Honolulu Lite
Jones moves mountains,
not judgesWhen June Jones, University of Hawaii football god, I mean coach, asked a federal judge not to send his buddy, fraudmeister Sukamto Sia, to prison and instead let Sia lecture at the university, some people attributed the curious suggestions to the coach's near-fatal car crash a year ago. Perhaps, the reasoning goes, Jones left a few marbles on the pavement after the accident.
This is a harsh assessment. And wrong. All evidence points to the fact that Jones was a few marbles short before the accident. Why else would he have been screaming along on the H-1 freeway without a seat belt? And why, after smashing into a concrete wall, having his aorta ripped open and knock, knock, knocking on death's door, would the coach announce that the experience really didn't teach him anything and he planned to keep speeding and keep putting his life at risk because, as I understand the argument, you're not really living unless you are almost dying.
Jones is a larger-than-life figure, at least for now. (When it comes to racing headlong into concrete walls, bravado's one thing and physics is another. Unless your life's goal is to become two-dimensional, smashing into walls should be avoided.)
Coach Jones came crashing into Hawaii from the NFL to take over a UH football program that had devolved into a glorified flag-football team. In one season, he took the Warriors to the top of their league. For that, he justly was crowned a god, hero, savior and all-around good guy. (The professor who brought international glory to the UH in the field of genetics by cloning green mice, on the other hand, was crowned a "crank" and a "weirdo.")
After Jones turned his Lincoln Town Car into a Lincoln Town Pile o' Twisted Metal, he recovered his health and went back to coaching. Apparently, somewhere along the line he met Sukamto Sia, an Indonesian zillionaire and owner of the Bank of Honolulu. If there's one thing football coaches like, it's guys with lots of money, since a football program lives or dies on how much booster bucks a coach can charm out of rich people. I don't know if Sia ponied up a baksheesh for the UH, but he and Jones became buds.
How do we know? Because when Sia was busted for defrauding the bank out of millions, Jones had his back. After pleading guilty to bankruptcy fraud and agreeing to pay back millions in restitution, Sia faced several years in a federal slammer. Jones wrote a letter to U.S. Judge David Ezra asking that hizzoner nix the prison time and let Sia serve his punishment by giving lectures at the UH. This says heaps about June's loyalty to Sia and even more about the disdain he holds for UH lecturers. I don't know if Ezra believes forcing someone to lecture at a university is cruel and unusual punishment, but he gave Sia three years in the joint instead of the UH gig.
Which is too bad. Because I have to side with Jones on this. Nothing could be more punishing for an international man of action like Sia than to have to stand in a stuffy classroom, saying things you don't believe to a bunch of students who don't care. If faced with such a sentence for, say, a federal seat-belt violation, I'm certain Jones would beg to be put on a chain gang instead. Preferably one in the path of speeding Town Cars.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com