How many Bobbies do you know over the age of 20? Coaches seem to be the only ones who don’t shorten their names to Bob when they reach adulthood.
Bobby Knight, Bobby Bowden, Bobby Lutz, Bobby Cremins, Bobby Petrino to name a few. No Bobs in the bunch.
Something about the coaching profession that makes it okay for a select few to never outgrow their childhood identities.
While we’re on the subject of Bobbies, one of them, Bobby Petrino, is out with his official apology. Took Bobby a while to get around to saying he’s sorry because he’s used to lying and abusing people expecting more from him, and getting away with it.
His instincts have never included contriteness.
Apparently Bobby was shellshocked after getting fired at the football coach Arkansas for his extracurricular activities and subsequent lies. Disgraced and turned out to pasture, a target of bad jokes and derision, a successful coach without a team, a fan following and no immediate prospects for a job.
Whether the seriousness of the situation finally dawned on him would require some speculation on our part. But the Bobby Petrino we’re familiar with would know that he could manipulate the system.
Just say and do the right things, get some tutoring on making apologies, follow established public relations procedures.
Some desperate university needing a football coach will eventually come calling, holding their nose, waving cash in his direction. And he’ll be off and coaching again.
Just don’t ask for any recommendations from the University of Louisville, the Atlanta Falcons or the University of Arkansas.
Bobby. Bob. Whatever.
I can’t explain a grown man keeping his nickname; I dropped the y off of my name as soon as I graduated high school. Though, I do know a man named Ricky, his parents chose to put it on his birth certificate, no Richard he.
That anecdote aside, I really wanted a forum for reporting that a former Cardinal football player, and Louisville were mentioned during the broadcast of the Miami/Tampa Bay NFL preseason game the other night, I chose this football thread. Griese asked and answered this question: what player is the only NFL player to have played for both an undefeated NFL team and a win less NFL team during his career? The answer is Larry Ball, (’72 Dolphins. and later TB), and after telling us the player he said that Ball played forrrrrr….Louisville. He even stretched it that way, like Berman/Jackson on ESPN. I smiled.
Ball was actually recruited by Denny Crum as a basketball player. He would get in the last three minutes of a game and foul out. Corso asked Denny if he could have this physical guy and Denny said yes.
Ball played SAFETY the first year for Corso who explained Ball could run backwards faster than anyone else on the team. He then played both tackle and linebacker in his next two years.
Plus he replaced Mathison in Miami as the extra linebacker in the 53 defense which was named after Mathison’s uniform number and not something like a 5-3-3 lineup.
I dropped the y, as did all the other guys in my neighborhood, when Kenny decided he wanted to be called Ken. He started dropping everybody else’s y. Funny thing is, he remained Kenny.
By the way, Bob Knight hates being called Bobby.
He’s not real big on “Hey Knight!” either.
He’ll probably end up at KY. Then we will kick his butt.
That would be the ideal situation Jim D.
And here’s a Bob who won’t give a recommendation. Bob Domine who posted the following on the CJ as a response to Sullivan’s column on Petrino:
“Bob Domine · Notre Dame High School, Harper Woods, Michigan
Amen! My personal experience with the man indicates his lack of moral fiber, and human being go a lot deeper than lies (Every pun intended) on the surface. A really, really great offensive mind..a really, really screwed up moral value at many, many levels.”