Like Father, Like Son?: An Open Letter to Coach Pat Knight
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Dear Coach Pat Knight (Lamar University):
I am writing to you about your post-game comments the other night. As others may not have seen your press conference, I quote it for their sake. Entering the press conference, you first tell a student-athlete: “I am next, because you don’t have a clue what it takes to win.” Your tone of disrespect didn’t end there:
We've got the worst group of seniors right now that I've ever been associated with. Their mentality is awful. Their attitude is awful. It has been their M.O. for the last three years.
We've had problems with them off the court, on the court, classroom, drugs, being late for stuff. All that stuff correlates together if you're going to win games. You just can't do all that B.S. and expect to be a good team and win games. These guys got to learn; they have to grow up. They don’t need to be coddled; they don’t need to be babysat. That is the problem with society . . . because people don’t make kids accountable. These kids are stealing money by being on scholarship with their approach . . . . If you act like this in the real world, you are going to be homeless, with a job… And if people have a problem with me being harsh about it, I don't care. I came here to clean something up.
While others have called your post-game comments an “epic rant,” as “tough love” or as an example your honesty, I don’t share their opinion. It was abusive, disrespectful and an affront to the educational mission of every institution of higher learning. You have defended these comments by noting the support of your fellow coaches, who are “all dealing with the same thing.” You have cited parents as so appreciative of your comments that they would want their kids to play on your team. While I don’t write as a parent (although the thought of my kids learning anything from you is one I cannot bear), I do write you as a teacher and a member the higher education community.
I am not sure if you think of yourself as a teacher or an educator. I don’t know if you subscribe to the belief that coaches, like professors, are advancing the mission of higher education through instilling values, fostering skill development, and otherwise preparing the next generation to succeed in all walks of life. Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist with the Washington Post, highlights the presumed pedagogical power (or mission) of collegiate coaches:
The best college coaches teach sport as a set of problems and how to tease out the solutions. They don’t just teach content and skill, but how to transfer it into real-world performance through study, organization and communication under pressure. They ask, what happens if you follow a strategy to its logical conclusion? What are the consequences of making things up as you go along? Why do things break down? What are effective fallback principles when skill or strategy breaks down? What are the traits of successful organizations across professional boundaries?
I would gather that you do see yourself as an educator, as a teacher molding the future generation. Whether true or not, I have to tell you your approach is both troubling and offensive and has NOTHING to do with teaching or educating. Teaching is not about publicly humiliating; teaching is not about ridiculing, demeaning, and disrespecting. You may think your approach reflects a commitment to disciplinarity and accountability but there have to be other ways to instill a commitment to excellence on and off the court. Anyone can stand before an audience, microphone in hand, without fear of any reprisal, to criticize. Teachers find other ways of inspiring, informing, or helping beyond intimidation and fear. Teachers don’t violate the trust of their students by announcing their grades in front of millions of people. Teachers don’t disrespect their students; calling out behavior is one thing, but condemning their character is another. Your decision to treat student-athletes as children, to publicly condemn and ridicule them, shows that you have a lot to learn as a teacher because anyone has the capacity to do what you did that night.
Beyond the tone, do you think it is proper to share students’ private academic records? You obviously do because you followed your press conference with additional statements about academic performance: “I’ve never seen more F’s on report cards than I ever have since I got here. Missing classes, being late for workouts, missing workouts. … What I don’t think they understand is all that correlates together. If you’re not going to be a winner off the court, you’re not going to be a winner on the court.” What good can come from embarrassing these students? At the same time, do you think it is proper to reference drug arrests, even though when I searched online all I could find is one arrest for a minor marijuana possession charge?
I would be remised if I didn’t bring up the racial optics of a white male coach publicly chastising, ridiculing and demonizing 5 African American players (based on search of roster, it appears that all 5 seniors are black)? Did you think about how publicly castigating 5 black players as academically deficient, drug using, and otherwise lacking the requisite values and attitude to be successful as basketball players or people fits in a larger racial context? Did you think about the societal stereotypes and how your claims are not only disrespectful to the players but reinforce widely circulated stereotypes about student-athletes and particularly black student-athletes?
Your arrogant comments makes me wonder if you and Newt Gingrich are writing a book together acting as if success and opportunity come as the result of a recipe of values, work ethic, and the right cultural ethos. Was he busy lecturing members of the NAACP so you decided to use your platform to reduce success and failure to attitude and values? Do you really think that excoriating 5 (black) players will help them develop a work ethic to avoid being homeless as if homelessness or unemployment is the result of not having the requisite values? You seem to imply that people succeed or fail because of their actions, which is far from the truth (just ask Mitt Romney). I wonder how your white manhood fits into your own career and how your own connections allowed you to make it irrespective of your own actions. You claim to fear for the futures of those players who lack the needed maturation, but maybe they have a Dad who can help them out.
Watching a well-paid college coach lecture a group of student-athletes, whose labor is exploited, about their values and their behavior is the ultimate hypocrisy. But of course, the pedagogy of demonization, of ridicule, discipline and punishment, is not unique to you. While you may want to focus on the culture of today’s youth, your behavior reflects the educational failure of a nation more committed to blaming than educating, more committed to disciplining than empowering, and more committed to incarcerating than investing. Your words a reminder of what’s at stake, as noted by Henry Giroux:
The current assault on young people, public education and critical thinking is first and foremost an attack not only on the conditions that make critical education and pedagogy possible, but also on what it might mean to raise questions about the real problems facing public education today, which include the lack of adequate financing, the instrumentalization and commodification of knowledge, the increasing presence of the punishing state in the schools, the hijacking of public education by corporate interests, the substitution of testing for substantive forms of teaching and learning and the increasing attempts by right-wing extremists to turn education into job training or into an extended exercise in patriotic xenophobia and religious fundamentalism. As the right-wing juggernaut destroys the social state, workers protections, unions and civil liberties, it is easy to forget that a much less visible attack is being waged on young people and especially on public schools and the possibility of critical forms of teaching.
Your pedagogy is yet another reminder of why this year I will boycott March Madness because as Kahlil Gibranonce noted I “Learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, I am ungrateful to these teachers.”
Wishing you a quick exit from the tournament,
David
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.
