Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
They don’t pay Charlie Weis to lose smiling. Let’s get that on the table right off.
He’s the football coach at Notre Dame and winning’s the standard there, same as anywhere only more so. And so when USC whips him, he’s not supposed to dispense confetti. When LSU hands him his golden dome, he’s not supposed crack open a cold one and say, “A round for the house, barkeep.”
On the other hand, whining ain’t allowed either.
On the other hand, a man standing where Charlie Weis stands is supposed to take defeat with a certain amount of grace, with quiet words and square shoulders and a chin aimed squarely at the ceiling. This is not just an expectation, it’s a requirement, and most of the time Weis fulfills it admirably.
This is not one of those times.
In case you missed it, Weis lost his lawsuit Tuesday against the doctors who stapled his stomach a few years back, a procedure that nearly cost Weis his life when internal bleeding knocked him into a coma. According to the suit, Weis bled inside for 30 straight hours while doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital stood by and did nothing.
A not-so-pretty story if true. Unfortunately, the jury wasn’t buying.
Unfortunately, they bought the doctors’ story, which is that Weis was told that internal bleeding was a risk with stomach stapling, an elective procedure. He was told the importance of following a pre-op routine. He was told this wasn’t something you just rushed through.
According to the doctors, Weis ignored all that. He rushed through it, eager to get back to his job as the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots before his boss, Bill Belichick, whom he kept at least partly in the dark throughout, found out the truth.
Thus the complications. Thus a situation in which his doctors might actually have saved Weis’ life by not going back in to stop the bleeding, which apparently did not last 30 hours. Thus a lawsuit that never should have been brought.
Didn’t stop Weis from acting the injured party anyway, and to the absolute hilt.
Wednesday he released a statement through the university that fairly reeked with gall. He said he pressed the case on principle, not money, and that if he’d won all the money would have gone to Hannah and Friends, his charity for people with special needs inspired by his daughter, a special needs child herself. He blamed the doctors for not saying no to the surgery. He said the jury grew “tired and bored.”
Whether intended to or not, this read like whine of a particularly sour vintage. And still Weis wasn’t through.
“I realized victory was a long shot, but was still surprised with the verdict,” the statement said. “The trial cost our family some vacation time. The verdict cost people with special needs some money …”
In other words: You jurors ought to be ashamed. You could have contributed to a worthy cause if you’d only seen this my way, but you didn’t, so you won’t.
Are you kidding me?
Look, no one who knows about Weis and his work for Hannah and Friends would ever begrudge either the cause or the tireless, loving effort Weis puts into it. The man will go literally anywhere at almost any time to take up its standard, and more power to him.
But shaking down doctors you saw fit to ignore isn’t the way you go about it. Laying a guilt trip on jurors who were only doing their civic duty doesn’t cut it either. It just makes you look small and petty and most of all graceless, in a way Charlie Weis has never looked graceless after any of his handful of losses.
I don’t know whose idea this statement was, or who if anyone signed off on it. But what purpose Weis or anyone else thought it would serve, other than to make him look arrogant and childish, is beyond me.
Better he should have torn a page from the aftermath of Oct. 15, 2005, when Notre Dame lost to No. 1 USC on Matt Leinart’s last-second plunge – a plunge aided and abetted by the now-famous Bush Push, Reggie Bush illegally shoving Leinart across the goal line.
Remember how Weis reacted?
“You could say Reggie pushed him, which he did, but that’s a heads-up play by Reggie and hopefully any running back I had would be pushing right along with them,” he said, graciously and with class.
Where was that Charlie this week?
