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It's all right for you to admit you never read Hamlet, because (a) your English teacher was a mope, (b) Shakespeare often reads like someone blogging with elbows, and (c) Hamlet, like Winston Churchill, the gospel of Judas and the atomic weight of cobalt, doesn't come up in conversation all that often anyway.
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| Shortly after his arrival in Fayetteville, Dana Altman makes his exit speech. (AP) |
Altman was the coach at Creighton. Then he was the coach at Arkansas. Then he slapped himself in the face and decided he wanted to be the coach at Creighton again. And everyone lived happily ever after because everyone said yes every time.
Except, of course, Arkansas, which has already had a pretty crummy year despite having a bowl team and an NCAA Tournament team. Some Shakespearians are never satisfied.
Anyway, this isn't really about Dana Altman. Coaches get hot wallets and cold feet about new jobs all the time. It's like they buy a new house, and the final inspection turns up a bag full of severed heads in the upstairs closet. Oops, deal undone.
Actually, this is about Florida coach/king of the world Billy Donovan, who said Tuesday that he has stuff to do until Saturday before he even talks to anyone from Kentucky about the Lexington vacancy. This is a new approach for this sort of thing, where the candidate says, "I'll get to it when I get to it. Keep your pants on."
Now we have no particular interest in Florida, Kentucky or Billy Donovan, except that a man in his mid-40s should probably stop calling himself Billy. He can stay, he can go, he can retire and whittle on his stoop for all the sleep it will cost us.
But we do know this. If at any point, he invokes his family, he should be attacked by angry villagers.
See, one of the things that makes coaching chases annoying is the painful disingenuousness of all parties involved. They are lying to us, we know they're lying to us, and they know that we know they're lying to us. It's a ritual, like the stations of the cross on Good Friday, or checking for the cops before you boost a car stereo.
And the biggest lie of all has always been, "I did it for my family."
As we all know, they almost never do it for the family. The family usually does it for them. John Beilein did not go from Morgantown to Ann Arbor because the wife wanted to open an antique store (and none of the stories we have read indicated that he used the family dodge when he took the Michigan job). Gail Goestenkors hasn't referenced her husband (an assistant on the Georgia Tech women's team) in he decision to go from Duke to Texas.
At least they didn't in any of the stories we saw. Maybe the writers have wearied of the transparent fraudulence of the family excuse and just omit it as a matter of course.
On the other hand, Altman did just that when he finished his tenure at Arkansas with a record of "Oh, my God, what have I done?" Now maybe his wife got one look at Fayetteville and decided, "You can go, but you'll go alone," but that might be unfair both to his wife and to Fayetteville. Either way, you'd have thought his wife would have been contacted and taken on a recon mission to Arkansas before she saw Omaha with new eyes, but again, we're just speculating.
