A Lot Fewer Antics, but More to Admire

The Rose Bowl is still a swell way to spend a New Year’s Day. You get to watch a great parade. Then you get to watch an entertaining game of football in person with 100,000 other people, all of whom presumably bathed. Or, you get to watch an entertaining TV show, one with many references to other entertaining TV shows that you should be sure to watch on this same network later this night. (“Amy Fisher, Part Six: The Homework Years.”)

Yes, the Rose Bowl.

Our annual January jamboree. We have been watching this game since we were knee-high to a Wolverine. We’ve watched Huskies and Wildcats and Badgers and Gophers. Hawkeyes, too. Buckeyes? Sure. Our eyes have been on both. There is always so much to watch at a Rose Bowl that it seems a shame to mention the one thing we don’t get to watch anymore.

The coaches.

There is absolutely no point in our watching the Rose Bowl coaches anymore. Don’t even bother taking your binoculars if you are going to today’s game. No use nowadays for the TV cameras to even aim their lenses at the coaches. Watching the coaches is no longer any fun.

Why?

They just stand there.

Ever watch Don James of Washington or Gary Moeller of Michigan on the sideline? All they do is coach. What a bore. Coach, coach, coach, that’s all they do. No screaming, no cussing, no spectacular tantrums of any kind. Even when they chew out a referee, their lips barely move. What fun is that to watch?

I mean, these are two relatively dignified, reasonably rational, generally sportsmanlike gentlemen who never go nuts for our New Year’s Day amusement. And we’re supposed to watch them? Forget it. All we can do is watch the football players out there, you know, carrying and passing the football.

It simply isn’t the same.

The Rose Bowl doesn’t even seem like the Rose Bowl without one of our crusty old warriors such as Woody Hayes or Bo Schembechler showing their athletes how not to behave. A TV camera? Push it. A yard-line marker? Kick it. A hat or a headset? Hurl it. An official? Abuse him. An enemy who strays near your sideline? Strangle him. Put the ol’ Hulk Holtz headlock on him.

Ah, how we long for the days when Schembechler would go off his rocker long enough to get so tangled up in his headset cords, he’d end up looking like Howdy Doody.

And oh, what fun it was to watch crabby Hayes huffing and puffing and threatening to blow the house down.

You remember Woody, the man who threw a punch at Clemson’s Charlie Bauman after he intercepted a pass near the Ohio State bench during the 1979 Gator Bowl game, and the man who slammed a camera into Times’ photographer Art Rogers’ face before the 1973 Rose Bowl?

But Don James?

Gary Moeller?

Come on. These guys are actually careful about the way they behave before an arena of hundreds of thousands of people and a TV audience of tens of millions. Can you imagine? We watch them and watch them and watch them, waiting for them to go waah-waah-waah, but do they? No, they don’t. They stand there in front of their young men, acting as though they are supposed to be, I don’t know, role models or something.

I have seen calls go against Washington where all Don James does--I’m serious--is say: “Darn it.” And he calls himself a football coach. Doesn’t he know by now that football coaches are supposed to lose it? That coaches are supposed to grab players by the fabric or scream into their facemasks? Or that coaches are supposed to “intimidate” officials by yelling so loud and long about this call that the referee is bound to make it up to him on that call?

Oh, sure, Gary Moeller goes ballistic now and again. He’s human. And even James got upset with a TV guy the other day and had a little tantrum. But, so far anyway, nobody from the Olympics has invited either to compete in the 100-meter cap toss. Or in the solo synchronized hash-mark stomp. And there have been no reports of Moeller’s acting like a madman in the middle of a reminder to his student-athletes not to behave immaturely.

So, how can we waste time watching James or Moeller today when all they intend to do is send in plays?

The least one of them can do, for old times’ sake, is turn the Tournament of Roses red in theface.

What can we expect for the future if these Rose Bowl coaches are actually going to go out there and act like grown men? Because it’s getting worse, you know. Or did you forget who is about to join the Big Ten? Penn State, that’s who. Joe Paterno, that’s who.

And you know what that darned Paterno is like. A perfect gentleman.

What’s this game coming to?