WP: All Is Not Well And Good With Duke Athletics
By John Feinstein
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, May 28, 2007
....Enough apologizing and enough martyrdom. It was a known fact on the Duke campus for years that the lacrosse team overdid it when it came to partying. There was a written report in 2004 that said just that and Tallman Trask, the university vice president allegedly overseeing the athletic department, and Joe Alleva, allegedly the athletic director, did absolutely nothing about it. Alleva fired Mike Pressler, the lacrosse coach, because a scapegoat was needed in the immediate aftermath of the incident and Pressler took the hit.
Here's what's wrong with all this: No one at Duke is ever wrong. Duke's last president, Nan Keohane, made a terrible choice when she selected Alleva as athletic director in 1998. Everyone at Duke knew that Alleva was a pleasant man whose next original idea would be his first, someone whose main asset when applying for the job was the fact that his racquetball partner was Mike Krzyzewski.
Five years later, Alleva had lived down to everything expected of him: taking a bad football program and making it worse, hiring a crony as baseball coach who HAD to be fired because the team was awful and former players came forward to say he had encouraged them to use steroids, and looking foolish almost everyone time he opened his mouth in public (which he rarely did, usually hiding behind press releases). Alleva did what everyone else at Duke has done for years and rode the coattails of Krzyzewski's successful basketball team. Keohane looked at this record and gave Alleva a new contract.
Why? Because she was a typical academician: Completely unable to admit a mistake....
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The football players aren't to blame for not being better football players. One can only hope that those playing lacrosse learned their lesson from the disaster of 2006. What's sad is that the adults appear to have learned nothing. Brodhead continues to do his Mr. Chips act, sending out lengthy e-mails to alums about how everything is going just fine now. Trask is still employed. Burness is still employed and so is Alleva. No one from Duke has apologized to the lacrosse kids for throwing them under the bus -- the kids are hardly victims here but the school chose to protect its image rather than its athletes -- and the entire athletic department is in disarray. People like me get angry mail from Duke people saying that, really, everything is just fine -- that it's the media (people like me) who are causing all these problems....
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There is a lesson in all this: It isn't about over-zealous prosecutors or media running amok. It's a lesson about a society in which no one ever admits they're wrong (see G.W. Bush and R. Cheney as exhibits 1 and 1A), especially allegedly smart people. Smart people make mistakes too. Mistakes are forgivable -- but only after you admit them....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052800929.html?nav=most_emailed#
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