Reaction is a sign of our own two faces

By Dan LeBetard ~ Miami Herald

How much shame is enough?

It isn't enough that one wife must pick up the newspaper and see pictures of her drunk husband kissing college girls.

It isn't enough that another wife must read about her husband punctuating a strip club visit with a mystery woman ordering $1,000 of room service the next morning to his room (one of everything, boxed to go).

And it isn't enough the husbands have to explain themselves, privately and publicly, as a laughing nation watches a new reality program being dubbed Coaches Gone Wild.

All the people who get hurt? All the tears of sons and daughters and in-laws and parents who must endure the betrayal, then watch a family secret mushroom into national embarrassment? Not enough.

It isn't enough, either, that today's argument culture feasts gluttonously on these things, Larry Eustachy and Mike Price making the leap from human beings to water-cooler issues on the Internet, talk radio, newspaper front pages and television.

Getting the attention

It isn't enough that one intoxicated evening of indiscretion -- not an illegality, mind you, but an indiscretion -- gets you more coverage than, say, all of Price's 14 good years at Washington State combined.

No, the profound national shame isn't enough.

Now you must pay with your job, too.

Sports, unforgiving and filled with bloodlust, are rapidly turning into Salem.

President Clinton can keep his position despite philandering.

But Alabama's football coach can't.

At least Price, unlike Clinton, never lied about it. But, hey, maybe Price deserves the higher standard. There are people in Alabama who will argue he has the more important position.

Our games have always been disproportionately cutthroat this way, which is how Bill Buckner's excellent 22-year career gets erased by one mistake, but isn't it odd that America's most famous team, the Yankees, would give Darryl Strawberry his 543rd second chance (this time as a minor-league instructor) on the day Alabama wouldn't allow Price his first?

Having it both ways

It's hard to turn Eustachy and Price into martyrs given their self-inflicted stupidity. Eustachy, a mercenary coach in the Bob Huggins mold, makes for an especially unsympathetic victim. But the intolerance of their employers is staggering, especially given that the Iowa State program seeking to dismiss Eustachy is the same one that forgave its present football coach, Dan McCarney, for admitted domestic abuse.

That's far more serious than Eustachy partying with college kids, but perception drowns out reality. Eustachy's crime was being photographed, then syndicated, bringing his school national shame. He could have survived a DUI but not one with accompanying photographs. Rest assured, if there were photos of McCarney beating his wife, he'd be out of a job, too.

The lesson here: If you are a coach, do as many bad things as you like in private. Just don't get caught doing one in public. It is a lesson that can be taught by everyone from Gary Moeller to George O'Leary, perhaps in the same fictitious classroom where Jim Harrick's kid taught the principles of coaching.

But, contrary to what these college presidents think, dismissing Eustachy and Price isn't brave or tough. Standing behind them is. It's easy to cut your losses now, turning a nation's ridicule into a spotlight for how your institution won't stand for this kind of thing.

There is no courage in taking another man's job to make yours look better.

Especially not at Iowa State, where the president signed off on making Eustachy the highest-paid state employee and didn't mind lowering academic standards by allowing him to keep bringing in junior-college thugs in the name of win-at-all-costs. You won't find the difference between the Eustachy who got that pay raise and the unemployed Eustachy in those drunken photographs. You'll find it in the standings, where he finished ninth in the conference last season and had lost his last 17 league road games.

Eustachy knows the value of perception, too. That might explain why he suddenly decided, after days of silence, to finally come forward with a news conference just hours after being informed by his athletic director that he was going to be fired.

America loves a good confession. So there was Eustachy, wife at his side, claiming alcoholism and throwing himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion. Gone was the slick hair and black turtleneck he wears 365 days a year, replaced by glasses you never see him wearing.

You hate to be cynical about these things, especially given how terrible alcoholism can be, but Eustachy looked and sounded more like a man trying to save his job than a man seeking help. Eustachy wasn't smart enough to realize his alcoholism while partying with college kids but was smart enough to be enlightened about it miraculously upon the publishing of those photos? Maybe that's because the I'm-sorry-I-need-help angle works a lot better with a rehab-friendly America than the woohoo-I-party-with-college-girls one.

As for Price, he is by all accounts a good man who did a bad thing, but save us the righteous indignation about him being married. You think only single guys keep strip clubs profitable? A good portion of the people in there are married. A good portion of the people are in there because they're married.

Does a coach at an institution of higher learning have an obligation to stay away from frat parties and strip clubs -- places that are legal to everyone around him?

Well, he does now.

It isn't fair.

But neither is the fact that, on top of his national shame, Price is unemployed today, one mistake erasing a lifetime of good work.

Dan LeBetard is a sports columnist for the Miami Herald.