Posted on: Monday, January 12, 2004
ISLAND VOICES
Warrior image out of control
By Russell Motter
"Hey, Russ, your boys are little out of control out there, huh?"
That's what I heard while making my New Year's Day telephone calls to the Mainland.
This observation should concern us here in Hawai'i, not just because there was another fight at the end of a football game, but because the image our football team currently projects reflects poorly on our university and our people.
June Jones returned to Hawai'i to revive a failing football program. And, indeed, he has breathed new life into that program. But that revival seems to have exacted a price: sportsmanship.
Jones calls his team the Warriors, and he has defined himself as their chief. They wear black uniforms adorned with "tribal" tattoos, ostensibly symbolizing a "warrior spirit." But the taunting and showboating that Jones' players have increasingly exhibited reveals the banality of his approach.
Jones has replaced a tradition of aggressive, tough-nosed, team-oriented play with a brash, strutting, me-oriented brand of football that mirrors some of the worst of what we see these days in collegiate and professional athletics.
Locally, questions about the image of the football team have been percolating all season, perhaps even since last year's Cincinnati game. After the UNLV loss, it looked as though Jones saw this trend and publicly chastised his team's lack of unity and discipline, pointing out several players who took the field with messages taped to their helmets. In retrospect, one wonders if it was the lack of sportsmanship that upset Jones or the lack of a "W" in the win column.
Some, notably the radio voice of the Warriors, Bobby Curran, have criticized ESPN's coverage of the fight after the Hawai'i Bowl. On his radio show Dec. 29, Curran agreed with Jones, who phoned in to complain that the media had overreacted in its coverage of the fight. But who could blame ESPN's coverage given the ad campaign that featured close-ups of Jones' handpicked mascot, Vili the Warrior, taunting prospective enemies to "Bring it on" Christmas Day?
The melee served up by the two teams after the game was merely icing on a cake that had been baking for some time.
In his remarks on Curran's show, Jones continued to defend himself and his players' conduct by blaming the officials for letting the game get out of hand and a Houston player for throwing the first punch. More disturbingly, Jones drew the invidious comparison between the media's coverage of the fight and the story of the American soldier now under scrutiny for firing his gun into the air to scare off what he believed were hostile elements in a crowd of Iraqi citizens. Jones condemned the media's coverage of the story and characterized the soldier's actions as heroic. To compare the seriousness, the deadliness of a real battlefield with what happens on a playing field indicates that Jones is a man of inflated self-importance and distorted perspective.
Jones has said that talk of the fight will fade and what will be remembered is the excitement of this game. Let's hope not. The incident offers Jones and the public a chance to take stock of the university's football program.
June Jones needs to rethink the culture he has created for our state's football team. Winning should not come at the expense of sportsmanship and certainly not at the expense of our state's image.
Russell Motter is an advanced-placement history teacher at Iolani School.
