Break all the mirrors in the house
Seattle Times kicks top Dawg
By: Richard Linde, 15 December 2002

We’re all trying to guess the name of a mysterious editorial writer from the Seattle Times. The editorial, which is entitled “Coach Rick Hamlet,” assumes that the rumor mongering surrounding Coach Rick Neuheisel is true, that he “really wants the (UCLA) job,” as one of Steve Henson’s sources put it. The anonymous writer tells the Huskies to jettison Neuheisel and find a coach who wants to say around.

You run with a rumor and treat it as the truth, then create a double standard for football coaches in the State of Washington. Is that fair play?

Mike Price (WSU head coach) "has earned the right to seek new challenges and other coaching opportunities," which is a double standard if I ever heard one.

“But Price is the coach we want to stay put,” the editorial goes on to say. “His teams play hard for him and he runs a clean program…Neuheisel is the fellow at the holiday party who never quite makes eye contact. He is always looking over the shoulder of the person in front of him, scanning the crowd for whom to schmooze next.”

That’s it in a nutshell. Okay let’s play “Authors.”

I’m guessing Lord Blaine Newnham, wearing Claudius’ armor for disguise. Rumor has it that he’s Neuheisel’s uncle. Didn’t Nueheisel once say of Blaine, "My father's brother; but no more like my father/ Than I to Hercules..." Or was that Hamlet who said that?

Just more proof that the editorial slant of the Seattle Times, in part, if not anti-Husky, is anti-Shakespeare. This bias, assuming it's against the Huskies, most likely starts with the people up front and filters down to its sports pages. So, on the other side of the coin, anything pro-Husky probably gets spiked--if one dare write such a piece, a blasphemy to the Gods of the Seattle print media.

Check big brother out, the New York Times and its Tiger Woods controversy, one of its own making. Two more writers in New York now, that they call Spikey, and not for their hairstyles.

Most of the local media bash the Huskies and its headman routinely, including Claudius. Sometimes their manure is blatant, other times it’s thinly disguised, but it’s always there, if for one word’s, one sentence’s or one paragraph’s time in the universe.

If Neuheisel should leave the program, the media elitists will continue to “watch” the Husky program and stereotype it negatively at every opportunity. It’s in their genes. It won’t stop with a new coach.

One of the worst bashers, Art Thiel, the Husky hater incarnate, stripped of his metaphors, stands naked, wearing a dangling participle and a split infinitive. Fortunately for Husky fans, his diatribe is disguised in metaphorical garbage, some of it so cleverly written that he can't understand it himself.

And then there are the Husky beat writers, Ted Miller and Bob Condotta, men of integrity, who exude honesty. How the hell did they ever end up in this business? Okay, okay, add Blaine Newnham to that list.

As for the others, how do they look at themselves in the mirror. Break all the mirrors in the house, they’re too painful for watching in the morning.