Former Columbia Head Coach Jim Garrett died Friday night at the age of 87.
His incredible career and life are being nicely detailed in many obituaries across the football and regular news media platforms.
Every one of them is making a point of hardly mentioning his tumultuous one season at Columbia.
Like many longtime Columbia fans, my impressions of Garrett have changed over the years. Thanks to the many conversations I've had with his former players, I believe I've come to a better understanding of the man and his ultimately failed mission at CU. I also think it's clear that what Head Coach Al Bagnoli has done at Columbia over the past three years proves a point about what Garrett faced 30 years earlier.
Garrett was brought in as a radical new hire prior to the 1985 football season. Hiring him was seen as a long-delayed move by an administration that had been historically apathetic or hostile to football for decades. Finally, there seemed to be a commitment at the top.
That commitment lasted all of one game. After blowing a 17-0 halftime lead in the season opener against Harvard, Garrett lashed out at his players in the post game news conference. He singled out the starting punter for poor game play, (the stats didn't show it), and made the famous quote that his players played "LIKE drug addicted losers."
I put "like" in all caps because Garrett was almost universally misquoted as saying the team "was a bunch of drug addicted losers."
Garrett was allowed to finish the season, but he was effectively fired after that one game. In his memoirs, then-Columbia President Michael Sovern wrote that he knew firing Garrett would hurt the football program and the positive direction he was likely to send to, but that the school just could not stomach that kind of intense bad publicity connected to athletics.
Not surprisingly, Garrett's players felt differently. Almost all of them had bought in to the radical changes he wanted to make. All these years later, they still feel that way.
What Garrett was really up against was an administration that didn't want to make even minor and ephemeral sacrifices to save the football program's reputation. This was the case until President Lee Bollinger finally made the great move to hire Athletic Director Peter Pilling and then green light Pilling's bold hiring of Bagnoli.
I see Bollinger's shift in policy as more praiseworthy and impressive than the same move coming from a new president. New people like to make sweeping changes, but Bollinger did this after being on the job almost 15 years. He learned from a mistake. That's less common.
Bagnoli's media skills are a million times better than Garrett's. So his chances to survive have always been better. But the point is he also was forced to make radical changes. The difference is that he's also dealing with an administration that isn't afraid of one bad quote in the New York Times... or at least it wasn't when it made the bold Pilling and Bagnoli moves.
I know many Columbia fans still feel negatively about Garrett. But they really shouldn't. He wasn't the problem. The administration was the problem, and Garrett just proved it beyond much of a doubt.
Anyone who really knew Garrett will also tell you he was a really good person. He challenged his players and was intense in a football setting, but never abusive. And in life, he was a true gentleman.
It would be fitting that while Columbia Football sees the reputation of its program recovering, we also see to it that Jim Garrett's reputation in the Columbia family also rises to a fair level of respect and understanding.
9 comments:
The Big Man was loved by nearly all of us. We had a players only vote right around the same day he was fired and it was something like 55-5 in favor of keeping him. He was a character and we would have started winning that next year had he stayed. Jason, John and Judd would have all graduated with CU degrees and we would have had an Ivy title by 1990.
What made it all the worse was that the school went out and hired that fraudulent, dishonest creep that succeeded him
Beautiful revelation, Jake, thank you.
Garrett had tumultuous coaching endings at Susquehana University, CU, and Milburn NJ HS, although Susquehana subsequently named a sports complex after him.
Few people think of it this way. The CU mark of Jim Garrett the coach is he was 0 and 10. The CU mark of Jim Garrett the man is he couldn't stand up and say he was the man responsible for players acting like drug addicted losers. Good men blame themselves and find a way to correct the problem. Garrett blamed players and couldn't find a way to correct the problem.
He deserves the same reputational respect as other terrible coaches at CU.
Garrett publicly humiliated a player. That was a firing offense. And rightly so. He should have been fired that Monday.
For what its worth he told us that he he was misquoted. He said he told the media that that we were addicted to losing just like an addict is addicted to drugs. When adversity would strike we did not know how to stop it and finish off the game. Nobody liked what he said about Murph, that was wrong... But the vast majority of us did not want him fired.
I agree he made egregious errors in PR. However, he also honestly spoke his mind, was liked by the players, and was set to deliver the ass-kicking and wake-up call which was needed well before and since.
His demise was more an example of PC concerns by an overly PC-sensitive and timid administration with zero insight into athletics and its importance to long-term alumni loyalty and support.
One can only imagine what he would have done with his expertise and the presence of his three outstanding kids on our team, who all played in the pros. Another blown opportunity
An insightful assessment. Thank you.
Mitch S 68CC
Jake....good post. I was a student in the middle of the Sovern era.....very little doubt he held little to no support for Football. My freshman roommates were players and used to tell me the conditions in which they practiced. Some said less than their high school facilities back then.
IMHO, Sovern was a classic Columbia nerd f'up whom I'll never forgive for selling a large chunk of uber-valuable and scarce real estate at Baker. As it happens, I remember having practice on that chunk while on the lightweight football team and the Columbia Lacrosse Club.
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