Squashing the hype
about Dobelle

NOW that The Dobelle Papers are starting to come out we see that one of the reasons he was in trouble was that Evan Dobelle was apparently recruiting Trinity College's squash coach.

I'm not sure which would be worse -- if this is true or if it isn't.

I think I speak for all of us when I say I don't want anything to do with a sport named after a vegetable.

(Quick question: Does squash help or hurt with Title IX concerns?)

I'm not going to pretend I know enough about the Dobelle brouhaha to say that this latest set of revelations is bad -- still spinning at this point, yeah? -- but it certainly looks bad.

I certainly found my blood pressure rising reading some of that stuff.

Squash coach?

Of course, some of it is probably stuff that happens all the time but you only bust it out on people you're looking to get rid of. Part of "job hunting with university resources" was that the former Prez apparently was not bright enough, with all of his "outside the box" brain power, to sign up for a Yahoo! account.

He was using UH e-mail to do it!

(Which brings to mind an interesting argument: If you are an assistant coach and you are in the office minding your own business and someone calls you to talk about a job, will you be busted for using the university phone?)

Some of this stuff is probably commonplace, but close to the line. Many people, for example, have paid for a day or two of personal vacation, thanks to a free flight to the destination, at the end of a business trip, and most of us see no problem with that.

But it looks -- looks -- like he was too close to crossing that line too many times.

You would think that a guy who is so brilliant would be smart enough not to let it look so bad.

Here is what I think happened:

I liked Dobelle. I guess I still do. I don't think he's a bad man, or even a dishonest man.

I think he's a good man.

But thanks to all the success he's had, so early and often in his life, I think he's come to believe his own hype. So much so that it looks -- reading some of that stuff, especially his own words in those e-mails -- that he's convinced himself anything he does is "visionary" simply because it is he who does it.

Of course, he's not the only guy who thinks this way.

Famous, about-to-be-unsuccessful people fall into that trap all the time.

(You know, like when Eddie Murphy started writing his own movie scripts.)

But it also seems like the Board of Regents believed Dobelle was a liar so much so it was almost to the point that it thought anything he said was a lie simply because it was he who said it. (And if he's half as bad as the board said he is, why would it pay him half that much?)

So there was a lot of Believing the Hype going around. Which is generally a bad thing.

>> Let's open football season in style: The best "Dear Sports Columnist" letter (on any sports topic) will win a copy of "Roger Craig's Tales From the San Francisco Sideline." After I read it, of course.