Trojans Working on Their Defense

You are a supporter of USC athletics. You return home from your Newport Beach car dealership one early June evening to discover your favorite school has sent you a letter.

You smile and wonder. Hmmm, maybe it’s from energized new football coach Paul Hackett, discussing the team’s spring progress. Or, perhaps, it’s about the baseball team’s inspirational march toward a national championship.

You hurriedly open the letter, expecting something light and fun.

And out falls a rock.

It is a seven-page missive defending Athletic Director Mike Garrett against allegations that have not been made, and the USC athletic department against a magazine story that has not been published.

A curious, odd-tinted rock.

There is a two-page cover sheet describing an upcoming Sports Illustrated story about Garrett and the department that USC officials do not expect to be fair.

There is a reprint of a three-page press release giving USC’s side of its now-completed investigation into academic fraud, purportedly another part of the SI story.

There is a one-page letter of support for Garrett.

And then there is Garrett’s resume.

When you realize that this is not Garrett’s subtle way of asking you for a job at the dealership, you start to worry.

Who knows, this could be from some distant wacko Trojan booster club with too much time and way too much money.

Then you notice one of the signatures contained in the letter.

Steven B. Sample, university president.

Now you really worry. And wonder.

When did it come to this?

Since when did we care about what people think about us before they think it?

When did the cardinal and gold become watered down with paranoia?

When did we become the Raiders?

For those who did not receive this letter--and especially for those who did--here are the facts:

In the last weeks of May, USC officials met with Sports Illustrated writers. It was USC’s impression that SI was about to run an unfavorable story about Garrett and the athletic department.

Under the direction of Dennis Dougherty, USC senior vice president for administration, they printed their defense and mailed out about 4,000 copies of it.

(Or, for all you benefactors, probably a couple of thousand bucks worth.)

The problem is, when the letter came out, SI had yet to run the story.

And when it does, considering Garrett’s numerous problems have been endlessly chronicled by various local publications, there is a chance it will contain nothing new.

What, is it going to write about how Garrett screams at athletes? Been done.

About how he botched what should have been the slam dunk of the winter, the firing of John Robinson? Been done.

About the improprieties in the tutoring program, a problem that USC says it has since fixed? Been done.

About how many alumni are fed up with Garrett’s clumsy style and overbearing attitude? Been done to death.

“The general consensus around here is that people were piling on Mike,” Dougherty said. “The impression [from SI] was, ‘We got Mike in a corner, he is a wounded rabbit.’

“We wanted to say that this was not the case.”

But in saying it like this--in a preemptive strike that only reminded donors of the athletic director’s tenuous position--it seems USC is piling on even more.

“We wanted to show people reality before they saw the Fellini movie,” Dougherty said.

Their reality includes, understandably, the list of Garrett’s accomplishments.

Since he became athletic director in 1993, the university has won four NCAA team championships, annually finished in the top 10 among 306 Division I NCAA schools in overall athletic achievement, nearly doubled fund-raising.

Their reality also includes, understandably, information about the resolution of their tutor investigation, which was supported by the Pacific 10 Conference and included only two violations.

Yet, there is another reality that is unmentioned but not unnoticed.

USC shouldn’t have to be defending stories that have not yet been published about their athletic director . . . because people shouldn’t be writing stories about athletic directors.

Athletic directors are supposed to be like umpires. The better they are, the less you hear about them.

Who is the athletic director at national football champions Michigan and Nebraska? Everyone knows the names of the basketball coaches at Indiana and Duke, but can anybody name their athletic directors?

If USC didn’t have an athletic director who so often stumbles, it could concentrate solely on promoting Hackett, who reportedly has taken dramatic control of a loose football operation.

It could concentrate on promoting baseball Coach Mike Gillespie, a heartwarming story of endurance and triumph.

Shortly before USC penned this letter, Trojan freshman Jennifer Rosales phoned her mother in the Philippines for inspiration shortly before winning the NCAA women’s golf championship.

Too bad university officials couldn’t have written seven pages on that.

What they did write proved one thing. As long as USC must continually baby-sit Garrett’s image, its baseball team can score 21 runs in a national title game and that won’t even be the most amazing thing to happen on campus that week.