When I think about Bob Wade, the former football and basketball coach of Dunbar High School, Baltimore, I think of the basketball team that kicked butts. The team had Mugsy Bouges, David Wingate, Reggie Lewis, and Reggie Williams. I tend to forget that Wade had a good football team as well. I forget that because my high school was better. :-)
When Coach Wade took over the University of Maryland basketball team after the death of Len Bias, I thought that it was a good move by the University of Maryland and an even better move for Coach Wade. It turned out I was wrong.
Gregory Kane, a conservative columnist for the Baltimore Sun, writes about the contrast of Bob Wade to the current coach of the University of Maryland, Gary Williams. He lays it out plain and clear:
So after Len Bias' death, Wade walked into the loony bin of Maryland men's basketball - and its fans - and no doubt figured he'd stepped into a mine field. No infraction, even minor ones, escaped news media and fan scrutiny. In fact, to hear the reporters and Maryland hoops fans tell it, Wade was something akin to the anti-Christ, only more malevolent.
Among the charges leveled at Wade and his assistant coach, Woody Williams, is that they took a player from Baltimore to classes at the College Park campus. That was considered a scandal. What's not considered a scandal is Chris McCray, a player on this year's team, being banished from the team for poor grades. Or the 0-percent graduation rate since 1998 for the men's basketball team, which was reported in this paper last Friday.
Defenders of Gary Williams, the current head men's basketball coach at Maryland, will point out that he can't be faulted for McCray's academic performance. And they would be right. Williams couldn't very well have sat in the classroom and taken McCray's exams for him. That would have been the scandal of the decade.
But the point here is that if the same situation had happened when Wade was Maryland's head coach, he'd have been criticized for not holding the flunking player's hand through every step of the academic process. And he'd have been crucified for the graduation rate in the men's program. Williams has not only emerged unscathed from any fallout associated with the low graduation rate, but he has seen a hefty $300,000 pay raise to boot.
I don't agree with everything Kane writes. Some things I agree with even though I don't like what he wrote. Some things I agree with and like what he wrote. This is one of the latter.
He's "loved" by the major conservative radio station in the Baltimore metro area. Sometimes I wonder if he's loved because he is the only conservative on the Sun op-ed staff, or because he's a Black conservative, or because of his ideas, or all of the above. But I notice that, lately, his columns aren't being mentioned much by the talk show hosts. I happen to think it is because, lately, he has taken on the Baltimore Police Department's tactic of arresting people for minor infractions like talking to your cousin in a car while you are on the sidewalk.
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