Something for Gary Pinkel, Mizzou football team to celebrate

The words were so much like the ones you always hear University of Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel say after a game.

“We talked about focus and eliminating distractions …,” he said on the field after MU’s surprising and rousing 20-16 victory over Brigham Young on Saturday night at Arrowhead Stadium.

No matter what happens, he added, “get yourself focused (and) get back to the next play.”

These bromides, though, suddenly resonated as words to live by after a game like no other for Pinkel, who on Friday announced he has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and will retirement at the end of the season.

That merely capped a chaotic week at MU also marked by his players boycotting football activities unless system president Tim Wolfe was ousted in sympathy with a student movement on campus protesting racial issues.

When he writes his book, Pinkel joked later, he figures it will have a chapter called, “The Week.”

But the end of the chapter will be about Saturday night.

So it was that even as Pinkel was answering questions on the field about trying to ignore chants of his name from the stands “so I could focus on what I’m doing,” he became engulfed in a wave of his players with a chant of their own:

“GP, GP-eh; GP, GP-eh,” they hollered as they encased Pinkel, not to mention anyone standing near him.

Someone yelled “I love you” in the middle of all this, and then Pinkel hollered, “How ‘bout the Tigers!” and started his patented wobbling, wiggling dance move as they swayed around him.

Later, surrounded by his grandchildren, Pinkel’s wife, Missy, wondered if this was the best win of his career.

“Because of this week, it’ll be up there forever, somewhere,” said Pinkel, whose mind perhaps flashed to beating Kansas here in 2007 to ascend to No. 1 as he avoided labeling it the best.

Nearby, new MU athletic director Mack Rhoades watched the scene and said, “It’s good medicine for the kids and for all of us, for our fans. Tough week. Great medicine. Let’s build on the win. ...

“I hope it’s brought a lot of us together.”

Rhoades was speaking specifically of football, but surely he was hoping there would be some broader healing to come for MU.

What’s to come in the bigger picture is hard to grasp or envision right now, but Saturday was significant in itself well beyond the fact that MU (5-5) enhanced its chances of sending Pinkel out with a bowl appearance.

Because this was a much-needed reprieve, a timeout from the pandemonium for all who wanted to seize the moment — and particularly for Pinkel.

Maybe that’s why he was so emotional in the locker room afterward, as you could see in a video on the Mizzou Network in which Pinkel clarifies the reason for the curious timing of his announcement.

“What a week, huh? …,” he said addressing his players. “Look what you did — look what you did. You overcame all that stuff. And then yesterday, the things I was forced to do that we were going to do Sunday because it (was getting out), which broke my heart.

“And you focused through all that (junk). And you made a great statement: We’re a great team and a great family. And when things get tough, and they were really fricking tough, and we fricking battled, and every guy out there battled!”

The video ends with Pinkel saying, “I’m proud as hell,” then putting his hands atop his head and bowing it.

“I’m overwhelmed,” he says, trying to get out more words before the sniffles came and a player yelled, “We love you, Coach!”

Over the years but especially the last 25 or so, Missouri athletics has enabled, conjured or just plain suffered more peculiarities, misfortunes and heartbreaks than any one place should have to endure.

Of course it happens everywhere else, too, right?

But … really?

So much of it has been stuff that you couldn’t make up if you tried:

A football loss on Fifth Down in 1990 to Colorado; UCLA’s Tyus Edney zooming the length of the basketball court with 4.8 seconds left to  knock MU out of the 1995 NCAA Tournament; the “flea-kicker” loss to Nebraska in 1997.

Each of those misadventures was a little more galling, of course, because the beneficiaries of the fates went on to win national titles — just like top-ranked MU might have had a chance to do in 1960 if it hadn’t lost its regular-season finale to a Kansas team that later had to forfeit the win for using an ineligible player.

And those are just the worst of the unfathomable episodes involving actual competition.

MU also has been the hub of such miseries as the stupefying Ricky Clemons-Carmento Floyd-Paige Sports Arena sequence and the profoundly sad matter of Sasha Menu Courey and … and … and.

So many times you’d think you’d witnessed the most preposterous set of circumstances you’d ever see … and you hadn’t.

But the last seven days capped by Saturday has a place at the front of this agonizing parade of the absurd.

We can only wonder, again, what could trump it.

The nasty brew of circumstances was bubbling plenty with racial turmoil on campus: the boycott that threatened forfeiture of the game Saturday … the toppling of Wolfe the day after an apparently inadvertent endorsement of it by Pinkel via Twitter… and arrests for threats of violence that had radiated fear through the MU community.

Oh, and then Pinkel announced on Friday that he had cancer.

It was a crazy trap of a week for Pinkel, who probably couldn’t please anyone but his players.

Some MU faithful likely were angered that he took a stance on Twitter in support of players who were in alignment with the movement to dump Wolfe essentially for not vigorously enough denouncing reported racial incidents or projecting adequate concern for the cause.

Others were upset that Pinkel didn’t go far enough to back up the implications of his tweet, waffling over the bigger picture and then disavowing the part of the message that gave a nod to Concerned Student 1950, the protest group so named for the first year African-American students were admitted to MU.

But in the end Pinkel reverted to doing what he does best, and maybe that’s the thing to remember most about someone who landed himself in a no-win situation even before it was known he had cancer.

When he told his team Friday, he said, it was one of the most emotional 15 minutes of his life. The players “looked scared,” he said, adding that he became “an absolute wreck emotionally.”

He wondered if he’d made a huge mistake telling them when he did even if the word was trickling out.

Pinkel, who stressed Saturday night that he feels well, worried that it might be impossible for them to play with the intensity they’d need.

Then the winningest coach in Mizzou history guided his team to another win to revive a season that appeared lost and give the school a much-needed short-term diversion.

And then he could do he still doesn’t do so well:

He danced, momentarily unburdened of “The Week,” the unknown implications ahead for MU and his own personal fight.

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 11:34 PM with the headline "Something for Gary Pinkel, Mizzou football team to celebrate."