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Yo, Please Pass the Truth Serum
Posted: Tuesday February 02, 1999 11:18 AM
I'm 6'5" with blue eyes, bench 425 and often win prizes for my coq au vin.
I was valedictorian at Yale, can barrel roll an F/A-18 Hornet and dumped Elle
Macpherson for hogging the
covers.
True, I'm lying like Sam Donaldson's rug, but I don't care anymore. Lying is in.
Lying is sweeping the nation. Everybody in America lied last week.
Twice.
Take Gary Barnett, who has told enough white lies lately to frost a 10-tier
wedding cake. As Northwestern football coach, Barnett kept insisting he'd never
leave Chicago -- usually after flirting with a job somewhere else. He talked
to UCLA, Texas, Notre Dame and even got caught on the Georgia campus. He said he
was there "to see the
facilities."
"I'm here, and I will be here for the next 10 years of my contract,"
he said of Northwestern in December 1997. "I stand by my
promises."
After that, he took a gander at Oklahoma, followed by Colorado. Two weeks ago he
even went so far as to E-mail his players, "I will be back to take us to
Pasadena!" Within days he accepted the job at Colorado.
"He gave us his word," said Wildcats sophomore running back Brian
Marshall last week. "When anybody goes back on his word, you lose respect
for him. How can you trust him?"
Is it any wonder that four of Backdoor Barnett's former players were indicted in
December on perjury charges in connection with a gambling
investigation?
Prosecutor: Young man, would you care to tell the court exactly what you were
doing in the basement of noted gambling figure Double-Up
Dougherty?
Northwestern athlete: I was just there to see the
facilities!
Barnett lied as much as the guy he replaced at Colorado, Rick Neuheisel, who had
been romanticizing during the season about "spending my career in one
place" and modeling his career after Joe Paterno's at Penn State. "I'm
anxious to be on board for the long ride," Neuheisel said after the Aloha
Bowl in December. "I truly love working at Colorado." Two weeks later
he took the job at Washington, jilting a room full of Colorado recruits waiting
to have dinner with him. Joe Paterno? No. Joe Isuzu? Yes.
Even Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan got caught up in Lie-a-Palooza recently.
When rumors started that Colorado was trying to hire Broncos offensive
coordinator Gary Kubiak to replace Neuheisel, Shanahan issued a written
statement, saying, "There has been no contact between Gary and
CU."
Only one little problem: Kubiak later admitted he and Colorado athletic director
Dick Tharp had met for almost three hours the night before Shanahan
issued his
statement.
Ohhhh, you meant our Gary
Kubiak?
Then there's Rocco DiLorenzo, the athletic director of Boston's schools, who
admitted last week that some coaches and other athletic representatives in his
system were guilty of phoning in bogus hockey scores to Boston newspapers for
years to keep teams from being humiliated. For instance, a 15-1 game might get
called in as 3-1. "It's not good for a team to get beat that way,"
DiLorenzo told The Boston Globe, one of the papers that was duped
into printing the false scores. That's true, Rocco, except the team did
get beat that way.
That's the way the world works. Nearsighted goalies get
embarrassed by 12 goals, give up their dream of joining the San Jose Sharks and
enroll in medical
school.
If it were up to us, Rocco, you'd be fired. (Not to worry, though. In the
papers, it'll say you're just out for a long
lunch.)
Two months ago Karl Malone said, "I have played my last basketball game in
a Jazz uniform in Utah." Last week he reported to Jazz camp.
Oops.
Over the last few years Madison Square Garden president and CEO Dave Checketts
has said the Knicks had no interest in signing players of low integrity. Last
week Checketts approved a trade for Latrell Sprewell, a player of no
integrity.
It's all so greasy, it makes you want to take a long hot shower, say, until
Easter. Nobody's word is worth a warm pitcher of spit anymore. Nobody's
signature is worth the invisible ink it's written in. Everybody lies like
Baghdad Realtors.
Except me. I can honestly say I've only told one lie my whole life, and it was
that first paragraph. I bench
450.
Issue date: February 1, 1999
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