Item: 1 LA Times sports section
I've found that it helps, when you're living in a place with no discernible seasons, to keep up with sports from time to time. It's one thing I can still do here that has a cycle, beginnings and endings and associations with a certain time of year. Although today's sports section had both basketball and football, which left me feeling, again, like it was not really any season.
But it has been, for awhile, fall, and thus football season, and so I read this morning about the current fates of local teams USC and UCLA. It seems they can't escape being compared and contrasted, and especially so when it comes to the coaches, Pete Carroll and Karl Dorrell, respectively. You have Pete Carroll, who is good-looking and bounds around on the sidelines having a great time, and then you have Karl Dorrell who stands there looking very serious and still.
Karl Dorrell is, for this reason, an interesting figure to me. He is almost never mentioned, in any personal sense, without a contrasting mention of his counterpart over at USC, and the undertone of this is usually "why can't you be more like Pete Carroll?" Of course the point is often made, too, that nobody would be complaining about Dorrell's coaching style if the Bruins were winning more.
I've heard that coaches function a lot as figureheads for a team. Thus, the reason they throw their clipboards on the ground, gesture furiously at the officials even if the call is perfectly reasonable, whatever, is to show the kind of fight they expect from their team. So what's to be done with someone who just stands there, demonstrating no reaction?
There was a recent profile of Karl Dorrell in the Times, which also brought up the angle of Pete Carroll being the golden-boy celebrity who plays well in this town of winning personalities, while Karl Dorrell, even though widely liked and respected within his circle, just doesn't have that star quality.
I think that's a little too easy of a conclusion, but I can't help being intrigued by the mystery of the guy who's never fully explained. It seems obvious to me that Karl Dorrell actually cares like crazy. He seems, in fact, to be the most vulnerable person on the field. He exudes pressure. He personifies every moment you've stood there with your heart in your throat, and for this reason you really want him to win.
But it has been, for awhile, fall, and thus football season, and so I read this morning about the current fates of local teams USC and UCLA. It seems they can't escape being compared and contrasted, and especially so when it comes to the coaches, Pete Carroll and Karl Dorrell, respectively. You have Pete Carroll, who is good-looking and bounds around on the sidelines having a great time, and then you have Karl Dorrell who stands there looking very serious and still.
Karl Dorrell is, for this reason, an interesting figure to me. He is almost never mentioned, in any personal sense, without a contrasting mention of his counterpart over at USC, and the undertone of this is usually "why can't you be more like Pete Carroll?" Of course the point is often made, too, that nobody would be complaining about Dorrell's coaching style if the Bruins were winning more.
I've heard that coaches function a lot as figureheads for a team. Thus, the reason they throw their clipboards on the ground, gesture furiously at the officials even if the call is perfectly reasonable, whatever, is to show the kind of fight they expect from their team. So what's to be done with someone who just stands there, demonstrating no reaction?
There was a recent profile of Karl Dorrell in the Times, which also brought up the angle of Pete Carroll being the golden-boy celebrity who plays well in this town of winning personalities, while Karl Dorrell, even though widely liked and respected within his circle, just doesn't have that star quality.
I think that's a little too easy of a conclusion, but I can't help being intrigued by the mystery of the guy who's never fully explained. It seems obvious to me that Karl Dorrell actually cares like crazy. He seems, in fact, to be the most vulnerable person on the field. He exudes pressure. He personifies every moment you've stood there with your heart in your throat, and for this reason you really want him to win.
posted by Karen at 7:52 PM
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