Chaney Deserves Another Chance

Let’s be fair to John Chaney.

Because that’s what he stands for. Fairness. Equal opportunity.

The Temple basketball coach deserves equal treatment, the same rights every other Hall of Fame coach receives when his career winds down. After 23 years at Temple, he has earned the right to determine when he should leave.

Right now, in the middle of the storm he created by sending in a player to rough up one from St. Joseph’s, is not the time.

Yes, Chaney set a bad example. But he didn’t set a precedent for bad behavior. Across the state, Penn State football Coach Joe Paterno ran across the field and grabbed an official after a game. You don’t touch the refs. Paterno kept his job. And five years ago, when it was revealed that Bob Knight had grabbed one of his players by the throat, he kept his job as Indiana basketball coach.

Don’t treat Chaney any differently. No special exemptions for him. Just the same thing. All he ever wanted was to be one of the regulars.

He once said, “I work hard at being common, even when I act like I’m stupid.”

Chaney acted stupid last week when he sent little-used Nehemiah Ingram into the game against St. Joseph’s to punish the Hawks, a protest for what Chaney said were illegal screens set by St. Joseph’s. Ingram picked up five fouls in four minutes, including a hard shove of St. Joseph’s John Bryant that sent Bryant crashing to the floor.

Chaney served a self-imposed one-game suspension. When it turned out Bryant suffered a broken right arm that would end the senior’s season, the university upped the suspension to three games. When that wasn’t enough to keep the wolves from howling, Chaney announced that he would sit out the conference tournament as well.

He was wrong. He admitted he was wrong. He’s being punished. That’s where the story should end.

“He doesn’t have to be fired,” said Clipper point guard Rick Brunson, who played for Chaney at Temple. “He does too much for us.”

It might not seem as if he’s doing them any favors when he’s yelling at them at 5:30 a.m. in one of his typical early-morning practices. So what did Brunson get out of it?

“I got a father,” Brunson said. “Every player that played for Coach came from single-family homes. I talk to Coach once a week. I’m 32 years old, you know what I’m saying? He’s been a father to me. It’s unfortunate what happened [with St. Joseph’s], but all the good outweighs all the bad.”

Sometimes even the good is bad. Not all of Chaney’s players graduate within five years. His graduation rate for black players who came to Temple in 1997 was 50%. That’s because he’s willing to take risks, to bring in the Prop. 48 kids -- or academic non-qualifiers, as the NCAA would call them. Some of the kids wouldn’t get a shot at college at all if he didn’t offer them a scholarship. He was one of the most outspoken critics of Proposition 48 and its standardized-testing cutoffs. (Four years ago the president of the University of California questioned the SAT’s relevance to college admissions as well).

“All of the Prop. 48 kids graduated,” Brunson said.

Chaney never sold academics short for athletic glory. You don’t see a steady stream of NBA lottery picks coming through the Temple campus. The typical Temple player who survives in the pros makes it on toughness and resilience, not talent.

“I’ve been in the league eight years on non-guaranteed contracts,” Brunson said. “Without him teaching me how to be tough and [not] get caught up in the business part of this, I would have never made it through life.

“I was a McDonald’s All-American. He was the only coach who came to my house and told my mother, ‘I’m going to make him into a man.’ He never talked about making shots, he always talked about life. And that’s what he’s about, making guys men in life.”

Even former St. Joseph’s player Delonte West, who is “upset with how it all went down,” said, “I don’t think he should lose his job over a player’s aggression. I’m pretty sure his intention wasn’t for the guy to go out and hurt somebody.”

That’s why any comparison to Woody Hayes is ridiculous. Hayes hit an opposing player, which brought his career as Ohio State football coach to an end. Chaney didn’t touch anybody. He told his guy, whom he called a “goon,” to get physical. Coaches have been saying that for eons.

What’s worse, sending a player to rough up the other team or putting your hands on one of your players’ necks?

That’s what Knight did. And when it was reported, Knight used Indiana’s media time at an NCAA tournament site to send out his character goons to rough up the accuser’s reputations, from players talking about how they didn’t think highly of Neil Reed to members of Indiana’s sports information department passing out news releases that referred to an “alcohol-related incident” involving Richard Mandeville, who had supported Reed. Smear the kids enough and maybe the allegations would go away.

A month later, a videotape of Knight’s grabbing Reed’s neck surfaced, and the Indiana people got real quiet. Then Knight apologized -- after another month passed and more unflattering allegations surfaced that put his job in jeopardy.

He was given another chance and a zero-tolerance policy, which he violated when he accosted a student whom he thought didn’t show him respect. Knight was gone. The point is, he had a chance to get it right.

At the very least, Chaney should get the same opportunity to blow it again. Keep him on, with a string of contingencies, slap him on double-secret probation. Just give him another chance.

“Somebody asked me when I’d walk away,” Chaney said five years ago. “I said, ‘One day I’m going to sing that old song that Frank Sinatra used to sing. At the end of the song, he’d say, ‘Excuse me while I disappear.’

“That’s probably going to be my last words.”

Let him live out his fantasy exit. John Chaney deserves to do it his way.