Mangino is an abusive bully
By JASON WHITLOCK
The Kansas City Star
Reducing the Mark Mangino controversy to a “poke in the chest” is an exercise in denial and/or naïveté.
Defenders of Mangino want to cast Kansas linebacker Arist Wright as a wimp and a Judas for complaining that Mangino allegedly shoved him in the chest during a practice confrontation. Simple-minded tough guys want to laugh off Wright’s allegation because football is a brutal game and coaches should be allowed to push and shove their players within reason.
The defenders and the tough guys can’t see the big picture.
Mark Mangino is an abusive bully. He’s been one from the moment he stepped on campus at Kansas. He used bully tactics to build a winning football team in 2007 and intimidate anyone on campus who dared to stand in his way.
I don’t really have a problem with bullies. They’re effective and many times their ends justify their means.
Abusive bullies are dangerous, and leaders of institutions and members of the media have an obligation to stand up to them.
There’s a reported and unreported pattern of abusive, out-of-control behavior attached to Mangino’s eight-season tenure at Kansas.
On Wednesday, the Lawrence Journal-World reported on Mangino’s profanity-laced run-in with the parking police on ku’s campus. The police repeatedly ticketed Mangino for parking in a loading zone next to his old office. Mangino didn’t like it and berated one of his ticket-givers.
I’m not going to belabor the point I made in my column Wednesday, but you can surmise the primary reason Mangino illegally parked next to his office day after day.
Also on Wednesday, a former Kansas running back, Jocques Crawford, tweeted that he left the ku football program because he couldn’t deal with Mangino’s mentally and physically abusive coaching style.
You can, if inclined, dismiss Crawford’s complaints, too. Crawford quit the team. You can say he wasn’t tough enough to make it at ku. That’s the culture of football and the culture of men. We’re not supposed to complain. We’re supposed to treat everything that doesn’t kill us as something that makes us stronger.
There’s an element of truth in the latter. But there’s also a lot of truth in this: Some coaches go way too far and need to be shut down before they embarrass themselves and the institution they represent. Some coaches cross the line from tough love to mean-spirited nastiness because they’re too lazy or simple to try anything else.
How many on-the-record stories must surface about Mangino before intelligent people conclude there is a serious problem? Do you think it was easy for Wright to come forward? A male athlete verbalizing his concerns about abuse from a coach is nearly as difficult as a woman reporting a date rape.
It’s just a poke in the chest. She must’ve asked for it.
From his problem with his son’s high school refs to his problems retaining assistant coaches to his difficulty treating parking police with respect, Mangino sounds like the football version of Bobby Knight.
Indiana University should’ve dealt with Knight’s anger issues long before he was captured on tape chopping one of his players in the neck.
You can coach football and basketball at a high level without treating young people like they’re lab animals unworthy of common respect.
I went through the Mangino experience my first two years as a football player at Ball State. I was immature, cocky and clueless about the effort required to compete at the Division I level. My position coach, Dave Magazu, tried to shame me into competing at a higher level. He was verbally abusive. I hated him. I still do. He left for a new job, and my new position coach, Lawrence Cooley, tried a completely different approach. He befriended me. He still yelled and screamed and coached hard. But he did it with respect. It worked. I played better and helped the team the next two years.
But I never loved the game after Magazu. I couldn’t get past the fact that my head coach, Paul Schudel, showed more respect to the obvious steroid cheats and bad characters. I didn’t play my fifth year because I wanted to write for the school newspaper more than I wanted to play a game I no longer loved.
Kansas can do better than the current Mark Mangino. And, as I said in my Wednesday column, Mark Mangino has far more to offer a major university after he addresses all of the problems causing him to coach and represent ku in an undignified manner.
