Verdict Is Kick in the Pants

A week ago, a jury gave Heather Sue Mercer $2 million for getting cut from Duke’s football team.

The jury believed Mercer was treated badly because she was a woman. The jury decided Duke Coach Fred Goldsmith made sexist remarks.

Mercer says she will use the money to provide scholarships for other female kickers.

Good luck. Because a really good female kicker might end up with fewer chances because of Mercer.

What football coach in his right mind wants to be the next Fred Goldsmith? Better to not give the girl a chance--and the law says Goldsmith didn’t have to--than to end up costing your school $2 million.

But women should applaud the verdict, right?

Women should be outraged over Goldsmith’s behavior, right?

Some have and are. But not all of us. Fighting for what’s fair is noble. Fighting for what’s self-centered does harm and not good.

Goldsmith admitted in trial that he may have suggested Mercer compete in beauty pageants or watch Duke games from the stands with her boyfriend.

Horrible, just horrible. How dare he say that?

Just wondering, though, how many men have been insulted, demeaned or humiliated by their football coaches. How many men have been told to try out for the band or go back to the chemistry lab? How many times has a football coach suggested a guy put on a dress instead of cleats? Hey, football coaches can be mean. They can be sarcastic. They purposely pick on a weak spot and attack. Maybe they want to run a player off. Maybe they want to find out how mentally tough the player is.

Mercer went out for football and it doesn’t seem as if she wanted to be treated fairly. She wanted to be treated differently.

Players get cut from sports teams all the time. Probably 90% of them feel they were treated unfairly. Probably 90% of the coaches who cut players say bad things to the players they cut.

Sometimes males get cut from teams because a coach doesn’t like them. Sometimes males get cut from a team because the coach likes a quarterback who has a weaker arm but faster feet and another coach might cut the same quarterback in favor of one with a stronger arm and slower feet.

It’s a subjective judgment. It’s what a coach gets to do. Like it or not, it’s part of playing sports. Sometimes you get cut.

Gene Murphy, 61, the football coach at Fullerton College and the last football coach at Cal State Fullerton, has had two women try out for his football teams--one at each school.

Neither was good enough to make it, Murphy said. If they had been, he would have been happy to keep them.

“I don’t think there’s a football coach in the country, at any level, who wouldn’t keep a player good enough to help him win,” Murphy said. “Why wouldn’t you?”

Exactly.

Duke hasn’t had so much football success that a coach would cut a player good enough to make the team better.

What Mercer and her lawyers did was devalue Title IX.

Title IX is a good law that has helped provide many sports opportunities for women. But using Title IX as an excuse to get money for being cut from a team, any team, men’s or women’s, hurts women’s sports.

There’s an Orange County boy who wants to play on a girls’ high school field hockey team because there is no boys’ team. Is this what women want? Boys taking over their sports? Because, like it or not, as a group, men are bigger, faster, stronger than women. That makes them, as a group, better athletes. Is this what Mercer and her lawyers hope for?

Ken Visser, the football coach at Chapman, says his school has a women’s track team, but doesn’t have a men’s team.

“If the lawsuit at Duke is based on gender,” Visser said, “well, then, do we go in both directions? That seems dangerous to me. I would think that’s a door a lot of women shouldn’t want to open.”

If a woman were to come out for Visser’s team now, he says, “What I would do almost immediately is go to my athletic director, to the people who have more authority than I do, and ask them about the legalities.”

Visser says that he’s coached 33 years and has always tried “to be a fair, good man. You want to give people chances but you don’t want to be afraid of the consequences of making decisions either.”

Murphy says he might be a little more nervous the next time a woman wants to try out for his team. “I imagine,” Murphy says, “that there might be some politically motivated people now who might say, ‘That woman made $2 million.’ As a coach, you couldn’t help but have that in your mind.”

Part of playing sports is accepting that you might not be good enough, that you might get cut. The sports fields have become among the most racially integrated parts of our society because, ultimately, it is talent that counts. Coaches want to win. If they don’t, they get fired. Goldsmith got fired because he didn’t win enough. Goldsmith faced the consequences of not performing well enough. He didn’t sue somebody.

Duke coaches said Mercer kicked 30-yard field goals somewhat consistently. Mercer’s lawyers said she kicked 40-yard field goals. In either case, that’s not good enough.

Mercer said she wanted to suit up and be on the sidelines with all the other non-scholarship players and that Duke never cut other football walk-ons.

Then again, Mercer wasn’t a typical walk-on. Typical walk-ons don’t bring their mother into the coach’s office, then have to tell mom to quit yelling at the coach.

When people use accusations of racism or sexism in silly, unbecoming ways, then the real incidents of sexism and racism are taken less seriously. Mercer has made it much more likely that a truly talented female athlete who wants to participate on a men’s team won’t get the chance.

*

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com