No innocent construction
Cancelations start by ruling out the possibility of goodwill. That is especially easy in sport, a culture that is superficially familiar but profoundly foreign to most people.
“my hips are so tight/sore”: text sent by a teenage female athlete to a mid-40s male coach.
It gets worse. A few weeks prior, the coach texted her: “Are you 18?”
Between those two messages, amongst others, the athlete thanked the coach for a gift he gave her.
The first two don’t require much creativity to read in the worst way possible. The third might not be a red flag for people unfamiliar with the proscriptions of “safe guarding,” but gift giving is frequently construed as a grooming behavior. The US Center for SafeSport, for example, lists “the exchange of gifts” as a “boundary violating coaching behavior” and a potential element of an “intimate relationship.”
I’m the coach in those texts. In the wrong hands, they end my career and maybe my life. Each is benign. But if truth and context mattered, there wouldn’t be cancelations.
“No Innocent Construction” was the other finalist for the name of this site.
“No innocent construction” is an element of defamation law in many states. It first came to my attention in Brian Holzgrafe’s defamation suit against Daniel Lozier. Holzgrafe was the head men’s and women’s tennis coach at Quincy University in Illinois. Lozier, who had been on the men’s team, accused Holzgrafe of having a sexual relationship with a female tennis player on the team. Illinois defamation law and Illinois Supreme Court precedent hold that a statement, considered in context, is not defamatory per se “if it is reasonably capable of an innocent construction.”
Holzgrafe won the suit, and was awarded $3 million in damages.
Upholding the verdict, a federal judge ruled that there is “no innocent construction” of the accusations Lozier made against Holzgrafe.
Most cancelations turn on statements and actions that have a spectrum of constructions: some innocent, some absurd, some cringe-worthy, some malevolent, some criminal.
Context normally rules out most of the latter two. But context is more than just what was said before and after the statement in question, or who else was around, where, and when. There’s a cultural context, too, and that is why sports people—coaches in particular—are such easy targets: competitive sporting environments are exclusive, and therefore unknown and truly foreign to most people.
Coaching the person, not the player
Most people’s impressions of coaches are formed by some combination of “Varsity Blues,” “Miracle,” “Ted Lasso,” and their history-teacher-baseball-coach from high school. As someone who has inadvertently become a valuable red cell sounding board recently texted me, “90% of my regrets in life boil down to me not realizing how little consequence there would have actually been if I just told my sports coaches to f--k off when I was a kid.”
Contrast that to a story a friend shared with me:
At the team camp before the 2015 World Championships, I went into the dining hall early one day to work. My roomie for the camp, a full-time employee of the federation, was FaceTiming with one of his athletes who was competing on a different continent before coming to join us. I looked at him like I was going to leave, but he waved me to sit down. I could hear the entire conversation.
...
When they were saying goodbye, I heard her say “I love you, best friend.” And he said “I love you, too, best friend.”
Grooming, power imbalance, intimate relationship, Coach Svengali levels of control... Anyone on the outside who heard that call could understandably think the worst, take it to the media or a safe guarding organization, who would make it even worse than that, and use it to end the coach’s career, reputation, and life. If anyone knew that my friend had heard the call and not fulfilled his duty as a mandatory reporter—even if he had nothing more than an ungenerous suspicion based on a fragment of a phone call—they could end him as well.
Here’s the immediate context, which I removed above:
She was distraught—long time on the road, hadn’t competed well, had a huge trip to join us—and then started bawling. He talked her down and they came up with a plan.
And the broader context, given my friend’s decades in elite sport:
I think it was an interaction between two adults who had been working together for years in high stress, lonely circumstances.
It wasn’t a regular occurrence for me, but it wasn’t uncommon, either. I could come up with more than a dozen athletes, men and women, who said “I love you” at some point. Usually post-collegiate athletes, usually getting the shit kicked out of them on the road, sometimes going through extreme family / relational stress.
Innocent construction vs. absolute malice
A coach sent a player a picture of himself from the waist down, wearing cut-offs with the caption, ‘Joining?’” The player responds “I’ve outgrown my Jean shorts :/ legs too big,” to which the coach replied “Booo.”
About a year earlier, David Huelsman was coaching the Gators’ men’s water polo team. The team was in Providence, Rhode Island, for a competition and was killing time in a thrift store. Someone had the idea that they should all buy pairs of cheap jeans and cut them into jorts to wear on the pool deck before taking the water for their first game. They all did, they all had a laugh, the other teams had a laugh, and it became the sort of silly memory and inside joke that bonds teams together.
The Gainesville (FL) Main Street Daily News omitted this backstory, but did include another uncorroborated jort-related allegation from the player. The article presented a single, extreme construction to lead the readers to a single conclusion.
If someone who was not on the trip had leaked the “jort texts,” someone who didn’t know that everyone on the team participated and everyone at the pool saw the Gators’ jorts (before seeing much more of the Gators when they removed the jorts to begin play in Speedos), their sense of concern might lead them to suspect the worst and take action accordingly.
This would be the standard move from “The Cancel-Your-College-Coach Playbook”: “vague allegations brought forth anonymously, then interpreted in the worst possible light via a steadfast refusal to interrogate context, culture, or professional best practices.”
That is not what happened here. A player who unequivocally knew the truth purposefully gave an absurdly malicious—and, knowing the full context, likely homophobic—version of specific events to the media.
