It isn’t always an extended spectacle of self-immolation. In fact, mostly when that happens it happens out of town, outside of New York, away from the glare.
Jim Mora famously sang “PLAYOFFS?!?!” in the normally quiet burg of Indianapolis, for instance. Dennis Green’s ode to non-sequiturs — “They are who we thought they were!” — spilled out as he was representing Arizona. And back when Hal McRae nearly rearranged his office (and a few reporters’ faces, to boot) he was wearing the vestments of Kansas City, a pleasant city bursting with pleasant citizens.
Those are all first-ballot enshrinees into the YouTube Hall of Fame, and maybe part of the reason they were so shocking is because they happened in Flyover Land, where managers and coaches don’t exactly endure the equivalent of Senate hearings before and after every game.
Still, it is in New York City when you can sense a manager or a coach is starting to lose his grip, not only on his team but on his job. Rex Ryan channeled Miles Davis for a few moments the other night, turning his back on a media audience, and if we are to use history as our guide — and it rarely leads us astray — then that was the first few syllables of his farewell speech.
You slide off the rails in New York, the rest generally takes care of itself.
Ask Willie Randolph, who 19 months after leading the Mets to within a game of the World Series, thought it would be a good idea to subtly and passive-aggressively suggest the team’s telecasts — and, by extension, team brass — were being hypercritical of him because of his skin color. He lasted another month on the job.
Ask Ray Handley, who was well on the way to one of the most forgettable New York coaching careers anyway, who was never what you would call a fan darling anyway, but who certainly helped hasten his departure by a bizarre refusal to answer questions during an especially testy time in the Phil Simms-Jeff Hostetler rivalry (the more things change …) and then abruptly walked out of the room, a dead coach fuming.
Ask Billy Martin, who was still just a combustible personality and not a cartoon until the instant before he said, “One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”
Ask Bucky Dent, who admitted, sadly, “I have no answers” when asked why his 1990 Yankees were struggling and wound up paying with his job days later.
Ask Dallas Green, who thought it a splendid idea to call his owner “Manager George” and said, “it’s always easier to criticize from above,” and was soon shown the door.
Ask Allie Sherman, who publicly began to melt down after the Giants lost to the Jets in an exhibition game at Yale Bowl in 1969 and never made opening day.
Ask Walt Michaels, whose paranoid rantings after a playoff game in Oakland — a game the Jets won — led directly to his exodus.
You don’t survive that kind of stuff around here. You just don’t. That isn’t to say you can’t engage with the media, or wrestle with the press; it just had better be a part of your personality from the start. Bobby Valentine never pretended that he wanted to make friends with the people covering him, and sometimes that turned ugly. Tom Coughlin was pointedly ordered by his bosses that he’d better be less ornery with the minions. And nobody ever relished the art of media war more than John Tortorella.
For Valentine and Tortorella, such behavior was tolerated as “V being V” and “Torts being Torts” when the winning percentage allowed it to be; it didn’t take long to soil those welcome mats once it didn’t. And Coughlin? Winning over the press was nice. Winning over his own locker room was a lot more important. And winning two Super Bowls … well, that’s not a Giants jacket you see him wearing now so much as a bulletproof shield.
Ryan? For the longest time, it seemed he was inoculated against all this silliness. He seemed to relish the spotlight, and knew how to maximize it. Now? Well, yesterday, he channeled Mark McGwire when asked if he regretted both his ridiculous decision to play Mark Sanchez with the JV and his postgame shenanigans: “What happened in the past,” he said, “you can’t do anything about.”
Consider that the first sentence of his farewell speech, even if it might take five months to complete.