5. The Head Coach who can check off those first four criteria will be qualified to check off this one, too: ascension to the top ranks of million-dollar-plus power leaders. He will then be perceived as a Strong Man, sport's version of the top dogs of global politics.
So how does the president match up with, say, three of the most famous and revered head coaches of his own lifetime?
There was Bear Bryant of the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide, known for his harsh discipline and almost religious passion for "his" school. "If you want to walk the heavenly streets of gold, you gotta know the password, 'Roll, Tide, Roll.'"
There was Woody Hayes of Ohio State who attacked an opposing player during a game and was fired the next day. A military history professor as well as a coach, he's been quoted as saying that the soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre, a 1968 American slaughter of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, killed men who deserved to die "and I wouldn't be so sure those women were innocent. The children are obviously innocent -- if they are less than five."
Finally, there was Joe Paterno of Penn State, a much beloved philanthropist and father figure known as JoePa, whose legend was tarnished by the proven pederasty of one of his assistant coaches. Paterno had known enough, early enough, to stop the man and prevent further abuse. He was fired soon after his 409th victory, a record, and died several months later. His statue on campus was carted away.
And the current crop of top coaches has yet to prove itself any better. This is important because head coaches clearly serve as father figures, cult leaders, models of masculinity -- perhaps particularly to the disaffected millions who see in Trump the strong man who can guide them, speak for them, protect them from everything that seems to be going wrong in their lives.
For those of us who don't quite view him that way, perhaps the only saving grace of the head-coach connection at this moment of the 54th Super Bowl is how easily college and pro teams are willing to dump their coaches when they don't fulfill expectations.
Alas, it doesn't seem to work that way with presidential head coaches. So far.
Robert Lipsyte, a TomDispatch regular, was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Robert Lipsyte
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
