Some people need to grow up

Having re-emerged from a four-day submersion into the NCAA Tournament, I’m going to ask for a little bit of indulgence.

The bulk of this newsletter will not be focused upon Seattle sports.

Oh, I’ll include a couple of things:

• The Mariners released Mitch Haniger, which is disappointing but not surprising given a recent shoulder injury. Rowdy Tellez has made the team’s opening-day roster. 

• The Mariners also announced a stand-alone streaming option fans can use to watch all of the team’s games for $19.99 per month. This move warrants an honest and absolutely unsarcastic tip of the cap. The lack of such a direct-to-consumer streaming option is something I had written about earlier.

• The Huskies are still a week away from the start of spring practice, but if you’re hard up for Husky news, here’s a link to the latest podcast I did with Christian Caple.

But I’m going to take a bit of a broader perspective on this Monday morning to talk about the increasing tendency of grown men to act like angry children when faced with disappointing news. I suppose I don’t need to be gender specific. I think this tendency crosses gender lines, but the two instances that I’ll focus on both involve men.

 😭 Sob story 😭 

I’ll start with the most recent one: 

• Dan Hurley, coach of the UConn men’s basketball team.

After his team was beaten by top-seeded Florida on Sunday afternoon, I was surprised at just how mature and downright endearing I found Hurley to be in his post-game interview with CBS’s Tracy Wolfson:

At this point I started to wonder if Hurley has gotten something of a bad rap. He has become rather well known for the overly demonstrative way he coaches. Everything from the way he protests seemingly ever call to the histrionics like falling flat on his back. Earlier this year, television cameras caught him yelling at an official, “Don’t turn your back on me. I’m the best coach in the game.” 

Maybe that was the heat of the moment, though. His in-game demeanor. After all, college-basketball coaches seem to be the one group of people who are still allowed to behave like fire-breathing lunatics over the course of the 40 minutes their team is on the floor.

If – after the final whistle – Hurley is able to summon that kind of perspective, maybe I’ve got him all wrong, I thought.

Then I saw the footage that captured what he said as he walked off the court and into the tunnel leading to the locker room (caution: bad language):

Now, I’m more inclined to think that this is a guy with multiple faces. Not so much a hypocrite as an Eddie Haskell. He’ll be sugary sweet when there’s a microphone in his face, but he’ll be a foul-mouthed and petulant jerk behind the scenes.

I watched all of that UConn-Florida game. It was a really good game. UConn played extremely well, and the reason that Florida won that game was not because of the officiating. It was because Walter Clayton Jr. – who was the best player on the floor – scored 13 points in the final 8 minutes, making three 3-point shots. One of UConn’s best players just missed what would have been a game-tying 3 with 1:29 left.

It was a tremendous disappointment for UConn, which was the two-time defending champ and had won 13 straight postseason games.

It is natural for Hurley and any UConn to feel disappointed. The problem is that he expressed that disappointment in the way that I used to when I was 10 years old. Well, maybe not the exact same way. I wasn’t using F-bombs at that point.

But I was throwing huge fits about the officiating and feeling that any result that didn’t go my team’s way was an affront to all that was holy. Two games stand out in my memory.

The first was the 1985 men’s national championship game between Georgetown and Villanova. I – for a reasons I don’t entirely remember – was a huge Georgetown fan. This was most likely due to the fact my father really liked how tough John Thompson’s teams were. My Pop had also attended a Jesuit high school in Los Angeles, and one of his classmates had gone to Georgetown so that may have played a role.

Anyway, the Hoyas were the top-ranked team that year and after beating St. John’s in the semis, and as they lost to an enormous underdog in Villanova in the final, I absolutely would not stop crying. Wailing might be more like it. At one point, my mom ordered me to get into the bathtub so I could go to bed if I wouldn’t stop carrying on.

At some point, Georgetown got close and my sorrow ebbed for just a moment as I began to entertain the possibility all could be saved only to have the Wildcats pull away at which point the wailing became even more pronounced.

I was 10 years old, and I have a very clear moment of my Mom looking at me with disbelief and saying, “Die a thousand deaths why don’t you?”

I had a similar meltdown the following year after watching the New York Mets lose a regular-season game. I loved the Mets because I loved Gary Carter, and at one point while watching the game, I got so mad that I flung my hat at the television, the bill striking the screen with a surprisingly loud “thonk.”

Nothing broke, but the sound was enough to summon my father into the living room, and he ordered me to accompany him on a car ride where he spelled out just how sad and immature he found my behavior.

Hurley should feel exactly like I did that day: very, very small. 

He should be embarrassed. Not for being mad or feeling upset or even holding a deep-down conviction that his team was hosed by the officials. Anyone who’s ever been invested in a team knows what it’s like to be emotionally, irrationally affected by a result.

Hurley should be embarrassed about is the way he acted on those emotions. For two years now people across the country have been pointing out what an enormous baby he is when things don’t go his way and when his team finally suffers a postseason loss – something that most teams endure every season – he goes stomping off the court about how his team got (forgotten).

He needs to learn how to take an L.

I’ll go a step further. I believe that our country – in general – could use a reminder on the value of maintaining some level of composure in the face of developments that we find to be frustrating and even unfair.

I’m not saying we should just accept it. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t react.

I am suggesting that acting on every emotion we feel might lead us to do something which – in hindsight – will prove both embarrassing and ineffective.

This brings us to our second case study:

• The governor of West Virginia 

I will confess that I was ignorant of this fellow’s name until last week. Then — after the Mountaineers weren’t among the 68 teams chosen for the NCAA field — governor Patrick Morrissey held a press conference in which he used the words “bracketologists” and “quad one wins” to argue that it was an injustice that West Virginia was omitted. He did this while standing in front of a podium with a sign that read, “National Corrupt Athletic Association.” He threatened legal action against the NCAA.

I do not care for the NCAA. At all. I believe it is a cartel that should be illegal. I’ll even concede that perhaps the NCAA was wrong to omit West Virginia from this year’s tournament.

I just don’t think that omitting a team that went 10-10 in the Big 12 justifies the highest elected official in the state behaving like a panelist on a “First Take” unless he’s doing it as a spoof or a gag and I saw no indication that Morrissey was anything other than dead serious.

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies is, “Get used to disappointment.”

This is what Wesley says to Prince Humperdink in “The Princess Bride” after the prince demands to know who Wesley is.

I do believe that there is value in being able to sit with our emotions after we are hit with news that we find to be disappointing, maybe even enraging. It’s why kids are encouraged to count to 10. Let the initial tide of emotion recede just a little bit before you decide what action — if any — you’ll take next.

Sometimes, you don’t have to do anything other. You just need to sit there and hold that loss because that’s what grown-ups do.