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Report from Stage Three Thursday, Nov 10, 2005 By John Brummett Requests have dribbled in that I address the football debacle at Razorback Inc. by applying my theme of hogaholism. That's the disorder by which a small and insecure state obsesses self-destructively on a sports empire that returns no reward, but only frustration. I'll oblige mainly because it gives me a chance to reveal and elaborate on what I've come to call the four stages of Arkansas maturity. I am proud to announce, or at least assert, that I recently have advanced to Stage Three. Stage One is rabid fanhood. I stayed in it through childhood and into early adulthood. It's quite primitive. In this stage I once got deep into the beer pitchers and interrupted legendary local singer-guitarist Bob Hays at the old Shakey's Pizza Parlor on an autumn Friday evening to lead a hog call. I yelled "kill him," and perhaps meant it, as Marianna's Dirt Winston chased USC quarterback Pat Haden out the back of the end zone at War Memorial Stadium. I stood in the eerie stillness of my backyard and doubted any reason to go on. I'd just turned 16. We had lost, 15-14. In Stage Two, one comes to so resent the arrogance, absurdity, provincialism, misplaced priority and general hogaholic debilitation of our overbearing cultural obsession that he begins to root openly against the home team for the perverse pleasure of it. This represents only scant advancement over Stage One, since it, too, reeks of raw emotion. In Stage Three, into which I completed passage only weeks ago, the outrages of Stage Two become sources of amusement. One becomes less culturally critical, having gained the context that Razorback fans aren't so far removed from Red Sox fans. One comes home from dinner and hears on the news that the Hogs just got beat by Vanderbilt. One finds himself in the middle of the floor, convulsed in laughter that the ever-cartoonish Houston Nutt had just lost to an opponent he had publicly yearned for - owing to its supposed patsiness - a year before. One turns on the radio to listen to the hatefully expressed post-game anger of fans and the ever-trite apologia of Chuck Barrett and Rick Schaffer. I look forward to Stage Four, in which one hasn't any interest left for such matters and is serenely oblivious to whether the team is 12-0 or 0-12. In the space remaining, I'll offer four Stage Three observations on the current ineptitude. 1. Nutt will keep his job because he is likable, apparently; because his players continue to give good and devoted effort, unlike Danny Ford's at the end; and because his superiors can see reasonable hope for improvement with Mitch Mustain passing and Darren McFadden running. 2. Nutt does not deserve to keep the job because he was perfectly willing to run off the last two years and is such a chronic whiner and excuse-maker that he has yet to do what Lou Holtz did after every loss, which was say players win games but only coaches bear responsibility for losses. 3. Nutt does not appear significantly more incompetent than most of the other coaches in the overrated SEC. Phil Fulmer, Les Miles, Mike Shula, Mark Richt - I can't discern that any has much on Nutt intellectually, tactically or strategically. They all get millions only because of Stage One. 4. Only two coaches in the SEC strike me as markedly better than Nutt. One is Steve Spurrier. The other - well, we could have had him when we instead settled on a used car salesman. The second-lowest moment in modern Razorback athletic history came when search committee members like Quinn Grovey and Scott Bull got sold a bill of goods by Nutt and outvoted a storied Razorback quarterback so keenly possessed of brainpower that he went on to eminent business success. That would be Bill Montgomery, who stood alone in wanting to hire Tommy Tuberville. Lowest moment? The rise and fall of Nolan Richardson, of course. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
