Jim Harbaugh and the vagaries of the workplace

December 30, 2014

Well, it’s official: Jim Harbaugh is off to coach at the University of Michigan, ending a successful if stormy tenure as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.

Harbaugh’s departure – or dismissal, the breakup may not have been mutual – proves what I have long suspected about the workplace: It’s less about what you do than how well you relate to the boss. Sure, the 49ers had a mediocre season (8-8) that kept them out of the playoffs for the first time in three years. But if mediocrity or worse were the real standard, Tom Coughlin wouldn’t be staying on as coach of the New York Giants. And Rex Ryan would’ve been gone from the New York Jets years ago. Instead he and Harbaugh are both exiting at the same time.

There’s also been talk that Harbaugh “lost the locker room,” particularly in his eagerness to get rid of former Niners’ quarterback Alex Smith. But it was clear after the team’s 20-17 victory over the Arizona Cardinals that the Niners went all out to win one for the Gipper, so to speak – to end their season and Harbaugh’s tenure on a high note. Nor would a team led by a temperamental coach who is said to be even more emotional in the clubhouse be likely to award that coach the game ball or shower him with ice water after the game if the members weren’t fond of him. Football players are not actors.

The winter of the Niners’ discontent

December 21, 2014

It’s with a heavy heart that I speculate about the future of my San Francisco 49ers.

How is it that a team that was so strong could become so lackluster with virtually the same personnel that went to the Super Bowl in 2013 and lost to the Seattle Seahawks in the playoffs this year – a game that many considered the real Super Bowl given how badly the Denver Broncos would play against the Seahawks in the actual Super Bowl?

But that was yesterday, and that is sport, as Novak Djokovic likes to say. In life, you’re only as good as your present success, and that’s never truer than in sport where teams mystifyingly rise and fall, sometimes within a season.

What role has Coach Jim Harbaugh played in all this – he of the dad corduroys and the heart-on-his-sleeve temperament? The seeds of his exit may have been sown in 2012 when he sought to get rid of quarterback Alex Smith – at first surreptitiously and then overtly after Smith suffered a concussion and was replaced by Colin Kaepernick, who took the team all the way to the Super Bowl.

Oh, the ironies: The Niners originally chose Smith over his high school rival Aaron Rodgers, who, miffed, went off to the Green Bay Packers – and legend. What if they had chosen Rodgers instead? Would I even be writing this post?

Colin is a mystery even to people like me who adore him. Brilliant, beautiful and hostile to a media that alternately fawns over and taunts him, he spent the off-season giving TMZ ammunition for a false date-rape charge by the company he kept. His curt responses to the local beat reporters, who try to ingratiate themselves as their job success depends in part on the team’s good will, do him no credit and will no doubt earn him no sympathy now that his season has headed south.

More adventures in publishing

December 17, 2014

At the risk of sounding like something out of “Forrest Gump” (“Life is like a box of chocolates”), life is like a skyscraper: You can’t really see it until you step back from it.

I had that sense at the Algonkian Writer Conference I attended Dec. 11-14 at the Ripley Greer Studios on the skirts of Manhattan’s Fashion District. The conference was designed to help writers from all over the country and all walks of life achieve one goal – to be able to pitch their stories to the agents/editors we met in the hopes that they would take them on.

I certainly think our workshop group of 11 professionals, who bonded almost instantly, achieved that goal in the sense that we perfected our pitch letters. What began as something unformed came into focus at the end of four days, thanks in large part to our insightful, sympathetic workshop leader, Susan Breen, who teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. (That she’s also the author of “The Fiction Class” means she not only talks the talk, she walks the walk.) In the process, I learned something about myself not only as a writer but as a magazine editor.

RG III sacked

November 26, 2014

Big pre-Thanksgiving sports news: Robert Griffin III is out at quarterback for the Washington Redskins’ Nov. 30 game against the Indianapolis Colts and Colt McCoy is in.

Head coach Jay Gruden, who has publicly lambasted RG III, made the announcement Nov. 26, so this is not a surprise. But it is a shame. When he blazed across the draft in 2012 – in the same QB class as the Colts’ ascendant Andrew Luck – RG brought an excitement and promise to the beleaguered Redskins. Maureen Dowd even compared him to Mr. Darcy – perhaps the highest compliment from we women of a certain vintage. But now injuries and the sense among some of the team’s Powers That Be that RG has hit a wall have made the Baylor University star’s stock plummet.

I have to laugh – bitterly, but laugh nonetheless. When I was plotting my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” – the second in my series “The Games Men Play” – I wrestled with how psychologically acute it was to create a coach who has no confidence in the team’s quarterback, my main character. I guess I now have my answer. It turns out you can’t make this stuff up.

A flag on the play for John Moffitt

November 7, 2014

Unsettling news out of the Nov. 6 edition of The New York Times, which chronicles the difficult time John Moffitt – whose departure from a $1 million contract as a Denver Broncos offensive lineman was the subject of post on this blog – has had adjusting to “civilian” life.

There were flirtations with writing and standup comedy – all well and good, particularly at age 27. But then came the drinking and the drugs and the possibility of jail time for possession, which was averted.

It’s difficult when you end a career to find the structure the job once provided, particularly when you’re a football player, with all the insular entitlement that implies.

That’s one of the reasons that Quinn Novak – the hero of “The Penalty for Holding,” my forthcoming novel in “The Games Men Play” series – clings to his football career, even though he thinks the brutality on and off the field is killing him. ...