The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (41 page)

Maybe the biggest difference between Mike Rice at Robert Morris and Mike Rice at Rutgers is that at Robert Morris, his teams won. The Colonials ended Rice's first season in first place in their conference. In his second season, Robert Morris made it to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 17 years. They returned to the tournament the next year—Rice's last at Robert Morris—and nearly upset Villanova, a number-two seed.

Rice was developing a reputation for his success, but also for his temper. Against Villanova, a few of his players had to physically restrain him after a series of foul calls. Not long after, there was speculation in the media that Rice's courtside demeanor had prevented him from being considered for the head coaching job at Seton Hall. According to another story, even the staff pickup games at Robert Morris had to be discontinued because Rice was taking them too seriously.

On some level, Rice knew that his behavior was a problem. “The 1,500 people who came to the games at Robert Morris, I'd put on a good show for them,” he told me. “If the game was boring, they could just watch me. I would watch myself and think,
Jeez, I've got to calm down.
”

In these fleeting moments Rice was capable of seeing himself as thousands, and eventually millions, of people would see him. And yet he couldn't, or wouldn't, get far enough outside himself long enough to recognize the need to change.

 

Rice says he stopped using the word “faggot” during his second season at Rutgers, when one of his assistant coaches pulled him aside to remind him that a student at the school had recently jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate filmed him kissing another man. (I heard about this from Rice himself, who also told me that the assistant said to him, “Are you crazy?”) But his homophobic slurs are still part of his lowlight reel, and he has to answer for them.

Toward that end, Rice has volunteered his services to the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. “You know how much courage it takes for a kid to come out in high school?” Rice asked me after his first meeting with a group of gay high school students in New Jersey.

In late July, the organization invited Rice to a daylong professional development seminar in Chicago. The objective was to help educators make gyms and locker rooms more inclusive. It started with the usual around-the-room introductions, only with a twist: participants were asked to give their names, their occupations, and their PGPs.

“Who can tell me what a PGP is?” asked the leader, Jenny Betz, a peppy 30-something in a necktie, blue button-down, navy trousers, and oxford shoes.

A man in a backwards baseball cap raised his hand to answer: “Your ‘preferred gender pronoun.' What you like to be called.”

“Exactly,” Betz said, kicking things off with her own PGPs: “‘She,' ‘her,' ‘hers,' or any combination of them will feel comfortable to me.”

I had assumed that the rest of the participants would be lower-profile versions of Rice: coaches doing penance for gay slurs. As the introductions got under way, though, it became clear that the group was self-selected. They were almost all gay coaches and PE teachers from the area.

It was soon Rice's turn: “My name is Mike Rice. I am currently unemployed, but I worked as a basketball coach for 22 years. ‘He,' ‘him,' or ‘his.'”

Over the course of the day, Rice and the rest of the participants watched videos about the experience of gay students in school sports, ran through hypothetical situations, and learned some catchphrases to help make them stronger advocates for gay students:
If you see something, say something. If it's mean, intervene. Grab a teachable moment.

The scene bordered on comical: Mike Rice, last seen by much of America calling his players “faggots,” sitting in the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community center in the Midwest, talking about how to prevent the perpetuation of gay stereotypes. But Rice dived right into the various exercises.

At one point, Betz asked people to break into small groups and talk about a teacher or coach who made a strong impression on them. Rice told the story of his high school coach's sending him to the locker room in tears during the early minutes of an important game for yelling at his teammates to stop shooting and give him the ball.

“What the hell are you doing?” his coach asked, pulling Rice off the floor.

“What the hell are
you
doing?” Rice replied.

“That's it,” the coach said. “You're done.”

“It was the most embarrassing moment of my life,” Rice said. “Until this happened.”

Later, Betz requested two volunteers for some role-playing: what do you do when a colleague says something intolerant and offensive? “Who wants to be the PE teacher?” she asked.

Rice gamely raised his hand and went up to the front of the room with his female partner, a coach from a middle school in DeKalb, Illinois, who was supposed to ad-lib a response to his scripted lines.

“That kid has such a mouth on him,” Rice read awkwardly. “He thinks he is so funny. Well, I shut him up today. I called him a little homo, and that cracked everyone up and shut him up. It's the first day we've had some peace in that class since the unit started.”

His pretend colleague responded instantly: “How is that in any way appropriate?”

 

“What I want at Rutgers is a coach who is going to be intense, hardworking, and emotional and who is going to care every single second,” the Rutgers athletic director, Tim Pernetti, said at Rice's introductory news conference in May 2010. “At the same time,” Pernetti added, “I think we have a guy who understands . . . where the line is.”

It would be too much to suggest that anyone could have known at that point that Rice didn't really understand where the line was. But it's easy to see that Rice and Rutgers were a bad fit from the start. This was one of the worst teams in one of the toughest basketball conferences in the country. Rebuilding the program was going to take time. Even if Rutgers improved significantly, it was not going to win a lot of games. What the team needed was not a coach single-mindedly obsessed with winning but one who knew how to lose.

The season before Rice arrived, Rutgers finished 14th out of 16 in the Big East, and then three players left the team, including the top scorer. He tried to make a virtue of their underdog status, hanging a punching bag in the locker room covered with laminated newspaper clippings about how bad Rutgers was going to be.

Rice also came up with a motto—a philosophy, really—to help guide practices: “Comfortable in Chaos.” The concept was borrowed from the Navy SEALs, whose training assumes that the game plan has been scrapped and that they are in trouble. As Rice saw it, going up against teams like Georgetown and Syracuse was the basketball equivalent of a combat mission gone awry. He wanted practices to be more demanding—more hellish—than the games themselves. “Get ready for the chaos,” he'd say as his players stretched out and warmed up.

