Forgive and Forget

It’s astonishing. Every spring, round about May Day, the world remembers to wake up. After months of cold and barren winter, the ground softens, the sun rises a little higher, the grass greens, the crotch-rockets line up around Lake Calhoun, and we’re back on our way—resurrected and ready to join the parade. The Midwestern memory is a funny thing. It’s often connected to morality, and it’s a function of our nordic demeanor. One of the dirty little secrets about Minnesota Nice, which is really just a smiling variety of stoicism, is its corollary. We’re nice to a point—a point way beyond reason, as a matter of fact. But once you’ve crossed that line, you will never be forgotten or forgiven.

Brenda Oldfield crossed that line. In March, the puffed-up former Gophers basketball coach was poached by Maryland—a superior basketball program at what is otherwise one of the nation’s most ignorable schools. Last year, she arrived in the Twin Cities with a powerful hairdryer, lots of empty language about dream jobs, and a mantra of absolute loyalty. And then she left on the same platform. She turned tail and sold her wares to the highest bidder. She now joins the infamous ranks of Norm Green, Chuck Knoblauch, Lou Holtz, and everyone else who ever violated our sense of decency and loyalty. Her next appearance in the Barn should be a real hoot.

For some reason, we Minnesotans find it easiest to hate sports figures. Even our most deplorable, self-serving shysters—the politicians—are forgiven and forgotten without a second thought. Brian Herron and his cronies aren’t hated so much as pitied. Rod Grams is the butt of a few harmless jokes, but no one wastes any energy actually despising the poor duffer. John Grunseth? You don’t even remember him, do you.

If you forget, then there’s no need to forgive. When Mark Yudof announced a few weeks ago that golf and men’s gymnastics may be released from the University’s stewardship, we had mixed feelings. Golf is not a sport. It’s a game, and we say good riddance. In the grand scheme of things, it belongs somewhere between bowling and billiards. Men’s gymnastics, on the other hand, is one of the most noble amateur sports, dating back to the cradle of democracy in Greece 2,500 years ago. The U of M’s program is 100 years old.

Although Gopher gymnastics coach Fred Roethlisberger is kind of a pushy jerk, we’ve excused him. We realize you don’t rise to this level in college athletics without being a pushy jerk. It’s the nature of the business, and we can’t think of one Gopher coach we’d actually sit down with and have a beer. (When Gophers coaches rallied round a podium last month to fight the cuts, it frankly gave us the willies seeing so many elastic waistbands in one room.) But with these venerable traditions lying in the dust, folks will quickly forget about Fred, even though his bullying ways have produced dozens of national champions and All-Americans in his 30-year career.

Fred undoubtedly feels like a martyr. Why couldn’t they pick on, say, J. Robinson, the belligerent coach of men’s wrestling who has been bad-mouthing Title IX for years? The coach who has been complaining that equal funding for female sports is anti-male? His would be a more perfect martyrdom, since these sacrifices never would have been made in the Good Old Days. Robinson can neither forget nor forgive Title IX, despite the fact that it clearly hasn’t prevented his wrestling squad from capturing its second straight national championship.

May Day is a holiday with long traditions among pagans and the proletariat—the kinds of people who, incidentally, make good college coaches. But memory is a powerful, two-edged thing. Here in Minnesota, where memory is indelible and forgiveness is rare, the Maypole might easily be mistaken for the whipping post. And some deserve the lash more than others.