If you have a lawyer/agent negotiating a $365,000-a-year contract for you, you’re not exactly a member of the impoverished working class. Those Bruce Springsteen songs aren’t about you.
A Division I college basketball coach is a manager, right? He or she supervises around 20 people, and most are compensated with six-figure annual salaries and plenty of perks.
They’re not punching timeclocks and working on assembly lines.
So someone tell me. Why is Gib Arnold filing a union grievance against the University of Hawaii? Why are UH coaches in a labor union to begin with?
Yes, the answer to the first question is obvious: Because he can. The other is a head-scratcher.
Sort of like what UH faced when it didn’t want a coach under NCAA investigation running the Rainbow Warriors when the season started. No good answers.
And here’s why this really matters: When UH fired Arnold, one of the reasons it did so was because it didn’t have the option of putting him on paid administrative leave.
Why? Because of his union membership.
It was leave him be until the NCAA letter of allegations, fire with cause or fire without cause. Manoa interim chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman chose fire without cause and stands by it. Now, in addition to the union grievance UH faces a $1.4 million legal challenge from Arnold because of a poorly written clause in their contract.
"I think that we made the right decision, that I made the right decision," Bley-Vroman told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s editorial board on Tuesday.
As it turned out, judging by the allegations brought forth by the NCAA a few weeks later, it looks like UH had plenty of cause to part ways with Arnold.
Firing without cause was "the sensible thing to do at that time," Bley-Vroman said Tuesday.
Maybe it would’ve been if the clause in the contract didn’t have what looks like a Grand Canyon-sized hole in it to pretty much anyone with a decent understanding of the English language.
It was the easy way out … or seemed like it at the time.
Bley-Vroman didn’t answer the part of a question asking if he’d reviewed the contract himself.
UH’s hope is that the other parts of Arnold’s contract about following rules and such will override the butchered clause regarding compensation for termination without cause.
At any rate — and you can believe it will be a high one, with more lawyers involved — the cost for this latest snafu is going to run high.
This makes what the UH basketball team has accomplished on the court heading into senior night all the more impressive. The Rainbow Warriors are on the verge of 20 wins under coach Benjy Taylor.
Bley-Vroman declined to speculate on when a permanent replacement for Arnold would be named. He conceded it would be ideal that whoever eventually takes over for Ben Jay as athletic director makes that call.
He also didn’t rule out UH self-imposing a ban on postseason play as the Big West tournament approaches. Considering the large number of mitigating circumstances in the rather tame NCAA allegations against the basketball program itself (not the former coaches), from here that step looks extremely unnecessary — not to mention unfair to the team.
Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783. His blog is at hawaiiwarriorwold.com.
