Longhornfrenzy 🤘🏼 · @Longhornfrenzy1
2nd Apr 2021 from TwitLonger
Tech 247 mod is butthurt
Chris Beard: Following in Billy Clyde Gillispie's Footsteps41
JoeYeager
Chris Beard and Billy Clyde Gillispie did not get along. In 2011, Beard was an assistant coach for Gillispie at Texas Tech. During one interchange between Beard and Gillispie, the two very nearly came to blows and had to be separated by athletic director Kirby Hocutt. Gillispie went on to coach the Red Raiders during the 2011-12 season. Beard left Lubbock to coach in the ABA for a season.
Gillispie was fired during that season. His team was bad enough. But far worse was Gillispie’s behavior. His maltreatment of players, assistant coaches and staff was the stuff of legend. Gillispie was a sadistic abuser. He forced his players to practice for so long that one of them, Kader Tapsoba, developed stress fractures in his legs, and despite the injuries, was required to run bleachers.
Gillispie was also a megalomaniac. He came, quite literally from dirt. The son of a poor cattle truck driver in Abilene and then Graford, Texas, Gillispie rose through the coaching ranks to become the head coach at Kentucky, arguably the most prestigious coaching position in basketball, college or pro.
The meteoric ascendence was apparently too much for him to handle. For example, soon after being hired by Kentucky he picked a fight with a television corporation that covered the Wildcats. In essence, he refused to conduct interviews, which were considered entirely de rigeur, with that corporation. Gillispie and the TV outlet butted heads until he decided to cut a deal. If the corporation agreed to purchase a massive quantity of expensive suits of Gillispie’s choice, Gillispie would participate in interviews. The corporation agreed and spent many thousands of dollars on Gillispie’s wardrobe. When Gillispie was fired from Kentucky, the movers responsible for cleaning out Gillispie’s palace reported that his closets were filled with unworn suits.
Clearly, something snapped in Gillispie’s mind while he was at Kentucky. It is easy to surmise that, having worked his way from nothing to the pinnacle of the game of basketball, Gillispie deified himself. He lost touch with reality and viewed himself as a maker of his own laws rather than as a mere human being subject to the laws of society. Ultimately, this irrationality proved Gillispie’s downfall. After having led Texas A&M to the Sweet Sixteen in 2007, Gillispie’s career moved into retrograde at Kentucky and then Texas Tech. During his lone year at Tech, he checked himself into the Mayo Clinic for physical and mental health problems and resigned. His next coaching stop was at Ranger College, and he’s now the head coach at Tarleton. A far cry from Kentucky.
The past of Chris Beard, formerly head coach at Texas Tech and now at Texas, is not quite so checkered. Not yet, anyway. There have been no allegations of abusive behavior, and he has never been fired for any sort of wrongdoing. However, in light of Beard’s unutterably callous resignation from Texas Tech to take the head coaching position at arch-rival Texas, there are signs that Beard may be more like Gillispie than is supposed. And he may ultimately suffer a similar fate.
Beard’s early life is obscure. It’s a subject he has never discussed in any detail publicly. We know he was born in Marietta, Georgia, but spent most of his youth in The Woodlands and Irving, Texas.
Beard’s background may not have been as hardscrabble as Gillispie’s, but it is clear that he didn’t come from privilege. Beard has said on more than one occasion that “guys like me get only one chance.” He was implying that, unlike the golden boys of the profession, he didn’t have a network of high-placed backers to help him in the case of setbacks.
Beard was fond of referring to himself and his team as “street dogs,” in contrast to pampered and precious “pet shop dogs.” Again, he portrayed himself as a denizen of the lower ranks.
Beard also recounted how, as a young boy, he saved his nickels and dimes so he could attend a basketball camp at Texas Tech conducted by former Red Raider coach Gerald Myers. Such an action does not indicate that Beard came from wealth.
So, Beard presumably comes from a socioeconomic background not all that different from Gillispie, and he arguably climbed to even greater heights. Beard has yet to land a coaching position as prestigious as the Kentucky posting, but unlike Gillispie, Beard coached in the national title game, coming up one defensive stop short of winning a natty for Texas Tech.
Did this vertiginous ascent from obscurity to fame affect Beard psychologically as it seems to have affected Gillispie? There is reason to believe so.
