim Tessalone, an athletic department spokesman, said Gillespie tried to talk with Cobb, but Cobb refused to see him. Tessalone also said the memo was not racially motivated toward Cobb, but instead remarked on Gillespie’s ancestry.

Cobb said he included the memo in his dispute against USC because he did not consider it a joke.

“Did he (Gillespie) honestly expect Dr. McGee would laugh at this?” Cobb asked. “Then if he did, then I have to seriously question the relationship between them and Mike McGee’s attitude toward African American people. In this society and this day and age it would have been foolish and naive of me to consider it a joke.”

Cobb said incidents such as Washington Mayor Marion Barry’s arrest by federal agents and the city of Boston’s reaction in the Charles Stuart murder-suicide case have lead him to be cautious.

“I’m in a very sensitive and difficult situation,” he said. “It’s a joke now only because I was fortunate enough to get my hands on that memo before any action was taken. I was genuinely scared. I was concerned to drive with my 6-year-old son. I had some pretty bad dreams for a few weeks over that.

“Any African American adult male living in America would be very sensitive to how I felt and how I reacted to that memo. Unfortunately, (for) white males it is all too easy for them to write it off as a joke.”