I have had the good fortune of never running into Mike Garrett once in my four years living at USC. But knowing his practice of avoiding the media types as much as possible, I probably wasn’t the only one.
And I’ve never had the good fortune of Pat Haden, the man replacing Garrett as the new Athletic Director for the Trojans. But I’ve been in a room with him one time. My editor knows what I’m talking about when I say the Evil K – the EVK cafeteria, the place most freshmen too scared of the college experience go to in order to eat. I was so scared of USC I ate there all four years.
I lived at this residential college called Birnkrant all four years – what can I say, I was too scared to move into an off-campus apartment – so the Evil Kitchen was my home-away-from-home-away-from-home. Every Tuesday was this special night where all the guys living in Birnkrant would have one part of the cafeteria all to ourselves and the cafeteria staff would roll out the better food, buffet-style. We had cloth napkins and everything, it was awesome.
Anyway, there would be special “guests” that would come and brave the food
Mr. Haden, however, needed no quotes. I knew who he was. Trojan legend. Co-MVP of the 1975 Rose Bowl victory over Ohio St. Rhodes Scholar. Venture capitalist for a firm alongside former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. USC Trustee. Very underrated color commentator for a long time, including for Notre Dame football on NBC. He got up and spoke about how great it is to be here and hoping everyone is doing well, yadda-yadda-yadda, let’s eat. Seems like a good guy.
So good luck in cleaning up the mess the athletic department has made of our alma mater, sir. In 17 years as overlord at Heritage Hall, Mike Garrett leaves behind a legacy of tarnish that spreads like BP oil in the Gulf. It’s not bounded by the streets on campus nor deterred by the pages of the media guide. It even has the ability to turn back time and stain the Heisman Trophy won by Reggie Bush, the school’s copy of which will be sent back in an effort to wipe its hands of the most electrifying Trojan the program has witnessed in its modern age.
The final corrective won’t be typed up until we see how Haden and new coach Lane Kiffin deal with the punishment the NCAA handed down (read the report here) in regards to the USC football version of a failed Bush administration – the loss of 30 scholarships, a two-year postseason ban, and forfeiture of any wins when Bush was a member of that team. That means vacating the 2004 Mythical National Championship, when ‘SC clubbed Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl, and the entire 2005 season, which culminated in Vince Young’s legendary performance – and for a Trojan fan, might be a good thing.
This whole disaster is rife with irony. Garrett, a man whose silent but vicious methods – I hear he had a particularly cruel way of bleep-canning men’s basketball coach Charlie Parker in 1996 – was supposed to send the message that he had complete control over the athletic program. Yet he’s being replaced as of Aug. 3 for sticking his head in the sand in the face of overt and rampant signs of payments and gifts given to Bush and to O.J. Mayo, major violations that add up to the finding of “lack of institutional control,” which is the real reason USC is headed to the NCAA version of Supermax prison.
Where does that leave the Garrett era? His crowning achievement, the Pete Carroll years, is now entirely ruined. And don’t forget that Carroll wasn’t his first choice, nor even his second; he was Garrett’s fourth choice, after Mike Bellotti, Dennis Erickson, and Mike Riley. A couple coaches that left during Garrett’s tenure have achieved success in other places – baseball head coach Mike Gillespie at UC-Irvine, women’s volleyball head coach Lisa Love, who’s now the AD at (clean so far) Arizona St. And then there’s the litany of bad coaching hires: Rick Majerus, Paul Hackett, Henry Bibby, Chad Kreuter.
At least he finally got the men’s basketball program its own brand spanking new arena, the Galen Center … just as it’s coming out of its own self-imposed penalties in the wake of the Tim Floyd cheating scandal. I was there for the first-ever game USC played there, and I recommend everyone pay a visit. It’s a beautiful place. I’m taking a wild guess here – seats are available.
And don’t forget how Garrett’s going out. The night of the announcement of USC’s castigation on June 11, he was meeting with Trojan boosters in the Bay Area. He read the report, and he honestly said that “between the lines there was nothing but a lot of envy, and they all wish they were Trojans.” How ironic that, on July 1, he sent letters of apology to several schools (Washington, Alabama and Florida among them) for accusing them of making illegal contact with running back wunderkind Dillon Baxter after the sanctions. Knowing his stubbornness, he probably was ordered, either by outgoing USC President Steve Sample or incoming President Max Nikias, to send those letters, like a cocky child forced by his parents to walk up to the front door of the people whose window he broke playing baseball and apologize.
USC fans are implicated in this, too. I’ll bet that despite the ultimate failure of the Garrett years – and trust me, most of us didn’t like him even when Carroll was Saint Pete in L.A. – we’ll look back on the past decade with fondness and even boastfulness. We’ll tell ourselves that the NCAA can never erase the electrifying runs by Bush, the well-oiled offensive machines led by Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, the way ‘SC kicked ass and took names and dominated the Pac-10 and the nation, from our memory banks. Never mind that the NCAA has erased it from their record books; we know what really happened.
Who’s to say USC will find its way back to the mountaintop again, especially if Haden and Kiffin have to walk the line of propriety? The NCAA has gotten its first big smackdown in a long time out of the way and is currently on the hunt for other big programs. SEC Media Days started the day after the announcement of Haden’s hiring, and immediately there have been reports the NCAA is looking into violations by conference schools Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. In case you haven’t heard from SEC fans, the SEC is the best college football conference of all time.
And that brings up the final, sad irony: If there is any truth to these new allegations, the conference of the victors of the last four Mythical National Championships will be in a cloud of suspicion much larger than the one that currently envelopes USC. But it would have been worth it because they won, even if it wouldn’t be “legal” once the NCAA reviews it. So, Haden and Kiffin have the option of cutting corners on their way to the top and hoping they don’t get caught, or keeping the school clean and possibly mediocre for a long, long time. Trojan Nation will be watching. Good luck, Mr. Haden. You’ll need it.