Georgia's gymnastics team won its 14th SEC championship over the weekend. Which is awesome, but part of the rich tapestry that is being a Bulldog fan is the fact that nearly every great achievement is balanced out by a corresponding embarrassment, which came in the form of former basketball coach and all-around knob Jim Harrick continuing to make an ass of himself in front of the NCAA.
In case you haven't been following the UGA basketball soap opera for the past two years or so, Jim Harrick is the basketball coach who: got hired for no other reason than because he was buddy-buddy with UGA president and Louis Quatorze wannabe Michael Adams from their days together at Pepperdine (and over the objections of athletic director Vince Dooley); recruited all-world dipshit Tony Cole (also over the objections of Vince Dooley); humiliated the university through a "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball" class designed specifically to let jock students sail through with As; and got fired only after getting the Georgia basketball program put on probation for four years. So.
(Just for the purposes of historical information, I was the editor of the student newspaper the day Harrick was first offered the job in April 1999, accepted it, then declined it to stay at Rhode Island, then accepted it again. Those of us who had to completely redo two front pages in the span of a few hours probably should've had some idea Harrick was a total spaz . . . oh, what innocent days those were.)
Now Harrick is arguing before the NCAA on behalf of his son, saying that his son doesn't deserve to be banned from coaching for seven years (as he was after the Georgia debacle). And what stirring defense did he make?
"It's Easter week," Harrick said. "Are you going to crucify us to the cross?"
If you're keeping score at home, Harrick Sr. did three things in the span of a single sentence:
· Compared himself to Jesus Christ.
· Compared his suffering to that of Jesus Christ.
· Used about as ridiculous a redundancy as there is (how else does one crucify someone, if not to a cross? Hey, why not electrocute him electrically?)
This is the kind of stuff that just makes you kinda sorta want to beat your head against the wall. Not as embarrassing as Maurice Clarett, necessarily, nor the fact that Gary Barnett still has a job doing anything but cleaning stadium toilets, but embarrassing nonetheless.
But anyway. The point is that I don't want the Gym Dogs' achievement to be overshadowed by one dipshit. Go Dawgs and, it goes without saying, kick Florida's ass.
1 comment:
Ugh. Gary Barnett. I fail to understand how someone who was essentially responsible for making CU into even MORE of a really expensive Playboy Mansion is still allowed to continue with his chosen line of work. In a just world, he'd be teaching the football team at a camp for overweight kids with Tourrette's syndrome.
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