HAZING LOSES, JOURNALISM WINS — AND THE BULLIES STILL DON’T GO AWAY
Pat Fitzgerald lost sight of right and wrong and was dismissed at Northwestern, as he should have been, yet intimidation follows us through life and sometimes looks like toxic workplace harassment
I was a newbie at Ohio University, standing naked in the basement of the Beta Theta Pi house, eyeballed and mocked by two dozen older “brothers” hazing me and my pledge class. Why were we doing this? Why let them throw condiments at us, everything they could find in the kitchen fridge? Why were they making us run up and down the stairs of the building for hours, without water or food or even a breather? Why did we have to lower our heads into a toilet filled with vinegar and, you hoped, tootsie rolls?
We were being tested. I survived the rite of passage, as it was, and I stayed in the fraternity through my senior year only because the sorority parties were good and the meals — when they weren’t being hurled across the room — were better than standard dorm fare. It wasn’t my best decision. But I learned about people — specifically, some of the a-holes who enjoyed tormenting us. Bad actors follow you into life, as I learned in a town such as Chicago, which happens to be the home base of scandalized Northwestern University.
Hazing is subhuman torture. It’s degrading, demented and destructive to the psyche in some cases, such as my freshman dorm hallmate, who had to return home after an anguished stab at Greek life. It served zero purpose in the 20th century and it’s stunning to know it exists in 2023, especially amid the intense scrutiny of major college football in America, even more so at a university that fancies itself as a leader in higher academia. Young people are not bonded by coercive, humiliating harassment. They should be horrified by it and avoid it like, say, feces in a toilet bowl.
Pat Fitzgerald enabled a culture of hazing so repulsive, he was blind to it. He lost his coaching job at Northwestern because of his alarming lack of oversight, a firing demanded in my Sunday morning column and, finally, by a handful of other writers. As reported by The Daily Northwestern, a brave former player exposed a disgusting ritual in the program: A group of eight to 10 masked upperclassmen “dry-humped” younger teammates inside a darkened locker room, punishing them for mistakes in games or practices. That wasn’t all he alleged, in details backed up by a second player who said he experienced the scenes. They were forced to stand at the entrance of a shower room and “basically (rub) up against a bare-naked man” — meaning, an older player. Naked quarterbacks had to take center snaps from naked centers.
Sexual cruelty, again and again.
In my day. And today. Evidently, society has not evolved.
It took the potency of media — reporting by the student newspaper, then our commentary — to alert the masses to the sins in Evanston. A proud moment for campus newsbreakers injected hope into the troubled craft of sports media, and it led university president Michael Schill to take a personally embarrassing but professionally urgent U-turn after he tried to downplay the details last Friday. At first, Schill suspended Fitzgerald for only two weeks without pay, claiming there wasn’t enough evidence to support a stronger penalty. Then came the evidence — first when he spoke to the accuser’s parents later Friday, then in the student paper on Saturday morning, then when he conversed at length with the accuser on Sunday. The timeline for his reversal — regardless of Schill’s excuse that a six-month, school-commissioned investigation was confidential — was dictated by the media and accompanying discussion in Chicago and nationwide.
Next thing you knew, The Daily Northwestern was quoting three ex-players about racism in the program, starting at the top with Fitzgerald, who allegedly ordered Black players and coaches to cut dreadlocks while allowing Whites to wear longer hair. Said a Latino player, Ramon Diaz Jr.: “I didn’t feel like I could be anything other than white. We never felt like we could be ourselves. We had to fit in by being white or acting white or laughing at our own people.” Then came another potential bombshell about the school’s first-year head baseball coach, Jim Foster, accused of bullying and abusive behavior that was reported to Schill and athletic director Derrick Gragg.
This is how outstanding investigative reporting works. Both Chicago papers, gutted by tech incompetence and reduced to irrelevance, were clobbered by the kid journalists a half-hour up the road. This is how it worked when I was writing a Sun-Times column and hammered Northwestern for stalling settlement talks with the mother of Rashidi Wheeler, who collapsed and died on a hot practice field during an unauthorized summer football workout. The years pass, but nothing changes on the shores of Lake Michigan.
“The head coach is ultimately responsible for the culture of his team,” Schill wrote Monday, explaining Fitzgerald’s dismissal in an open letter to the university community. “The hazing we investigated was widespread and clearly not a secret within the program, providing Coach Fitzgerald with the opportunity to learn what was happening. Either way, the culture in Northwestern Football, while incredible in some ways, was broken in others.”
Nothing is “incredible” about a culture that belittles young men, with rituals confirmed by 11 current or former players in the outsourced probe, according to Schill. “The hazing included forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature, in clear violation of Northwestern policies and values,” he wrote, three days after his regrettable original call. And to think the university community actually was divided, with Fitzgerald’s supporters contacting Schill and turning a morality failure into a political exercise. His final decision, he said, came “after a difficult and complex evaluation of my original discipline decision imposed last week on Coach Fitzgerald for his failure to know and prevent significant hazing in the football program. Over the last 72 hours, I have spent a great deal of time in thought and in discussions with people who love our University — the Chair and members of our Board of Trustees, faculty leadership, students, alumni and Coach Fitzgerald himself. I have also received many phone calls, text messages and emails from those I know, and those I don't, sharing their thoughts. While I am appreciative of the feedback and considered it in my decision-making, ultimately, the decision to originally suspend Coach Fitzgerald was mine and mine alone, as is the decision to part ways with him.”
