Finally, someone has agreed that it’s not a good thing to have an adult COACH belittle, verbally abuse, and denigrate his players by screaming explicative’s, throwing balls at their heads and faces, and using homophobic slurs to describe their performance.   Thank goodness I have lived long enough for someone to stand up and say that this type of COACHING is not acceptable behavior.  Unfortunately, as a Baby Boomer, I’ve seen this scenario dozens of times in dozens of situations, and the only good thing that has come out of it for me is that I am passionate about anti-bullying.
Mike’s dad, also a basketball stand-out, has the dubious distinction of being the only ANNOUNCER ever thrown out of a game by the NBA.  It seems to me that the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree.  Problem is, in Mike Senior’s life-time, coaches; were given a free ride when it came to this type of abuse.  How many times have I seen even midget football coaches dragging their players around by the face masks, screaming expletives at them and acting like idiots on the sidelines?  Short answer?  Too many.   It was almost as if many of the coaching playbooks had suggestions like this:  Belittle, malign, demean, debase and humiliate your team because that will make them men.
Unfortunately, in certain circumstances,  that was all that the players had ever experienced and then, they became coaches themselves, and not unlike an abused child who knows no other way to impart discipline, they  continued the circle of abuse with their players.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met orchestral conductors, math teachers and bosses who did everything but throw the ball in your face, too, and the result?  Well, sometimes the team won the championship, but decades later when they get together to discuss their abusive coaches they say things like, “Yeah, we won, but he was a jerk.”
I’m not sure what human behavior specialists, or even animal right activists say about these types of leaders, but I’ve seen it in the operating room, in traffic jams, at lines in the airport and even in fancy restaurants.  When frustration levels go up, some folks in charge retaliate by attacking, and when they get caught, they are flabbergasted.  “What did I do wrong?” they say.  (I’m sure that they probably were treated even worse.)
So, where does Mike Rice go now?  He was a Divison 1 coach . . . maybe the university in Florida that named their stadium after the company that owns for-profit prisons, the same company that has been written up numerous times for abusing prisoners, maybe they  will want to hire him?  Just think, if Sadam Hussein hadn’t been taken out, his professional soccer players were tortured and beaten if they lost games.  Mike would probably  have fit in well in Afghanistan, the Middle East or parts of Africa where beheading, limb removal and torture are still the norm.

Oh, wait a minute, didn’t one of Notre Dame’s coaches get reprimanded for abusing players, in “Under The Tarnished Dome,”  this book said that Holtz . . . abused his players at Notre Dame to the point of spitting in one’s face.  And isn’t he now a highly paid sports commentator? Maybe that’s Mike’s  ticket? To once again, follow in his father’s footsteps and become a commentator for the NBA?  Beat up kids and become a talking head.

Seriously, I have no idea what is going to have to happen to get people like this out of the business of education, coaching or youth anything, but it does seem to me that ESPN should continue to broadcast videos like this one and, not unlike when the KKK was exposed by the media , these abusive people would have their moment of fame.
As a teacher, when things didn’t go well, it was because of ME, not them.

Last night I received an E-mail from Carnegie Mellon University inviting me to the Innovation in Health Care Technology Conference.  When I read the small print, I saw that it was for the next day, April 5th.   I wasn’t sure if I had been invited because I am an alumnus, a healthcare consultant and entrepreneur or because I write a blog, but upon arrival, my admission ID said, “Nick Jacobs – PRESS.” 

After looking at the program which included discussions on:  Healthcare Policy, Bio-pharma, Health Care IT, Entrepreneurship and numerous other intellectual topics, I responded positively to the invitation and left my condo this morning with high hopes of being academically challenged and informed. 

As a graduate student at CMU back in the late eighties and early nineties, my most often asked question to our Dean was “Why is this all so quantitative?”  Kind of like when I began running hospitals and kept asking, “Why do you do things like this?”  It has been a subject that I’ve revisited numerous times, “quantitative vs. qualitative,” and it continues to be a source of severe discomfort for me personally. 

The irony for me is that everything I read about good leaders comes back to the fact that the best of the best have tremendous qualitative skills, skills that are heavily weighted in emotional quotient capabilities, yet we dedicate so much academic time to “the failed promise of technology.”

To my dismay, the speakers talked about things like quantum mechanics, complexity theory, quantum physics and quantum biology.  In fact, the only glimmer of hope that I had was when one of the speakers listed the word music on his opening slide. 

