Columnist Dean Juipe: Coaches are held to high standards

Dean Juipe

Monday, May 5, 2003 | 10:01 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Morally reprehensible conduct won't always get you fired.

But it should.

And it did over the weekend in the case of Alabama football coach Mike Price.

Unable to beg or plead his way out of a predicament of his own doing, Price was dismissed as the Crimson Tide's head coach Saturday after the university saw no other solution to an embarrassing problem that surfaced a week ago.

As a supposed leader of young men, Price was obliged to conduct himself in a professional manner at all times. Yet even before coaching a game at Alabama he was caught in a web in which there was no extracting.

His indiscretions were public, they were humiliating and they were subject to a standard that exceeds even that imposed upon the president of the United States. As Price -- and embattled Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy, who's in hot water of his own due to a tangent lapse of judgment -- proves he's not right for the job, it serves as a reminder to everyone who coaches for a living: there are simply things you cannot do, no matter how much fun.

Running up a huge tab at a topless club is one of them. So is allowing one of the girls to order $1,000 worth of food on your credit card.

If your wife doesn't make you pay, your employer will. And those in charge at Alabama had seen enough.

Price was angry as he attempted to apologize and defend himself, yet he had no one else to blame. He had violated an item that's in the fine print of his contract, and, harmless or not, it speaks poorly for a coach to have found himself in such a mess.

He compromised himself and the university, and whether his wife forgave him or not the school was going to make him pay. It exercised a prerogative and let him go, a mere five months after it had paid him handsomely to jump from Washington State.

Price, 57, is now in a mythical stockade that doesn't ensnare every wrongdoer, yet it claims its share. Eustachy, caught smooching with coeds at a campus beer bash, might be next.

Neither is accused of any sexual misconduct and those inclined to defend them inevitably summon the name of Bill Clinton as a reference point. If Clinton can have sex with an intern in his office and keep his job, why, they argue, can't a coach ogle at topless girls and/or drink with the kids at a frat house?

The answer: Clinton may have had a moral duty to conduct himself in an appropriate manner, but when it came right down to it the only person he really had to answer to was Hillary. Price and Eustachy, on the other hand, violated their contracts and are facing an even greater wrath, that of their school's president.

It's hard to sympathize with either one.

Price, in particular, should have been on his best behavior, having just taken the Alabama job. Yet he goes to a golf outing, boozes it up, spends the rest of the day staring at half-naked girls and awakes the next morning to find his credit card is being used to feed everyone still at the club.

Yes, that makes for a heck of a good story. But it will also get you fired.

And it's an example that shouldn't be lost on the men and women who were once among his coaching colleagues.