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YellowSnow
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Hey @DoogCourics seen any chinteresting articles about Don James in the Athletic lately? Asking for a parsimonious fren.
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James hung up and turned to his wife, Carol.
“If that’s what happens,” he told her, “I’m resigning tomorrow.”
The next day was one of the most shocking, significant and polarizing days in Seattle sports. Steve Kelley, a columnist for the Seattle Times, and Art Thiel, a columnist at the Seattle P-I, both criticized James for quitting on his players — and received death threats. Mike Lupica admonished James on ESPN, while acclaimed journalist and former Tuskegee Airman Chuck Stone said James did the right thing “as an exercise in Socratic conscience.”
With one decision, James altered the course of Washington football for years to come and left people fiercely debating his legacy and reputation. That’s why it’s the perfect moment to re-examine James — not as the God-like authority watching practice from a tower or the legend with a statue outside Husky Stadium, but as a man caught in a gray area.
Did James betray his values when he quit in the summer of 1993, or did he live up to them?
Before Sports Illustrated crowned him the best coach in the country, before he won a national championship or coached in a Rose Bowl, Don James wanted to set an example. The people he admired were good, solid, sensible people; people who did the right thing and acted the right way.
“So that’s what I try to be,” he said. “I want my players to look at me and tell themselves, ‘See, you can be successful that way.’”
Over the years, he drilled those values into his team. More than once, he left players behind who didn’t show up on time for the bus, including starters. One year, assistant coach Dick Baird brought him a list of possible recruiting violations against other Pac-10 schools. James threw it away, looked Baird in the eye and said, “We’re not going to play that way.”
James and Carol took pride in welcoming new recruits into the James Gang. But that familial loyalty went only so far. Baird remembered James telling his assistants, “If any of you guys cheat, I’m going to fire you on the spot.”
He hated mouthing off in the press, cheap shots and running up the score. At a Thursday meeting before a game against San Diego State in 1982, James railed against San Diego State coach Doug Scovil, a man who James believed had run up the score on lesser opponents.
“Will Rogers was once quoted as saying that he never met a man that he didn’t like,” James wrote. “Well, I’ve never met Coach Scovil and I’m finding him easy to dislike.
“Now, with my church background, I’m having a difficult time wrestling with this. What I’ve decided to do is make it a competitive hate that I will drop once the game is over.”
James believed unnecessarily humiliating opponents was a crime against the sport. He did not stand for it, and some of his best players still laugh when they tell stories of James pulling them early. “I don’t like to say this,” UW receiver Mario Bailey said, “but I would have been in the Heisman race if it wasn’t for that man’s integrity.”
Scovil, however, didn’t let up on outgunned opposition, so James wrapped up his pregame talk with these words:
Swarm their ass.
Get them the hell out of town.
Then when it’s over, we’ll tell the press what a great bunch of guys they were.
Nearly a decade later, James had every reason to run up the score against Michigan in the Rose Bowl. His 1984 team had lost out on a national championship because of a close AP vote, and now James’ undefeated 1991 Huskies had the lead and the ball near Michigan’s end zone, with a chance to make the win that much more convincing. James ordered his team to take a knee.
“He put his money where his mouth is,” said Hugh Millen, a former UW quarterback. “His class just won out.”
Then consider this: In 1988, James’ team finished 6-5, one of the worst seasons in James’ 18-year tenure at Washington. In the middle of the season, the Huskies lost two brutally close games, including one to Oregon.
The Thursday after that game, he told his team, “Have you ever seen a team face more adversity in your life than we did against USC and Oregon? Did you see anyone in here quit? Hell no you didn’t, because we don’t have quitters in here.
“See, when you lose, you’re not a loser unless you quit.”
(Bernstein Associates / Getty Images)
The trouble for James started in November 1992. The Seattle Times broke a story about star quarterback Billy Joe Hobert taking a huge loan from a businessman and spending it in just three months.
Hobert initially borrowed $25,000, then bought a 1991 Chevy Camaro. He asked for a second and third loan, traded in the ’91 Camaro for a ’92 model, splurged on a $4,000 stereo and blew the rest of the $50,000 on guns, car insurance and wild weekends.
“I just pulled it out and paid cash wherever I went,” Hobert told the Times.
James saw the problem as an isolated one, a young man who made a bad decision. “I’m not a judge,” James said to reporters. “I let them walk around with cellular phones, wear earrings — which I don’t particularly enjoy. But I don’t run their lives.”
Then the story exploded.
The Los Angeles Times reported a series of possible NCAA violations and questionable behavior: players selling drugs, illegal recruiting by his son-in-law, a booster offering to adopt a recruit to evade NCAA rules. The Pac-10 launched an investigation. Committees were called. A total of 31 violations were leveled against James’ program — a program formerly held up as the squeaky clean standard.
The allegations and investigations hounded James leading up to the 1993 Rose Bowl, Washington’s third straight appearance in the Granddaddy of Them All.
