Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

Perhaps we all would feel better about how the war in Iraq was going if, rather than the Bush administration, someone like legendary college football coach Lou Holtz had been in charge of preparation.

Holtz is notorious for spending the week before a game building up his team's opponent, making perennial powerhouses and punching bags alike sound like the second coming of the 1985 Chicago Bears. In fact, Holtz's poor-mouthing was inversely proportional to the quality of foe. Sports writers crack each other up with their imitations of "Boo-Hoo Lou," delivered in a mush-mouthed, Elmer Fudd-ish drawl, with a hangdog tone that sounds like the dry cleaner ruined his shirts, again, on purpose. "You know, those Little Sisters of the Poor, they're pretty darn tough." (At this point, Holtz takes off his baseball cap and rubs his forehead like he's got a massive migraine.) "If we don't concentrate, who knows what'll happen? I just don't know if my team is ever gonna be ready."

Of course, what Holtz knows is that if his team and its fans are overconfident going into a game, there's a real chance the Little Sisters of the Poor could put a whuppin' on 'em. And his technique works: Generally, Holtz's teams do not lose to inferior squads.

Contrast that with the Bush administration's run-up to war, in which it was stated over and over that the US-led coalition would, no question, remove Saddam Hussein from power. Yet now the military — at least the part of it actually doing the fighting — is reporting that the perceived easy roll into Baghdad has turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated.

Or perhaps we would feel better if someone like Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Jon Gruden, rather than the Bush administration, had been in charge of preparation.

Gruden, coach of the Super Bowl champions, is an extreme workaholic, even by the definition of his profession. Gruden is famous for his Chucky scowl on the sideline. But he's risen to the top of his profession quickly by working insane hours — he arrives at his office at 3:30 a.m. — to devise meticulous game plans for the week ahead. Win or lose, Gruden's teams can never be called unprepared for whatever eventuality may come forth. In preparing for the Super Bowl against the Oakland Raiders, a team he had coached the previous year, Gruden drilled his players so well on the Raiders' tendencies that Bucs safety John Lynch was caught on camera saying, "Every play they've run, we've run in practice."

But in the Bush administration's war preparations, which included a full-scale reconstruction of the Kuwait-Iraq border and dress-rehearsal invasion, there appears to have been no playing out of every possible Iraq scenario. What happens if the Iraqi army doesn't lie down? What happens if its citizens don't rise up against Saddam Hussein? What happens if Iraqi citizens and the Arab world, seeing Saddam as a lesser evil to the United States' Great Satan, join the fight? Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a man with his own "Chucky" scowl, is warning Syria not to send Iraq supplies. Or what? Will the United States bomb that country, too? A fair number of people in the Bush administration, include Rumsfeld, used to be chummy with Saddam, so it's not like they should be surprised by anything he'll do. And yet, there was Lt. Gen. William Wallace in the New York Times and elsewhere as the anti-John Lynch, complaining of an enemy that was "different from the one we'd war-gamed against."

Maybe we'd feel better about the war's progress if any coach who understands playing in front of unfriendly crowds — pretty much all of them — had stopped by the Pentagon.

Coaches know instinctively that playing on the road means the likelihood of hostile crowds. The enthusiastic support that can help inspire great performances at home isn't there. That's why you hear coaches talk about a strategy of taking the crowd out of the game. Rather than talk smack or showboat or do anything to incite a venomous crowd into a greater frenzy, coaches set up plans to make sure that their teams shut up and play to get off to a good start early, sapping the crowd's enthusiasm. A quiet crowd doesn't help the home team; ergo, its major advantage has been taken away, and the visitors' chance of success goes up considerably.

But the Bush administration has alienated almost every friend the United States has had. The administration's arrogant air has created divisions within its own ranks, as well as further incited the Arab street, which wasn't necessarily sympathetic to Saddam in the first place. And now Iraq is calling for acts of terrorism against US interests within its own borders and inside America itself, and there's no shortage of potential recruits worldwide.

Many coaches have studied military history and strategy — including Holtz, a member of Army ROTC in college — and folded what they learned into how they run their programs. Sometimes, you wonder if the Bush administration should have studied sports history and strategy, and folded what it learned into how it runs its program.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.