Fitzgerald has hired a lawyer. A better idea: Call a news conference today and explain everything — then file defamation suits against the informants, if he’s serious about his innocence. But the fallout would be uglier when his aim is a bigger severance package. Schill says he made this decision alone, but the university trustees are powerful — including Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz, who didn’t need another scandal after a sexual assault case brought down his hockey club; Patrick Ryan Jr., son of the money man behind the university; Michael Reinsdorf, son of You Know Who; Michael Sacks, who helps keep the Sun-Times wheezing; Mark Walter, owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers; and Michael Wilbon, who has yet to weigh in as an ESPN commentator and should not be serving on a university board. The “life trustees” include people who’ve wielded power in that city and in this country for decades. Fitzgerald is playing the Bob Huggins card, challenging the school to reinstate him. If that can’t happen in West Virginia, it certainly won’t happen in Chicago. What’s done is done, until Wilbon hires the next coach.
“I recognize that my decision will not be universally applauded, and there will be those in our community who may vehemently disagree with it,” Schill wrote. “Ultimately, I am charged with acting in the best interests of the University, and this decision is reflective of that. The damage done to our institution is significant, as is the harm to some of our students.”
All of which makes me wonder why the Big Ten, which is about to welcome USC and UCLA into an expanded superconference, wants anything to do with Northwestern. A league of national powerhouses, in football and basketball, is hellbent to drive TV ratings and attention — and that isn’t happening, even in a vaguely interested Chicago market, if NU has returned to life as a football bottom-feeder. You wonder if the school would have acted had Fitzgerald produced better than 1-8 conference records in three of the last four seasons. The Wildcats can’t come to Los Angeles and play West Coast behemoths only to be slaughtered in the Coliseum and Rose Bowl, which would shame the Hollywood alums who still take pride in the purple. Let’s see who’s hired. Hopefully, not Lovie Smith.
In my Sunday column, I alluded to a former Northwestern football player who had some bully in him when we were Sun-Times colleagues for 13-plus years. As I wrote, Rick Telander wanted to go outside and fight me, for some reason, during halftime of a Bulls game in Washington, which must have amused Al Gore as he walked past. There was the time he admonished me for several minutes at my health club in the north suburbs — don’t worry, clothes were worn — and when I returned home, a blog item on a juvenile website placed me in the same club that night. When I appeared on a local public-affairs show, mainly to talk about Tiger Woods, I was shown a video clip of Telander ripping me for some reason. How old was this man? Sixty?
He had a hard time with his mild relevance in Chicago. I ruled the town. I was on ESPN every day. He was a child about it. I laughed. We called him Biff.
But there was more. Telander tried to intimidate me, as you might expect from a Northwestern football player. He made a fool of himself after Ozzie Guillen, who managed the White Sox then, called me a “f—ing fag” in what became a national story. Telander interviewed the clubhouse attendant and asked if I’d been there lately, which is why Guillen was upset. Well, no, I was away covering multiple national events — I did almost all of them — and, frankly, I was tired of being harassed in the Sox clubhouse through the years. My editors were too busy schmoozing Jerry Reinsdorf to care. Never mind that Tony Phillips engaged me in a back-and-forth volley of “mother f—ers,” a setup that allowed the team’s flagship radio station to blame me in an absurd breaking-news story. Never mind that badass Carl Everett threatened me. Never mind that I found a nail in my tire in the stadium parking lot. Did Telander call me and ask? A good reporter calls and asks. Nah. He wrote a hit piece about me — in my own newspaper. It was so ridiculous, I bought the house a round at O’Callaghan’s and dedicated a toast to him. My response, as I would tell them at The Daily Northwestern or any student operation: Ignore it. Keep doing great work. Keep trying to breathe life into a struggling news business.
I was offered a $1 million contract, a big deal at the time. I signed it. People weren’t happy in the newsroom. Weeks later, after an abysmal website failed us at the Beijing Olympics, I resigned and handed back the fully guaranteed deal. Telander was supposed to go with us to China, but he was told to stay home after the health-club harassment. When I left the paper of my own volition, I was being watched by almost a million viewers a day on ESPN, and circulation at the Sun-Times was 340,000.
Today, the print run is a ghastly 48,000, a far cry from when I was available to 1.3 million media consumers a day. So I figured I’d give the Sun-Times a peek on Monday night, after both Chicago papers were destroyed by the kids. Telander condemned the hazing, as all of us should. But it seems he has a short memory. Does he think it’s normal behavior to challenge a colleague to a fight on press row? Isn’t that workplace harassment?
In the same toxic family as hazing? Do they teach that at Northwestern?
A Chicago media friend thinks Fitzgerald is being set up by the trustees. In that city, corruption never should be ruled out, but in this case, I’ve seen too much holier-than-thou entitlement in Evanston through time to think this is a wicked conspiracy. No, a bunch of kids who thought they were privileged — and could act out as they pleased — were allowed to run pranks by a beloved coach who faced no pressure to win big.
They were just like the hazers back in college.
Only this time, the frat-house president was expelled.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.