Rice says he can now see that he took the idea way too far. “A good coach leads his team to water,” he told me, borrowing a metaphor he picked up in anger management counseling. “A great coach leads them to water and makes them thirsty. I led them to water, put their heads in until I was satisfied with how much they drank.”

It's a reality of coaching that no matter what you do, your team is not going to get better every day. During our conversations, Rice talked a lot about the ticking clock, how he felt as if he had only so much time to turn Rutgers around if he wanted to keep his job. I don't doubt that Rice felt a powerful urgency to win at Rutgers. But the pressure was only a catalyst. It was also who he was and what he did for a living that made his behavior at Rutgers seem inevitable.

“It's easy to say now, but when I was in it every day, I wanted to grab someone and just go, ‘We can do this, we're going to show everybody,'” Rice told me. “Because that's who I am, and that's what I do.”

 

By some measures, Rice's first season at Rutgers was a success. The team was projected to finish dead last in the Big East. Instead, Rutgers finished 12th, with an overall record of 15-17. As proud as he is of his Robert Morris teams, Rice considers this his greatest achievement as a coach.

His second season promised to be even better. He landed five highly rated prospects, a remarkable feat for such a weak program. Of course, five highly rated prospects also meant a lot of freshmen, all of whom had to get used to playing against bigger, stronger competition, not to mention college life. The team proved inconsistent. It showed flashes of potential, upsetting some top schools, but would then turn around and lose to schools it was expected to beat. It finished the season 14-18.

When you cut through all the mythology of the college coach as molder of young athletes, what you will find is basically a group of extremely competitive people whose livelihoods—not to mention self-images—are tied to the performance of a group of adolescent kids. This doesn't mean that coaches don't care about their players; it's just the reality of the job. “What did you think about when you were 17 to 22 years old?” Rice says, referring to some of the challenges of coaching college players. “You were out of your mind. The last thing you'd think about was jumping to the ball and making a play for your teammate and boxing out every time. You're thinking:
Where's the party going on? Who's hanging out with who that night?
”

In this sense, anyway, coaching really isn't so different from parenting. You want your kids to do better, to be better, and it can drive you crazy to watch them repeat mistakes or even just underachieve. The trick is to be able to drive down your own demons, to contain your frustration, and, more generally, to balance anger and disappointment with love and encouragement. This is what good parents and great coaches do. And it's what Rice couldn't do at Rutgers. Here's another way to look at it: college coaches often talk about saving kids from themselves; Mike Rice's problem was that he couldn't save himself—or his kids—from Mike Rice.

I've heard Rice call his behavior any number of things—“idiotic,” “thoughtless,” “stupid.” As Rice puts it: “There's not a lot of thought that went into why you would throw a ball at somebody's feet as hard as you could. Is that going to make him rebound better? Probably not. I don't know what will, but that won't.” Even as Rice acknowledges that he was wrong, he says his players understood he was just trying to motivate them. “Did any of them blink?” he asked me once. “If they were mad at me, they would have knocked the hell out of me. They're six-nine, 270 pounds.”

After the video went viral, a number of Rice's players at Rutgers came to his defense on TV and in newspapers. “We always said we want to be pushed to that point where we get better,” Tyree Graham, who was on the Rutgers team for Rice's first two seasons there, told me. “That's what he did.”

It's not surprising that players would rally around their coach when they saw him being publicly pilloried. But not all of them agreed with what Rice was doing. The fact that Rice's players didn't fight back doesn't mean that his conduct wasn't abusive. What college athlete is going to knock the hell out of his coach? And to whom could Rice's players complain? The athletic director who hired him? The assistant coaches who were loyal to him and stood silently by while he bullied the players, or even participated in similar behavior themselves?

Rice says he wanted his players to fight back, to match his intensity. You can see how this might work as a form of motivation, but you can also see how it could easily backfire. Not all players are going to feel comfortable yelling at their coaches. And isn't it the coach's job to hold himself above and apart from his team, to be the educator, the grown-up?

One mystery of Rice's story is how his behavior went unreported in the media for so long. His practices were open to the public and regularly attended by local journalists. During Rice's first year, Jay Bilas, a college basketball analyst on ESPN and a former Duke player, watched a Rutgers practice and was so taken aback by “the volume level, the profanity, the challenging of the players,” he told me, that he pulled one of Rice's assistants aside to say that someone needed to talk to him. Rutgers's new basketball coach, Eddie Jordan, said over the summer that the school has been working with players who had some “psychological damage” from their time with Rice.

Rice's style might have worked at Robert Morris and with his first team at Rutgers—which he affectionately calls “the leftovers”—but it stopped working during his second season there. Part of the problem was that some of Rice's returning players felt that he was treating the freshmen differently, that they were being spared the worst of Coach Rice's Comfortable-in-Chaos boot camp.

Rice said one of his assistant coaches told him privately that his relentless intensity and negativity were hurting the team, and suggested he lighten up on some players. Another gave him a copy of a book called
The Positive Dog
to underscore the importance of positive feedback.

But Rice didn't listen, at least not until his second season at Rutgers was nearly over. “You're successful and now you keep building and it gets a little more out of control until it becomes a problem,” he says. “And my problem became a huge problem, and I never took time out to analyze how I was going about things. Even though people would say things, I'm not hearing it. Because the intensity is what I was, the intensity is what I knew.”

 

“You're lucky I have no more anger, buddy!” Rice joked one afternoon in June, swerving his Audi SUV to avoid a car that had just cut in front of him. We were on our way to lunch at a Ruby Tuesday near the Newark Airport. Sitting in the backseat was the man in charge of Rice's emotional and professional rehabilitation, John Lucas.