There are two possible constructions of the article itself. First, the journalism student who wrote this article—his third about David Huelsman—is the only person close to the University of Florida men’s water polo team who did not know the backstory behind these texts. Alternatively, he knew and willfully chose to omit it from his reporting, at the expense of the truth and David Huelsman’s career and reputation.
Neither is particularly innocent, but neither would end the reporter’s career as effectively as he ended Huelsman’s.
Chew on this: Cancelations collapse reality
Schroedinger’s Cat is a famous thought experiment in physics, one that reached escape velocity and took hold in pop culture as early as the 1970s.
A cat sits in a sealed box with some radioactive material, and a radiation detector connected to a vial of poison. When the material lets off some radiation, the detector breaks the vial of poison, killing the cat. But radioactive metals don’t decay at a regular, predictable rate. We can not know if the cat is dead unless we open the box. But the lid is also connected to the vial: if you open the box, the cat dies immediately.
So if you take a look, was the cat dead or did you kill it by looking?
A coach who asked to remain anonymous in case of future legal or administrative action told me this story:
“A staff member had this quirk about how it was bad luck to take the last stick of gum in a pack. She once offered me a stick of gum, and when I said, no, thanks, she hesitated. ‘I don’t want to open it, because if there’s only one stick then that’s bad luck for me.’
“I said, ‘If you were given a pack of gum that might or might not have one stick in it, the gum would exist in a state of existence and non-existence at exactly the same time. It would be Schrodinger’s Gum.’ Some time later, I put some paperwork on her desk along with a pack of gum with a Post-It note that said ‘Schrodinger’s Gum.’
“That came out in the university’s investigation into me. They confronted me with it, looking for some sexual interpretation of it. ‘What did you mean by this?’ It’s a joke, I said. Schrodinger’s Gum.
“’I have no idea what that means.’
“Erwin Schrodinger. The German physicist.
“’I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
“Well, it’s one of the most famous thought experiments in all of science. It’s about this cat in a box, and he’s alive or not until there’s a deterministic event.”
“’I’ve never heard of that.’
“She got on my case, and I said ‘How is it possible that you’ve never heard of that? I just don’t understand how you don’t know who Erwin Schrodinger is. How is it you’re this stupid?’ Yes, I was being a bit of a dick and I probably shouldn’t have said it because it pissed her off, but come on.”
This incident happened while this coach’s cancelation was still in the “internal inquest” stage, before the media took over. He had some sense of the distortion and disconnection from reality involved in such incidents. But things hit differently in the first person. “At that moment, it became clear to me how batshit things were. One of the reasons I pushed back was my disbelief that this could be a thing.”
Schrodinger used his cat not to explain how the universe works, but to expose the contradictions and absurdities that had gained traction in his field of quantum theory.
Schrodinger’s Gum does both: it illustrates how cancelations work by exemplifying uncontested absurdities and irrationality. This coach’s inquisitors could not conceive of an innocent construction because they couldn’t process his words at face value. They lacked all context, so they presumed malevolence. Their ignorance was proof of his guilt.
Quantum of solace
“Why them and not me?” is the fundamental question of survivor’s guilt.
The vast majority of coaches—myself included—have done the vast majority of what got other coaches canceled.
Let’s return to the texts from the beginning of this article. “my hips are so tight/sore” “Are you 18?” “thanks for the gift”
The day before her hips were “so tight/sore,” we did a training session with a high volume of new exercises, emphasizing eccentric muscle activity in the adductors. She is a centerback in soccer, a position that requires kicking the ball 40+ yards repeatedly during a game, so this was highly specific training. For additional context, we did the training outdoors, mid-morning, at a public school’s track next to a fire station: lots of old people walking laps, and a building full of burly, sworn-to-protect men.
“Are you 18?” Yes, she was. That meant I could use a guest pass for her later that week at the gym I belong to, in order to introduce her to some weight-lifting exercises and techniques she would likely see in college and when playing professionally.
As for the gift, a high school graduation present.
Three texts, three innocent constructions.
Why did I not get canceled for them, while so many other coaches were canceled for similar things? Why do I still get to have these rich and rewarding experiences, and they don’t?
Is it simply because this athlete and I (and now you beautiful, understanding people) were the only ones to read these texts?
Maybe others did, and even if they were unsure and had a bit of side-eye, they gave them an innocent construction because they know me, her, and what the coach-athlete relationship really is.
Schrodinger wasn’t comfortable with some of the conclusions of quantum theory. His colleague Albert Einstein didn’t like some of its implications. “God does not play dice with the universe,” the latter wrote.
Part of maturing as a sports person is recognizing the role of random chance—luck—against the backdrop of rigorous preparation. Coaches accept that a fluke goal or a freak injury can determine your season, or whether you keep or get a job. Tragically, we now rely on luck to not get canceled for doing our job by people who know nothing about our job and the relationships it entails and requires.
Every act of coaching has become another roll of the dice.
I’ll keep doing it until my luck runs out.
Related:
The Cancel-Your-College-Coach Playbook (James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal)
Call Her Lawyer: Costs of Cancelation Rising for the Accusers (The American Thinker)
First draft, final word: Cancelation, narrative foreclosure, and counter-narrative (Abuse of Process)
Photo credit: From The Garden of Schrodinger’s Cats, Jeroen van Luin / Flickr under CC BY 2.0.
Well researched reasonable analysis. This is the big picture.
George, another great column. Context, as we know, is everything. Thank you!