Before the game, James sat down with ESPN reporter Mark Schwarz, who told James that Washington president William Gerberding had called the situation “embarrassing to the institution.” Schwarz asked if James was embarrassed.
“Maybe shocked would be a better word,” James said.
Schwarz pressed on, asking James if he was angry that Gerberding used the word embarrassing. James snapped.
“Absolutely not,” he shot back. “Are you trying to get me to say something bad about my president? That is ———, Mark. Don’t even lead your ——— questions that way. I’m not going to sit here and put up with that ——— now. I’ve already told you that ———.”
The last few months had worn on James. He constantly defended himself and his program. There were whispers that James’ bosses were leery of his power and popularity, that they might not fight any penalties “It had been tough for him for about a year with upper campus not being supportive like you’d like them to be,” Carol says. “It had taken a toll”.
One more thing: James’ started having health issues. He wore a monitor on the sideline, a doctor close by to keep an eye on his troubled heart.
The morning after the phone call at his house, James asked Carol to go to work with him. They waited in the same office James had occupied for nearly two decades.
When the call came, James picked up and listened to the sanctions: a loss of scholarships and TV revenue and a two-year bowl ban. James was furious. Then another phone rang and Carol answered. It was Gerberding wanting to talk to James. Carol told him no, he couldn’t talk to her husband, that he’d done all the damage he was going to do to him — and hung up.
“If he wasn’t fired then,” she laughs, “he would have been.”
James asked his coaches to gather his players in the team meeting room. He couldn’t go on, he said, 13 days before the start of the ’93 season. He knew his program wasn’t perfect, but neither did he cheat. The loss of scholarships, the loss of TV revenue, the two-year bowl ban — it was too unfair, too wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he said before leaving. “I love you guys.”
Napoleon Kauffman stood up and yelled, “You can’t quit on us!” Players screamed and cried. Like learning President Kennedy was assassinated, one of them remembered. A stoic man, James broke down and cried, too. His assistants begged him to reconsider. He wouldn’t.
A few players trailed him and Carol out the door. James turned. “I’m not your coach now,” he told them. “You go in there and be with your team.”
“No matter his high-sounding rationale,” Thiel wrote that day, “James committed an act of cowardice he would not respect in any of his players or assistants.”
Kelley was just as stunned. He thought the Huskies got “jobbed” with the sanctions, but he also couldn’t believe that a guy who held James’ values could quit on his team. He didn’t think that’s who Don James was.
“He quit,” Kelley wrote, “jeopardizing more than 20 years of integrity in one day.”
James knew that’s how some people would view his decision. The night before, he and Carol talked at length about it.
“And I said, ‘You know I’ll back you no matter what,’ ” Carol says. “We talked about all the pros and the cons and people would say he’s a quitter. I said, ‘Don, you know you’re not a quitter.’”
All these years later, opinions are just as divided.
“I think he’s a really honorable guy; I really do,” Kelley says. “I just think he made a huge mistake.”
“His integrity, he just felt like he couldn’t go on with what had happened and how they had treated him,” Carol says. “It really broke his heart.”
“I just think he should have stuck to his principles,” Thiel says. “And I think that’s a dispute reasonable people can have.”
“He quit on principle,” Baird says. “He said what he was going to do, and they called his bluff on it, and there was no bluffing. Don was a man of tremendous principle.”
For the ’93 season opener, James sail-gated to Husky Stadium, just like he’d always wanted. His players wore “DJ” patches on the back of their helmets, and before kickoff, they kneeled on the sideline and pointed to James in the press box. After Damon Huard threw a touchdown pass, James stopped by UW’s coaching booth to ask about Stanford’s defense, the old coach still inside him.
A radio station sent James 153 dozen roses — a dozen for each of his wins at Washington. “We’re sending the dead ones to the Pac-10,” Carol told reporters. He hosted a weekly radio show and broke down Husky games on local TV. “Now that Don is a member of the media,” Carol joked, “I sometimes refuse to talk to him.”
Over the years he fielded offers to coach again but always said no thanks.
With his life no longer consumed by football, he traveled the world with Carol and went on cruises, played golf with Lenny Wilkens and took his grandkids to the state fair. He never regretted his decision, and for good reason.
“It probably added 10 or 15 years to his life,” Carol says, pointing out her husband’s heart issues. “As we look back, he had about 20 years, and we just got to do everything.”
In the summer of 2013, James and Carol talked about their bucket list. Was there anything they wanted to do before they couldn’t travel anymore, anything else to see, to experience? They thought for a while and realized they couldn’t think of a single thing. Then they looked at each other and said, “This is great.”
Donald Earl James died a few months later.
At James’ funeral a drunk Steve Sarkiasin led a rousing and inspiring Go Huskies chant.
The car full of expensive stereo gear with a top notch car alarm to make the crooks have to smash your window in and rip out your dash board. Good times