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Notre Dame not the victim Posted: Monday December 17, 2001 10:29 AM
The ironic thing about it is that George O’Leary has a reputation for straight talk. "He’s honest to a fault," says Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen, the best friend of the man who resigned late Thursday as coach of Notre Dame. "Everything he’s ever told me was the truth. That’s the way he lived his life." Friedgen understood that O’Leary had claimed a graduate degree that he didn’t earn from New York University, and that he had claimed three letters in football that he didn’t earn from New Hampshire. Friedgen didn’t care. "It has nothing to do with anything," said Friedgen, who worked with O’Leary for years before serving as O’Leary’s offensive coordinator at Georgia Tech from 1997 through 2000. "It’s perception. It’s how we’re perceived, not what we do. It should be what we do." O’Leary won games. He treated his kids well. He is a tough-nosed coach. He genuinely cares for his players. Those qualities are evident in the first five minutes of a conversation with him. What O’Leary did at Georgia Tech probably would have been enough to protect him from the fallout of his resume falling apart. He had proven his worth at Georgia Tech. Notre Dame owed him nothing. Coaches lie all the time. They hide injuries and mislead reporters about game plans. The leap from fudging the 40-yard-dash times of a player to fudging the number of letters won in a long-concluded athletic career doesn’t cover a lot of ground. However, academic degrees are sacrosanct. O’Leary, says his attorney, Jack Reale of Atlanta, understood immediately the ramifications of his mistake. He resigned without being asked. "It’s the only resume that he has ever prepared," Reale said Friday. "There was no intent to mislead. Over a period of time, it should have been deleted and cleaned up, and it wasn’t." There wasn’t any intention to mislead Notre Dame. There was an intention to mislead in 1980, when the newly hired Syracuse assistant first wrote that he had earned the letters. Over the years, O’Leary never corrected it. In his mind, coaching biographies had nothing to do with winning games. He couldn’t be bothered. Most coaches, says Georgia Tech football spokesperson Allison George, take their biographies, add a year to the ages of their children, and move on. George, who is close to O’Leary, says that he is "a stickler for details." Yet she feels responsible for the inaccuracies in O’Leary’s biography. "Catholic guilt," she says. It’s not her fault. It is O’Leary’s, another Catholic. Friedgen, defending his friend, says the kind of mistake that O’Leary made "is what confession is for." Notre Dame defenders may claim that the university has been victimized. Don’t believe it. If university officials felt so strongly about the integrity of O’Leary’s resume, they should have checked it last week. It would have saved Notre Dame embarrassment. It also would have saved Notre Dame the $1.5 million that it paid Georgia Tech to break O’Leary’s contract, too. That money is gone. O’Leary is back in Georgia, his spirit crushed. "He was more comfortable than I’ve ever seen him," Reale said of O’Leary in his five days as Irish coach. "He was home." The legacy of O’Leary is that from this day forward, all coaches will have their resumes checked. Bill Byrne, the athletic director at Nebraska, says that his school already conducts thorough background checks, including police records. Ohio State athletic director Andy Geiger doesn’t check resumes. For years, he says, people have introduced him as having rowed on the U.S. crew that won a gold medal at the 1961 Pan-Am Games. "I didn’t row," Geiger said Friday. "I was the starboard spare. I was on the team. And it was in 1959, not 1961." Speaking from his office in Columbus, Geiger opened a media guide on his desk and read aloud from his official biography. It said that he was a member of the crew, not that he rowed. However, it still read 1961, not 1959. Geiger has no plans to resign.
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