He discussed Schrödinger’s Proposal, the great thought experiment that puts forth a theory that involved a cat in a box.  (From Wikipedia:  a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.  (Get it?) 

Our speaker then showed a cartoon of another cat with a mouse in the box and the mouse was holding a hammer to break into the flask of poison.  Although his point was scientific and dealt with quantum superposition, as a qualitative guy, all that I could think about was the fact that the mouse was gonna be dead either way! 

Our MD/PhD went on to say that Chemo Therapy is always tail chasing where the cancer is not cured, just slowed down only to grow again, sad.  But most importantly, he suggested that, “Personalized medicine won’t work as a business model.” Again, his supposition was that it will continue to cost a billion dollars to create a drug and with personalized medicine, enough people will NOT need that drug to make the venture financially positive.  (So much for doing the right thing for individual people.)

When I asked him about his music slide, hoping to hear about the vibration of proteins in the healing process, he simply said that he likes playing the guitar and often wondered what type of music a DNA strand would make.

Not to make light of extensive cerebral capabilities, it all just made me cheerless as I listened to these very bright people continue to pursue only their quantitative capabilities: IT, Biotech, and Pharma.  They’re still  missing the nuances of Integrative Medicine, unconditional love, and self-worth as potential benefits in our healthcare world.  

“The Failed Promise of Technology.” 

One of the things that I get to do while consulting all over the country is to periodically attend lectures about health. Because of my interests in non-traditional, ancient medicine practices that often work better than some new medical treatments, I get to attend some pretty interesting presentations, the type that you’re not likely to see on the Discovery Channel anytime in the near future. One of the last talks that I heard in the interesting category was about primitive food.

The presenter, a Harvard M.D., used the descriptive word primitive in only the best possible context. It was about the kind of food that people ate before big business, bad science and deceptive marketing got involved. It was about pure food, nature’s food, unadulterated food. It was about natural foods: meat and milk from cows that graze in fields, chickens that don’t live in cages; he discussed real butter and milk that is not pasteurized, insects, fish and other sea creatures, whole grains, and pure water.

This cardiologist started out with a series of photographs of what people’s faces looked like in the 30’s. I’ll admit they were not all models, but there was a certain beauty, a quality that is not seen much anymore.  These were the faces of people who were not consuming modern chemically treated foods that encourage shelf-life, kill predator insects or thrive during a drought: no hydrogenated fats or MSG, no genetically altered corn, and no high fructose corn syrup.

After each picture of the faces of those eating natural foods, he showed us pictures of people who grew up eating the altered, chemically produced food.  To the majority of us in attendance, those pictures were very surprising.

The crux of his presentation was that back in the 30’s a very curious dentist noticed something about people and the impact of what they ate on the formation of their facial bone structure.  The bone formation in their faces had changed dramatically. This doctor then traveled the world in order to substantiate his findings. The first place that he visited was Switzerland: not developed, modernized Switzerland, but some tiny little village tucked in a mountain pass that was only accessible by foot and couldn’t be reached at all in the winter. When he got there he found the people were living on only locally and naturally produced food–dairy products, grains and meat.

This is where things gets interesting. Their faces were full, and their teeth were perfect. They were happy, healthy and fertile. In other parts of the country where sweets and processed foods were more prevalent, the people had thinner jaws and plenty of cavities. The bone structure of the faces had actually changed over a few generations, and there was not enough room for all of their teeth. So, he decided to keep traveling and went to Africa, the South Pacific, Alaska and several other remote locations where he discovered exactly the same thing, Natural foods–fuller faces; processed foods–thinner faces, tooth decay, infertility and not enough room for their teeth, hence the need for braces.  

By the end of this lecture, our presenting cardiologist had me convinced that I should consider switching to eating seal stomachs, grub worms, pig tails or even fish heads as long as the food was not adulterated, not injected with preservatives, chemicals, artificial colors, sugar, corn syrup and antibiotics. The people who ate primitive foods were happier and healthier, sexier and had prettier smiles; their faces were full and their teeth fit in their mouth.

As I sit here and contemplate our various food groups: artificially flavored chips, injected beef, chemical-laden white bread, sodas containing a chemical used as a fire retardant, make-believe spray cheese, factory-produced chicken eggs, and enough corn syrup to float the Titanic, I now understand why my dentist had to pull my wisdom teeth.

Bottom line? Eat natural stuff. You’ll be sexier!