Chicken Abuse With No Hint of Double Entendre
At present, Kansas football coach Mark Mangino is under considerable fire after reports surfaced concerning how he treats his players. He is alleged to have threatened to send African-American players “back to the ghetto” or “back to the street corner with their homies.” He allegedly taunted another player with the player’s father’s alcoholism, and is said to use things said in confidence against players. Mangino is also reported to physically provoke his players as well. Keeping in step with his namesake, Baby Mangino has allegedly been throwing sand on African American toddlers at preschool and sprinkling some crack on them during nap time.
Duck, black people!
I’ll go out on a limb as far as saying it doesn’t necessarily sound like he’s nurturing the evolution of the student-athlete. The statements made towards black players are unacceptable. From an African-American coach to an African-American player as an attempted challenge to transcend one’s surroundings, I could see that being a motivational ploy, but from a white coach it just sounds bad, and no amount of spin can make it sound otherwise. All that said, the sum total of allegations against Mark Mangino were penciled into Bobby
Samantha Mangino certainly appears shocked by her dad's behavior.
Knight’s day planner just from the 6-7 AM hour. As Tom Coughlin and Bill Belichick have shown recently, the difference between being a “tyrant” and a “champion” is as simple as a few W’s. I don’t think Eric Mangini’s changed his style at all since he was Tony Soprano’s favorite football coach; he’s just losing. Rich Rodriguez is only cited for the same practice “violations” that every other coach in Division 1 isn’t because Michigan has had two down years. Additionally, the standards between acceptability for a coach’s treatment of players versus the general standard of care offered in the general population are somewhat nebulous. Bobby Knight chokes Neil Reed and he skates; he chokes the “What up, Knight?” kid (after some down seasons), and he’s canned.
Does Mark Mangino treat his players in a manner that I personally wouldn’t take kindly to? Absolutely. But it falls under the murky territory of what the athletic department, the university, the boosters, the parents, and the players are willing to trade in exchange for athletic success. There isn’t much precedent for a coach getting fired following a team revolt over getting treated like shit, but it has happened. Current ESPN commentator Bob Valvano (brother of probation-inducing Jim Valvano) started his broadcast career after he was fired by D-III Catholic University in Washington, D.C. after his basketball team requested he be fired for his profane personal assaults. Where’s James Van Der Beek when you need him? These things can happen when your team isn’t a mint for the school, but that’s not to say it could never happen when the team is. It just has to be when the team’s losing. Other than that, the members of the team will just have to look for their few stolen moments of personal victory – the ones where someone tricks the coach, the coach says something hilarious, or the coach wipes out and falls on his ass. And speaking of, how much less seriously might the same allegations facing Mangino be taken if he looked, say, like Urban Meyer?
This is a chicken farm. And we're the chickens.
Anyway, I’ve said my actual piece, so if you don’t want to hear me tell a story about one of these so-called “stolen moments,” go about the rest of your day.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I was a college swimmer, a detail which matters to no one, except maybe fellow swimmer FiddlingWhileJimRomeBurns. Now in college, our men’s and women’s team had mixed practices and the same head coach. For a beyond awkward kid that could have had a naked girl jump in his lap and still would have been too scared to make a move, this didn’t suck. Our head coach was a woman, which didn’t bother me at all. I would also like to say, for the first of many times, that I do not advocate violence towards women.
Our coach, setting a template for many of my future bosses, had a penchant for being wildly unpredictable. Some of her highlights included inciting a rival team with an exuberant celebration over winning a meet because the other team’s relay was disqualified (it’s an unwritten rule that you don’t celebrate disqualifications in swimming; the following year, I’d never seen a team so fired up to beat us, and I couldn’t blame them), a near-fistfight with the diving coach during league championships my senior year, throwing a bottle of cough syrup in the women’s locker room during a city-wide meet (which hit a good friend of mine in the head), and allegedly telling a swimmer who announced she was leaving the team, “This is why you don’t have any friends.” (That happened after I had graduated). Was she a bad person? I don’t think so. She just had poor social skills (like I can talk), was a questionable motivator, and was
The world's first unmanned flying cough syrup. Oh captain, my captain!
overly jealous that the team wasn’t buddy-buddy with her like with the assistant coaches. That’s life as the head coach.
In the interest of full disclosure, I actually had a very good relationship with our coach, and there’s one very good reason for this. I wasn’t any damn good and never claimed to be. I couldn’t make our team now that more money has been put into it for more scholarships, but at the time, we were a D-I program with no scholarships that existed solely to keep another program in D-I by having the minimum number of D-I sports. I was ostensibly a D-III swimmer on a D-I team and my usefulness was as a character guy, working hard in practice, and making people laugh. As Style Points’ tagline points out, I couldn’t disappoint her because she didn’t expect anything from me. When I blew out my shoulder, the athletic department paid for most of my surgery since she had been right there when I did it, and didn’t dispute it. That was really cool of her, as was letting me go to Miami with the team right after my surgery, a trip I’d already paid for, but could have gotten refunded.
