Fanview 1/13/09

By Joe Torosian

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
--- T.S. Eliot

There’s dumb, and then there’s off the charts dumb.
Educators, academics, people of letters, quote-unquote: The Smart People.
The Smart People scream about money for education and spend it on free lunches for children who don’t need them.
The Smart People scream about money and then promote their own, who’ve reached the top of the pyramid, to an administrative position where they receive six figures to decide the placement of trashcans in the school district.
So what do The Smart People in Temple City do?
(Now remember they are saying the altercation between Randy Backus and a student had nothing to do with his removal as head football coach)
The Smart People in Temple City remove a coach who maintained a quality staff, when they were too brain dead to keep their Golden Son Mike Mooney and the mass exodus that took place to San Marino with his departure.
The Smart People in Temple City removed a coach who financially had his program in the black both years.
The Smart People in Temple City removed a coach (remember the altercation had nothing to do with it) that kept 105 of a 110 players in the program academically eligible.
The Smart People in Temple City removed a coach who had 21 of his 36 players carrying a 3.0 grade point average, or higher.
The Smart People in Temple City removed the coach who led the team in 2007 to its first road playoff victory in over a decade.
The Smart People in Temple City removed a coach, that even after he was suspended did all he could, kept his staff together, and game prepped (this would rate as classy) to see his squad reach the school’s first semifinals since 1998.
The Smart People in Temple City removed as coach the only person on campus capable of coaching its football team.
The Smart People of Temple City didn’t like the language and maybe the forceful energy Coach Backus used.
But I’m sure The Smart People of Temple City have always enjoyed the revenue the football program has produced over the years.
Note to The Smart People of Temple City: You can most likely kiss it all goodbye.
While you have pontificated on goodness and virtue, and wanting something better…you threw Randy Backus under the bus.
You Smart People of Temple City kept him under said bus while rumors circulated about the incident/altercation as it was reported in the local paper.
You did nothing to clarify or relieve the talk.
You have angered loyalists and parents by keeping them in the dark as a good man got rumored apart.
So unless you have Tony Dungy waiting in the wings you are in serious trouble.
Note to The Smart People: Temple City football was special before you got here, I wish I could say it will be special after you are gone.
Then again, is it not the pattern of Smart People?
Smart People idealize, theorize…and then blame others when things go to hell in a hand basket.
What a sad ending...No what a heartbreaking ending.
I didn’t go to Rosemead, but oh, those people are so prideful about Rosemead football. You sense that at Arcadia, it is alive at Arroyo, and it has always been there, since my earliest days as a kid growing up in El Monte we would talk of Temple City football as being extraordinary.
Smart People come in and what do they do? In what they say is fairness, decency, equality (how French), they always seek and result in turning the extraordinary into ordinary.
The clichés are true; When everyone is beautiful, no one is. When everyone is special, no one is special.
This is what The Smart People have done in regards to Randy Backus; They amputated the special.