Thursday, October 26, 2006

An Honest Question

In the Marquette-UWM saga, that has taken far too long and made both parties appear childish, there is only one thing left to finalize the deal: Marquette needs to sign the contract. My question today, though, is why this hasn’t been done yet. Marquette proposed the contract. UWM made it obnoxiously clear that it had signed the contract, doing so at a press conference shown on live TV. Marquette has received the contract. Head coach Tom Crean has openly recognized that it’s a reasonable contract from his perspective, having been quoted as saying about the UWM signing "We’re pleased they finally recognized the appropriateness of the contract."

So why, three days later, isn’t this thing signed? The picture in the Journal Sentinel indicates that it’s a pretty simple contract, so it’s not as if Marquette’s been reviewing the content again for the last three days. There may be a plausible reason why Marquette’s line still doesn’t have a signature on it, but I can’t think of what it would be. And given the number of times this agreement has gone from "done deal" to "no deal" and back, I refuse to believe that the Marquette-UWM game will happen until a second name is signed to the contract.

So step up and sign the paperwork already, Marquette. If you don’t sign a contract that you proposed, and that you’ve continually recognized as appropriate, you look pretty disingenuous. And in a process where both parties have mostly let me down so far, I’d like to avoid losing any more respect for anyone. Oh yeah, and that game would be nice to see, too.

(A final aside–I did not see the UWM press conference signing, as I was out of town on a basketball fact-finding mission, but doesn’t the act of calling a press conference to sign a contract in this situation smack of something that you’d see pro wrestlers do? Calling out another party by shoving a contract back in their face and agreeing to play on the other guy's terms seems less like something that UWM should be doing to Marquette, and more like something that Rowdy Roddy Piper would have done to Ric Flair.)

2 Comments:

At 11:41 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good post Chris. I believe you are right on with all your posts, but one. Rowdy Roddy Piper would have done that with his contract to box Mr. T right before Wrestlemania. Rowdy Roddy was in the WWF for most of his career while Ric Flair was in AWA/NWA for most of his career. This was before his skin got old and leathery.

-Curl

 
At 2:04 PM, Blogger Chris said...

Excellent point, Curl. I struggled to decide which wrestlers to use in this analogy, and decided upon Flair, due to his status as a villain (good guys like Hulk Hogan never would have required a prod to wrestle all challengers) and the fact that his name was easily recognizable. I tossed Piper in there because he did feud with Flair in the early (or mid) 1990s after leaving the WWF, and seemed better suited to play the neglected underdog role of UWM than, say, Dusty Rhodes, who I would consider the archetypal Flair opponent of the 1980s.

Glad to see that someone's reading closely enough to see the fine points that I struggle with.

 

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