Now in that spirit of making people laugh, my lasting legacy to the program (possibly in addition to making up a song about the rumor that one of the female swimmers took it up the ass from another swimmer’s roommate’s boyfriend) was bestowing our coach with the nickname of “The Chicken.” This isn’t a long and convoluted story. Our coach looked and talked like a chicken. I can’t post photos because that would be overly mean (not like surreptitiously naming someone after poultry), but she had a long nose (as do I), a long neck, and no chin. And as for the voice, her vocal histrionics were note for
Jim Henson's artistic representation of our coach.
note squawking. The joke doubled-down after my freshman year when one of my friends, upon quitting the team, bequeathed me a rubber chicken, which became the team’s unofficial mascot. (It also made spot appearances at Caps hockey games, because, well, I find rubber chickens intrinsically hilarious). Upon graduation, I passed down the rubber chicken to the underclassman that did the best impression of our coach. Non-teammates that I tell about this often say this was mean, but I don’t feel bad about that in the least. Stolen moments. No matter what your impression of your coach in the big picture, on a day-to-day basis, if you like your coach even 50% of the time, something is probably wrong. Because that’s the person squawking at you every day for six months, cutting short your vacations, guilt-tripping you about missing practice for a family funeral, throwing cough syrup at your friends, etc. So you take the moments of subversion because they’re what you can get.
But as with almost everything in life, when you get that one moment that everyone secretly dreams of, it’s not exactly what you wanted. And let me state again that I do not advocate violence against
Our coach's husband, the Chicken Lover.
women. My freshman year, our winter training trip was in Altamonte Springs, Florida, in the Orlando area. This was the first year of our team having a training trip and the first and last year we drove there. Anyway, during the trip, a botched hotel wake-up call lead to yours truly missing half of morning practice, after which The Chicken assigned us all to vans for the rest of the trip. And just my luck, I was assigned with The Chicken herself, which meant that not only was the miles-out-of-my-league sophomore I had a crush on in the so-called “Party Van,” driven by one of the senior captains, I got bonus Chicken 4 times a day. My friend who gave me the rubber chicken still hasn’t forgiven me, even though it was the hotel’s fault.
Anyway, on our last day of training trip, we were taking a team picture when I spotted a lonely “Caution! Wet Floor!” sign in the hotel parking lot. The significance, if you can stand another tangential memory, was that my freshman roommate, a fellow swimmer, had drunkenly pissed in our room twice. Once on the floor and once, directly in the freshman facebook (not to be convinced with Captain Zuckerberg’s Overly Precious Ponzi Scheme). After I pointed out the sign to said roommate, he, who at least had a sense of humor about it by this point, told me it was my assignment to take it. Now I’m repressed to this day, but the stories about my naïveté as a college freshman could fill a book that you guys wouldn’t read since if you’re still with me, you’re at least annoyed. But slowly and surely, while everyone was distracted, I stole my very first sign and quickly stashed it in the back of the van.
14 hours later, it’s about 2 AM and we’re all disembarking from the vans. I grab my stuff from the back and head for the dorm when I realize that I’ve forgotten the sign. I’m convinced that if The Chicken finds it, I’ll be thrown off the team. Unfortunately, the back door to the van is locked from the back. So I had to ask The Chicken to
A fellow fan of rubber chickens -- Gary Gnu.
reopen the van, which she had to do from inside the van. Now you can probably see where this is going, and remember, I do not advocate violence against women. Immediately after she does unlocks the door, in one swift motion, I open the door, grab the sign, and slam the door. I have never moved so quickly. Save ass first, ask questions later. However, The Chicken’s reaction time, after a 14-hour drive, was not what it could have been, and I manage to slam the back door of the van directly into The Chicken’s head. Despite the muffling of the van, loud squawking followed. The one witness, my friend who bequeathed me the rubber chicken, swears that her exact words were, “God dammit, [Old King Clancy]!” And if that’s true, her restraint is beyond admirable compared to what my own reaction would have been. For as many times as I was every frustrated with The Chicken, I was mortified. My recollection is very little, but I believe I just starting yelling about how sorry I was, and then finally made headway for my dorm, with my cackling friend in tow.
And that was my stolen moment of revenge against The Chicken, albeit not the way I ever would have wanted it. Amazingly enough, apparently I told very few people that story, probably because I was so ashamed. At a special seniors-only reminiscing party, when asked to go around a circle and recount a favorite story, I told that one, and damn near killed the rest of the seniors with laughter. I’d been the one who had done what everyone secretly wanted to. I only wish I could have bequeathed the moment to someone who deserved it more. Like the swimmer that was told she had no friends. Or at the very least someone with two X chromosomes.
Tags: ba-GAWK!, caution wet floor, chappelle, college football, Kansas, Mark Mangino, McChicken, micturation, mindless self-indulgence, nightmare ant was robbed, old king clancy, perpetual hypocrisy, swimming, The Chicken
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monchhichi
Wild, man. &1.