Good vs. evil, easy as pie. In Don Imus, HBO’s investigative “Real Sports” had its male villain. Now it needed its heroine. And Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer would perfectly fit that script.
So, in 2007, when Imus & Co., even by Imus’ often cruel standards, recklessly and hurtfully spoofed RU’s women’s team as “nappy-headed ho’s” — the end of his WFAN reign despite his abject apology — “Real Sports” portrayed Stringer as a highly successful “nurturing” coach and a woman blessed with unimpeachable dignity, credibility and honor.
Except it wasn’t true. Not then. Not now.
Stringer, as again demonstrated last week, has never been better than the standard big-salaried, big-time, whatever-it-takes college basketball coach. No better and perhaps worse.
In 2002, on the state school’s dime and time, she recruited Shalicia Hurns, a 6-foot-3 star rebounder and perhaps an answer to Stringer’s deal-with-the-devil prayers.
Hurns had already been thrown out of Purdue then Wabash Valley Community College for a string of lawlessness, including a no-license hit-and-run car crash. She was bad news before she landed in Jersey.
Stringer, who in 2014 was paid $1.6 million and is now on a four-year contract with a total base, pre-incentives salary of $3.5 million, explained that in providing Hurns a third chance, she was magnanimously providing her “a second chance.”
Of course she was. Multiple second chances are bestowed on student-athletes who can help win ball games.
In 2004, while on full scholarship at Rutgers, Hurns bound then beat her roommate, Kelly Evans, a member of RU’s women’s soccer team. Threatening to kill Evans at knifepoint, Hurns held her captive for several hours.
Hurns was arrested and accepted a plea bargain to criminal restraint and issuing terroristic threats. Then, on her “second chance,” she was thrown out of her third college. Her victim transferred.
Of course, none of this made the “Real Sports” piece, nor did Stringer’s defiant, obdurate response to a USA Today reporter
who asked if she regrets recruiting Hurns. Her reply: “I don’t apologize for anything.”
And Rutgers allowed her to continue to do as she pleased.
While Hurns was later incarcerated for violating parole, we skip ahead to last week to find that nothing has changed on Stringer’s watch.
Senior forward Caitlin Jenkins was suspended after her arrest for assault and criminal mischief in what the Asbury Park Press reported to be a domestic violence case. Rutgers is her third college.
Two days earlier, Stringer had successfully recruited former Baylor star Alexis Morris. She’s a former Baylor star because the sophomore from Texas was jettisoned after her second arrest, including the charge of possession of a dangerous weapon, since September.
Thus Stringer, on RU’s watch and student and taxpayer funding, remains in the third “second chance business.” Whatever it takes.
In that HBO piece, Stringer, who’d already expressed no regret for having recruited a maximum-risk criminally violent player who next beat and bound a Rutgers student, said that what Imus said constitutes “an assault on all women.”
Then WFAN replaced Imus with Craig Carton. Round and round we go.
Tank fix: Reward best non-playoff teams
Teams tanking? Try this:
Reward the team closest to making the playoffs rather than the one being the furthest out.
In other words, if a league’s top 16 teams make the postseason, the first draft pick is granted to the team that finished 17th, as it clearly did not tank, trying to win until the end. That best ensures the integrity of games, lineups the value of tickets and even TV ratings.
Then work it down — the 18th-best gets the second pick, and so on down.
Even regular season closing days would carry the likely promise of the worst teams trying to win, trying not to be the team that finishes last rather than be in the hands of a coach, GM and team owner who would much prefer to see their team lose.
And if you finish dead last, you get the last pick among those who didn’t qualify for the playoffs then the first pick in the second round, then work off the bottom in ascending order.
Vagaries will exist with the trading of draft picks — why play hard and/or play the starters to improve someone else’s pick? — but overall the value of winning will surpass the value of losing.
Soon the experts will be applying their expertise to mock NFL drafts, followed by saturation coverage of the real thing.
But will any pause to remind the us they have little-to-no idea, perhaps even invoking last week’s Tom Brady-to-Julian Edelman Super Bowl connection?
Brady, perhaps the NFL’s greatest QB, was chosen in the sixth round with the 199th pick. Edelman, a 5-foot-10 QB at Kent State, was a seventh-round pick, the 232nd overall, in the 2009 draft.
Now take a look at the first round of the 2009 draft. Many unrecognizable where-are-they-now and/or quickly expendable names, including Mark Sanchez, drafted fifth overall.
Where are they now? Last seen, Brady and Edelman were riding a roller coaster at Disneyworld.
Hope exists Pitaro can fix ESPN
There is hope among the remaining credible within ESPN’s vast wasteland that in new boss Jimmy Pitaro someone will have their fronts and backs, thus, not that ESPN can sink much lower, much will change for the better.
For starters, Pitaro is known to be a genuine sports fan. Imagine that. That could mean that he knows ESPN’s fractured content and context are in immediate need of nonsense removal.
Next, we’re told he seems to know good from garbage, and is disinclined to suffer the latter. If so, the hollow noisemakers populating ESPN’s studios and game-site broadcasts should take care and beware.
Further, the wishful, expensive but worthless hiring practices at ESPN — sign any big name, especially the disreputable, a Bobby Knight and Ray Lewis, among plenty — to soon discover they can’t speak a clear thought, also may be at the end.
If even half of this info is true, that’s good.
With the Knicks and Rangers in another rebuilding era, has it ever dawned on James Dolan that he isn’t particularly good at what he does? Think Dolan the employee would’ve survived Dolan the boss?
That sound of screaming in the middle of the night is from Howie Rose, having night tremors on how to handle descriptions of new Met Robinson Cano jogging into double plays. Should he hide it from a radio audience? Let listeners assume he didn’t run? Or just tell the repetitive, can’t-miss-it truth?
Remember sports fans: If LeBron James is not happy, you’re not happy.