Soon after the 2019 tournament run, Texas Tech held a party in United Supermarkets Arena to celebrate the stupendous season. ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla was master of ceremonies. Fraschilla related an interesting anecdote about Beard. He said that, soon after the title game, he was at a gala event for coaches in which Beard was in attendance. All of the luminaries were in some sort of buffet line. Beard had his food but demanded extra butter. The server replied that there was a limit on butter, no exceptions. According to Fraschilla, Beard replied: “Don’t you know who I am? I just led Texas Tech to the national championship game, and I can’t get extra butter?” The server responded, “And I’m the butter guy and you still get only one pad!”
Those in attendance tittered nervously. This story didn’t gibe with their image of Beard as the common man people’s coach. On the contrary, it reeked of extreme arrogance and egocentrism. This was not the Chris Beard they thought they knew.
Since that marvelous season, Beard really hasn’t been quite the same. He received a lavish contract reserved for only the royalty of the coaching profession. With generous subventions from Dustin Womble and many others, Beard oversaw the creation of an opulent new practice facility that outstrips any other in the college game. And “The Womble” was bedizened with a mammoth mural of Chris Beard himself. Whatever the Emperor of West Texas wanted, the Emperor of West Texas got.
During the past season, Beard repeatedly made the bizarre claim that, if the Red Raiders made the NCAA tournament, it would be Texas Tech’s fourth straight tourney appearance. But that clearly was not the case. The previous NCAA tournament had been cancelled, and had it not been cancelled, there was absolutely no certainty that Tech would have received an at-large berth. The general consensus was that the Red Raiders were squarely on the bubble. Here was a case of an Emperor trying to will history into existence. It was a textbook case of megalomania.
But the massive contract, the construction of the Womble Palace and the prerogative to reinvent Texas Tech basketball history as he saw fit, were not enough. A little more than a week after Texas coach Shaka Smart decamped to Marquette, Beard did the same to Texas.
Beard had been at Texas Tech, in one capacity or another, for 16 years. He improbably led the Red Raiders to an Elite Eight and then the national title game. Texas Tech, Lubbock and all of West Texas fell in love with Beard. Some people felt so strongly about Beard that they donated millions of dollars to the construction of The Womble with the understanding that this building would be a physical covenant between Texas Tech and Beard. Like a wedding band, this facility would bind Beard and Texas Tech together for the long haul. And Beard understood this subtext as well as anybody.
Nevertheless, when the coaching opportunity arose at Texas, the ultimate enemy of Texas Tech, Beard took a roto-tiller to the roots he had established in West Texas. He forsook and severed every single of the multifarious personal relations he had established in his time at Texas Tech. He abandoned the former players he recruited to become Red Raiders. And he pulled out an ice pick and stabbed in the back the hundreds of thousands of fans who adored him and supported him unconditionally.
It was an act of shocking disregard for the feelings of others. It was not only cruel, it was utterly thoughtless. It was as if all of the people who poured their heart and soul (and money) into Beard and his basketball program, meant absolutely nothing to him.
There is a psychological term for those who view other human beings as mere tools for their own gratification and aggrandizement. The term is sociopath. Whether or not Beard fits the clinical definition of a sociopath, I cannot say. But what I can say with complete certainty is that his behavior in accepting the Texas job was sociopathic.
And this brings us back to Billy Clyde Gillispie. Gillispie, presumably because he could not effectively process his own dirt-to-diamonds story, developed a megalomania in conjunction with his preexisting sadism, that led to his own downfall and nearly his self-destruction.
Chris Beard is manifesting a similar pattern. After the pinnacle of nearly winning the national championship, the quality of his next two basketball teams diminished dramatically. Two years ago, the Red Raiders finished 18-13 and may not have made the NCAA tournament had it not been cancelled. Last season, Tech finished 18-11 and was bounced by Arkansas from the Big Dance in the second round. Over the course of those two seasons, the Red Raiders recorded a 18-17 mark in Big XII play. Not bad, but hardly the stuff of coaching genius.
It is entirely possible that Beard’s mental condition has reduced his functioning as a coach and as a person. If that is so, we have already seen the best of Beard, and will now witness his decline. I do not believe he will disintegrate as Gillispie did for the simple reason that he is more mentally stable than Gillispie. But I am convinced he will never reach the heights in Austin that he did in Lubbock. And if Beard’s coaching career does decline, that will be only a modest recompense for him having kicked his great good fortune in the teeth