Human. Shocking.

Hayes on Weis in a well-rounded…um, “three-dimensional” profile of the coach:

“The biggest problem I have,” Weis says, “is people who don’t know me, who have never spoken to me, think I’m an asshole.”

Again, where this is a problem for a highly-paid coach, we don’t know. The difficult part in any perspective piece on a coach or player is the Uncertainty Principle, the fact that interviewing that person causes them to behave differently and force the bromides out of everyone around them, since no one’s going to stand up and say “God, that man is retarded and fond of barbecuing live ferrets for lunch.”

It does give some take a fair amount of brainpower, though, to hold two contradictory ideas in the head simultaneously. Weis might be an asshole to all but 14 people in this world; Mark Mangino might manage to have come up the hard way, worked two jobs for thirty years, been a dedicated father, and still wound up being loathed and feared by most people who have contact with him. It is a very real thing to assume being a real, live person means being complex, potentially unlikeable, or even likeable and an asshole simultaneously. With people being polymorphously perverse as they are, all of the above are possible, since being human often involves being complex, problematic, and difficult to understand.

Pardon the digression, though. We now return to the standard dynamic of worshiping athletes and coaches or hating them outright. Apologies for the interruption of service.