Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

The firing of Alabama football coach Mike Price and the imminent dismissal of Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy may get sportswriters and casual fans to do something they've rarely done before: take Internet fan boards seriously as a source of information.

The Des Moines Register got credit for a breaking story with its April 28 piece about Eustachy sipping Natural Light Ice and smooching coeds at a Missouri campus party, but the newspaper wasn't really first — a Missouri Internet fan board had the story on Jan. 22. And the road to Price's May 3 firing — essentially, for being dumb enough to take a woman back to his hotel room and let her order one of everything on the room service menu, to go — began with chatter on Alabama fan boards on April 25 about something happening with Price, a woman of ill repute and a credit card during a golf tournament the previous week in Pensacola, Fla.

Up until now, the sports mainstream has viewed college fan boards as the domain of no-life fan boys — booster wannabes who don't have the money to influence their favorite program with hundred-dollar handshakes, who instead rant into the wind about recruiting battles, perceived slights to their golden gods from the media and the daily minutiae of their favorite program. Any "news" reporting on the fan boards usually takes the form of wild-ass rumor, the equivalent of old ladies' gossip and chatter at the beauty shop on Saturday morning, but with less credibility because the old ladies don't identify themselves only with names like "Superdupertigersfan."

That's certainly what a lot of Alabama fans posting on sites like Tidefans.com and Tiderinsider.com thought when rumors on those sites mentioned Price, a school credit card and a prostitute. I can't confirm the exact rumors reported — the moderators of those sites, as often happens on fan sites, immediately take down any unsubstantiated information deemed negative toward the program. (On the other hand, rumors and innuendo about other programs and perceived enemies often stay up, and oftentimes so do rumors about the home team's own players.)

The responses on the Alabama fan sites were along the lines of "CMP (Coach Mike Price) isn't stupid enough to have done this." Just to check, Alabama Athletic Director Mal Moore brought Price in for a meeting to discuss his conduct, but by that point, the rumors were already out of control. A fan had mentioned them on a Memphis sports-talk show, and the sports editor of the school's hometown paper, the Tuscaloosa News, was reporting that Price was meeting Moore about something related to his conduct, without saying what.

But the rumors weren't dying online, and with the acknowledgement by the school that it was meeting with Price, it became only a matter of time before the rumors were checked out. By May 1, newspapers all over Alabama were recounting Price's wild night at a Pensacola strip club, followed by a morning in which an unidentified "young woman" tried to use Price's credit card to order one of everything off the room service menu. Two days later, Price, who had been hired only four months earlier and hadn't yet coached a game, was out of a job.

The timeline for Eustachy's public airing of his moral turpitude was longer, if only because the fans on the board that revealed his sins are the forgiving and understanding type. On Jan. 22, the night after Eustachy's Iowa State team lost at Missouri, the first stirrings about his after-game conduct appeared on Tigerboard. "My female friend says he made an appearance at Willie's last night after the game," Brady213 posted at noon Columbia, Mo., time. "Same old Larry."

That let loose for a few days' worth of various tales of witnessing Eustachy drinking, smoking and hitting on college girls. Nonetheless, the talk was delivered not with a this-guy-should-lose-his-job finger-wagging but with a can-you-believe-this-guy type of head-shaking. After all, he is an opposing coach. Pictures of Eustachy looking like Ray Romano at a WB cast party appeared, though they weren't the same pictures Missouri student Sean Devereaux turned over to the Register — one of the Tigerboard pictures was identified as two years old.

Certainly, the Register's investigation of the photos gave them more legitimacy than the ones that appeared online, which even some Tigerboard regulars believed were faked. Then again, the paper might have gotten to this story sooner had it not accepted the Iowa State athletic director's brushoff that the Tigerboard photos were of him "pausing to have his picture taken with some fans who saw him out for dinner." (The director, Bruce Van De Velde, later said this statement was based on what Eustachy told him.)

So does this mean journalists and fans should investigate everything they see posted on a fan board? Probably not. But the situations of Price and Eustachy do show that where there's message board smoke, someone might get fired.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.