The Screamer and His Fire Within

One of the dirty little secrets of the American workplace--and a mostly overlooked wrinkle in the firing of basketball player Latrell Sprewell--is the so-called “screamer,” a boss who feels at liberty to berate and belittle his employees even if he feels constrained by law or political correctness from making sexual advances or using racial epithets. The ugly encounter between Sprewell, who is black, and his white coach, which has been attributed to age, race and class, can also be seen as a clash between a “‘screamer” and someone who simply refuses to endure a verbal scourging.

Sprewell was fired by the Golden State Warriors for throttling his coach P.J. Carlesimo under the good moral character clause of his $32-million contract and banned from pro basketball for one year by the National Basketball Assn. So far, the punishment visited upon Sprewell has been spun in the media as either a long-overdue exercise of “authority” in the face of rampant violence in professional sports, as Sprewell’s accusers would have it, or an unduly harsh exercise of discipline based on race and class conflicts, as his defenders see it.

But the Sprewell incident can also be regarded as a worst-case scenario of what happens when a “screamer” pushes one of his subordinates just a bit too far. Carlesimo is a coach with what Newsweek characterized as “a profane, in-your-face style,” and he was apparently in Sprewell’s face when the aggrieved young man “went straight playground” on him, as one fellow player put it. Carlesimo may have misjudged how much abuse a man like Sprewell was capable of enduring before his temper would spin wildly out of control.

“Maybe,” cracked San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, “his boss needed choking.”

The culture of professional sports tolerates and even celebrates coaches who resemble Marine Corps drill sergeants, and roughing up a player to encourage a peak performance is seen as a perfectly appropriate management style by some win-at-all-costs managers and owners. But the same attitude can be found throughout the work world. I have encountered some truly accomplished “screamers” in law, journalism and the entertainment industry.

At my first job after graduating from college, I witnessed the president of the company administer a public humiliation to his advertising director after the screening of a 30-second television spot that the boss found unsatisfactory. So harsh were the words that he dumped on the ad director in the presence of his coworkers, so insulting were his manner and tone of voice and so embarrassed was I at witnessing the spectacle that I could think of nothing else to do but slip out of my chair and slink out of the room.

“Where are you going?” barked the boss, shifting his line of fire in my direction and stopping me short. “Sit down and watch; you might learn something.”

What I learned was that some bosses feel empowered to treat their subordinates with a degree of coarseness, contempt and cruelty that would be unthinkable in any other social setting. I observed that screamers are often coddled and even encouraged within the corporate culture if they are successful at making money for the company. And I saw that most of their victims chose to shut up and take it because they are afraid to put their paychecks at risk by fighting back. That was 20 years ago and not much has changed. Screamers are still tolerated in workplaces where sexual advances and racial epithets are now forbidden.

But the excesses of the screamer cannot be shrugged off as motivational tools or the unfortunate eccentricities of a gifted manager. Verbal and emotional violence is still violence. Indeed, Sprewell is not the only player who experienced Carlesimo’s “in-your-face style” as an assault, nor is he the only one who wanted to put his hands around Carlesimo’s throat.

“I felt like choking him many times,” another pro basketball player was quoted as saying of Carlesimo. “He has a way of dealing with you that’s very condescending and degrading. Sooner or later someone was going to step [up] to him about it.”

Of course, the fact that Carlesimo may have provoked Sprewell may help to explain the attack but does not excuse it. But one of the lessons of the incident is that a verbal assault may well bring on a physical assault, and any boss who allows his own anger and aggression to erupt in the form of bitter words may find that something even harsher may splash back on him.

“[A] subterranean fire was eating its way deeper and deeper in him,” wrote Herman Melville in “Billy Budd,” an archetypal tale of an abused young man who turns on his abuser. “Something decisive must come of it.” Significantly, Melville’s words describe Claggart, the abusive master-at-arms, and not Budd, the young man who struck him down and paid for the impulse with his life. The “screamer” is the one in whom a fire rages, and sometimes he is the one who is burned.