Stanford University -- predictably and cravenly -- attempted to close the scandal of men’s swimming coach Skip Kenney’s doctoring of team records with the announcement that the head of a program with a streak of Pac 10 championships dating back to the Reagan administration has been suspended … for two months of the offseason.
In the ritualistic packaging of contemporary therapy, Kenney also was trundled off to reflect with a counselor in conflict resolution, lest he be tempted ever again to embrace this particular teaching tactic.
Kenney is an ex-Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam who is praised for instilling the individual sport of swimming with unusually strong team bonding, and reviled for a vindictiveness bordering on lunatic. Last month Chronicle reporter Tom FitzGerald broke the story of how the coach had been treating the team’s official history of best times as if it were his personal loyalty checklist.
Jason Plummer, Michael McLean, Tobias Oriwol, Rick Eddy, and Peter Carothers were among the Stanford student- athletes who defied Kenney in various ways over the years; McLean, for example, once exercised his right to take an internship rather than practice full-time in the summer. As a result, they saw their accomplishments erased from the Cardinal record book.
This is significant, first and obviously, because the whole point of sports is objectivity and meritocracy. You don’t need a lawyer to prove that you did a great 200-yard individual medley. You just need a stopwatch operating under meet conditions.
But Kenney’s serious imbecility goes beyond that. You see, there are rules in the National Collegiate Athletic Association -- seemingly as well known in the breach as in the observance -- limiting “voluntary” practices, and the consequences are grave. In football, a player somewhere in the country drops dead every now and again at a “voluntary” summer workout. In addition to the condition called bereavement, this can create horrible distractions for teammates, coaches, boosters, and sponsors.
In the antisocial swamp that so much of American sports has become, we sometimes forget that corruption, warped values, and sick behavior aren’t confined to our most celebrated spectacles. Readers of this space know that I believe some of the most revealing cues aren’t even on the playing field; they come from the coverage of sports by market-grubbers like ESPN, and from entities that technically don’t even fit the definition of sports, such as World Wrestling Entertainment.
In Kenney’s case, we see confirmation that esteemed institutions of higher learning don’t play dirty only in the “revenue” sports of football and men’s basketball. While these may be the prime examples of a fish that rots from the head, there are well-heeled coaches and hacks all the way down the line with an interest in rationalizing and romanticizing a win-at-all-cost ethos. It would be more accurate to say that, at Stanford and on other high-powered campuses, all sports are “revenue” sports, distinguished only by whether they are existing high-revenue sports or wannabe high-revenue sports.
In a wonderful irony, FitzGerald’s Chronicle whistleblower was published days after the newspaper’s Sunday magazine ran a puffy interview with Kenney. The coach talked, plausibly, about his background in team sports and the unlikelihood of his long-term success in swimming, a sport in which he boasts no personal skills. Less plausibly, Kenney maintained that after a quarter of a century as one of the top coaches in the field, he still didn’t know the first thing about basics like time splits. This was roughly the equivalent of a BCS bowl game football coach selling that he couldn’t tell a deep post from a down-and-out.
So maybe that’s how Cardinal swimmers have glided so smoothly through the water all these decades – by slicking themselves down with Kenney’s rhetorical owl excrement. I hereby call for an investigation.
I am not a member of the immediate Stanford community. Nor do I have a stake in the Cal-Stanford rivalry; I couldn’t care less who wins the Big Game or the Big Splash, or for that matter the big scrum for the latest military-industrial complex contract. But I am the father of an 11-year-old club swimmer. And like any sentient observer of this sorry episode, I know how it should, but almost certainly won’t, resolve.
Skip Kenney, that great molder of young men, should get out from behind his handlers and enablers, and take responsibility for what he’s done.
Correcting Stanford’s records in future editions of its media guides is not good enough. The university has a moral obligation to proactively publicize the corrections, and thanks to its deep-pocketed benefactors, the Arrillaga family, it has the resources to make things right. Kenney, athletic director Bob Bowlsby, and president John L. Hennessy should dispatch appropriate apology letters to the victimized swimmers -- and release them to the press and put them up on the web. The new media guide should publish not just the re-re-airbrushed records, but also these apologies. Finally, parallel errata should be inserted into all old media guides in the athletic department archives.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for such a high-minded brand of academic justice. Indeed -- as they say on the pool deck -- you’re well advised to breathe on both sides.