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NEWS, NOTES &
COMMENTARY
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The
Bradsher Beat
Friday, September 15, 2006
By Bethany Bradsher |
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Logan still doing it his way
Former head coach of the
Pirates still teaching football with panache — over the airwaves
©2006 Bonesville.net
All rights reserved.
The occupants of East Carolina's football
coaching offices seem to be set for the foreseeable future, so there’s
certainly no reason to look back.
But a day of surfing podcasts has reminded me of
this undeniable fact: I surely do miss a good Steve Logan quote.
From 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on any weekday in the
Triangle, the former Pirates coach can be found hosting The Logan Zone, a
call-in radio show on
WDNC-AM 620 "The Bull." He has been
involved in broadcasting since he left ECU in 2002, but this is the first
time he has owned the microphone for a daily show.
And even if it seems like he’s still shaping his
radio persona at times, the shows I’ve listened to featured a handful of
moments that brought me right back to the four seasons I spent covering
Logan as a head coach. All a caller needs to do is hit on a topic that’s
close to his heart or, as he puts it, “gets my blood pressure up,” and he
takes off just like in the old days when a new reporter asked him an
innocently inane question.
“The discipline of these kids, individually and
collectively, is all consuming,” Logan said in reference to the N.C. State
players who ran onto the field near the end of the Akron game on Saturday
and were slapped with a 15-yard penalty that ultimately led to an improbabe
Wolfpack defeat. “If those were my kids, I would have slapped a knot on
their head that the Boy Scouts couldn’t untie. And my blood pressure right
now is soaring.”
One of the most enlightening elements of his
show for Pirates fans is hearing the inside scoop of stories about which he
had to stay tightlipped during his 11 years in Greenville. In the same
segment where he ranted about player discipline, he told the story of
Richard Alston, who was the team’s backup quarterback and starting wide
receiver in 2000 when he decided to copy a $100 bill on a color copier. He
tried to buy a hamburger at Burger King with the fake money and was,
predictably, caught.
“Dr. Eakin calls me over there, and he is
livid,” Logan, referring to former ECU chancellor Richard Eakin, said of the
fallout after the Alston incident. “And finally when he calmed down, I said,
‘Doc, every year I bring these kids in and I have a list of 22 things I go
over with them almost daily. I tell them don’t do drugs, don’t plagiarize,
don’t steal, don’t get in fights, you’re not allowed to have weapons, you
are going to go to class’ but by God, I just flat forgot to tell them don’t
counterfeit!
“Now, Dr. Eakin absolutely fell off the couch
laughing. He got up, he said, ‘Steve, I appreciate the way you’re handling
the program,’ and he walked out.”
I’ve covered a dozen or so head coaches in my
sportswriting career, and none has even come close to Logan in wit, candor
or the ability to turn a phrase. His way with words and his talent for
articulating his understanding of the game of football was a particular
treat for me because the last coach I covered before Logan was Panthers
chief Dom Capers, an incredibly nice man who had mastered the fine art of
speaking to the press for 20 minutes and never actually saying anything.
You see, I’m often one of the only writers on
press row who has never actually played football, and so I’ve spent my
career trying to compensate for my lack of inside knowledge about the sport.
Steve Logan certainly didn’t cater to reporters, but the fact remains that
he was the best football tutor that I ever had.
When Logan wasn’t teaching us the finer points
of the game, he was making us laugh. About every other week on a Monday
afternoon, I would call my husband over so that I could play him an excerpt
from that day’s press conference. Rarely were the football tutorials or the
blood pressure-elevating rants even useful for that day’s story, but they
sure did inject some life into the routine of weekly football coverage.
"I think it will be an emotional hemorrhage for
the entire state of North Carolina,” Logan said in 2001 before a much-hyped
contest between the Pirates and the Tar Heels. "I think that they'll have
trauma units everywhere.”
So my day today was awash in nostalgia as I
listened to Logan reminisce about coaching struggles and landmark victories
during his ECU years. He talked more than once about his relief at being out
of the college coaching grind, and he seems to have a new chief goal: to
inject some class and culture into the rough-as-a-cob world of sports talk
radio. In between assessments of Wake Forest’s prospects for the postseason
and comparisons between the ACC and SEC, he sprinkles in references to fine
wine, the blues, bass fishing and tennis.
“This is not roadkill radio,” he said last week
on the show. “We’re not screaming and trying to fire coaches, we’re trying
to educate about the great game of college football.”
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Bethany Bradsher.
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02/23/2007 01:13:17 AM |
