A Texas-Size Mistake at Tech

Texas Tech University fired its head football coach, Mike Leach, on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, a day that will live in infamy. One of Coach Leach's players has alleged that after the player sustained a mild concussion, disabling him for regular practice, the coach made him choose between standing in a small, dark enclosure or leaving the team. The school did not explain how this irregular practice damaged the young, fit, albeit slightly concussed, football player.

Granted, standing in a dark enclosure is not a regular form of practice for any football team that I am aware of, but if you were to poll a representative sample of college football players, I'd be willing to bet that most of them would consider such an activity to be far less rigorous than their regular practices. My only objection to it would be that it is too Buddhistically peace inspiring and might cause a red-blooded young American male to step meditatively from the darkness onto the eightfold path to enlightenment instead of onto the onefold path to kick his opponents' asses.

This is one reason groups like Al Qaeda laugh at us. We've become a collection of couch turnips, scared to do anything as dangerous as standing in a dark closet for a couple of hours and unfit for any activities but watching TV, twittering, and tweeting. Are we men or birds? You might say, “I am a man with a birdbrain, and what my muscles lack in definition my HDTV more than makes up for, and that's the way I like it.”

“This," I would reply, “is not only not funny, but it is not true.”

The people who wish to destroy us do think it is funny, and some of those people are pirates. While you may be laughing at Coach Leach for his enthusiasm about pirates, somewhere a Somali pirate, whom the Coach emphatically does not endorse, is laughing at you. Keep this enthusiasm in mind, because if Coach Leach really wanted to discipline the player he would not have made him stand in a closet, something even the most sissified pirate would consider a joke. He would have keel-hauled him or made him walk the plank, probably preventing the player from ever complaining about another minor concussion. Right now, Osama and his advisers are probably sitting around the fire enjoying a goat while they laugh about how they now can just hit the Americans on the head, making them complain to their fathers, who will see that their leaders are fired.

We need more, not fewer, leaders like Coach Leach, men who are more like pirates than bureaucrats, men who aren't afraid to help mold the characters of their charges by giving them the occasional time out. How can they fire this man for acting more like SuperNanny than Captain Hook? He deserves a TV show, not a pink slip. He is a hero, and we would not enjoy the freedoms we do if men such as he, landlubbers as well as pirates, had not occasionally put others in the closet. Many of them should have stayed there, but that is another issue.

Arrrggghhh and Happy New Year mateys!