Sidelines
IT was in high school, and it was an argument you'd never expect to have. Our football season had not gone well. We had a small team. So small that it was team policy that everyone get his ankles taped every day because we couldn't afford any injuries. So small that we practiced faking injuries in order to stop play and save timeouts. Weighing truth
against winningJ.D. Pahukoa was our knee guy. Someone else had ankles. We were specialized.
Years later, watching some old video, the images on the screen startled me -- oh my goodness, we were terrible! But we didn't know it then.
We didn't know it then.
Somehow, we believed every week. We battled for our coach.
He did everything he could think of to make us better. Hypnotism (it resembled the scene from "The Natural"). Aerobics instructors. Inspirational stories. Really, really inspirational yelling.
One day, after a loss, he even painted some helmets blue and somehow got them to the top of the goalposts and ordered us to bow down to them before practice.
We all kind of looked at each other. It was one of those no-win situations. Do it and you're bowing down to your opponent. Don't, and you're not listening to the coach.
Like, "I don't want to hear another word out of you! Do you understand?"
But the argument ...
It was late in the season, and we had lost almost all of our games, and everyone was beat up. Shinsplints. Bruises. Worse.
But there was hope, somehow. We won a game. (Was it two?) And our coach told us if we won the next one we'd tie for first in the second half of the season and go to a playoff championship game.
Here is where it gets complicated.
NFL star Drew Bledsoe has accused his old coach of lying. And a long story in Sports Illustrated told us that the infamous George O'Leary didn't just lie on his resume, but his entire coaching career was built on lies.
O'Leary threw his nonexistent college football experience in his players' faces as a tough guy example of playing through pain. He roared at his players never to quit when he, in fact, was a quitter.
The interesting thing was the reaction to this story. Some people saw the greatest virtues of coaching in O'Leary's deception -- he had good teams, he made men. Others were sickened by the overwhelming level of fraud and the misuse of a sacred trust.
But here's the thing. Our revered coach was wrong. Our next game couldn't put us in first place. We couldn't make any playoffs. We were mathematically eliminated, and the newspaper said so. (This is probably why coaches don't want you reading the paper.)
I still wanted to win the game just as badly, but unfortunately, I knew. And it slipped.
And that was the argument, with a teammate. It was right there, black and white. But it didn't matter. Our coach had told us, and so the facts meant nothing. He believed.
So here is the question, sports ethicists: Was our coach wrong for telling us a lie?
Or was I, for not believing it?
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com