[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Candor — not for the first time — took a well-timed powder at last night’s School Board meeting.
When the Culver City High School coach, whose instant and apparently student-specific policy switch had a chance to defend himself in public for the first time, he passed.
Whether he or his superiors made the call, the sudden microphone-shyness speaks poorly of all of them.
In one of the lesser decisions of my checkered life, I once inherited a set of in-laws like that. At the table, they would speak of and around me, as if I were dead or in another location.
Surely Coach Scott Mair — whether he is right or wrong —felt uncomfortable sitting in stony silence while engaged persons all about him bandied his still-mysterious, still unexplained policy of banning a supposedly talented player.
Horrors.
She also wanted to participate in an off-campus program, and the coach said no on grounds of a potential one-day conflict with his team after the regular season ended.
That is raising the price of winning, in high school, to a level more properly befitting the National Football League, not a fairly obscure after-school workout.
From descriptions I have heard, Mr. Mair’s policy and a 3-minute egg have more in common than you would imagine.
If Culver High does possess soiled laundry in this case, it was elegantly, conveniently, hidden from sight last night. This was a feel-good exercise, unless you stood too close. I was reminded of a friend who once tried to palm off on me an evening with an unattractive girl. She was marginally ugly. Creatively, he described her as “interesting.”
Avoiding specificity at all costs, we listened to lecture-minded, stern-faced defenders of the high school’s exclusion of a two-year player — under identical circumstances — piously proclaim that, by golly Ned, today’s children need to grow up. Yeah, say it again, louder. They must learn to deal with scheduling conflicts, disappointments, obligations, loyalty to team members and responsibility by stiffeningtheir lower lip and buttoning their upper lip.
They may be at Culver City High School for academic training, but, please, there are games to be won. We have priorities.
Fortunately, the impressively mature coach absorbed these life lessons years ago. He doesn’t need to be annoyed by them anymore. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to waste his time on such esoteric and outdated morality. He can focus on what he was hired to do:
Win, baby, win.
The dominant jock mentality is, no doubt, thriving at Culver High.
Mr. Mair’s worst gaffe, it seems to me, was choosing to bar a player whose father is more articulate than all of the athletes, cumulatively, I covered during decades as a sportswriter.
He brought her case to the public stage, and it rightfully has stayed there.
If there are more than three players in the National Football League whose rudimentary grammar is admirable, I lose my bet. In 25 telephone calls, I could find 20 NBA players who believe that America still is in the European Union. Men who play sports are no threat to academia. They have dedicated their sandbox lives to a jock mentality.
Puerility reigns.
And so last week there was an unprecedented hour-long meeting at the YMCA between school leaders and the brass of the Y, who are obviously faultless in this embarrassing drama.
School people have made nasty statements over the years about the Y’s Youth and Governance program. Apparently everyone felt good afterward, and their session was labeled “productive.”
Wrongly, I believe.
They skillfully avoided resolving the Maya Cohn matter. But never mind. They felt good. Meanwhile, she dangles in the wind because, you know, a girl’s gotta learn what a girl’s gotta learn. Maybe she can ask the coach for life tips. Not, however, when he is coaching.
