USA Today Opinion Piece

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Plenty of other coaches appear to be having rage strokes on the sidelines. Have blistered their players publicly. For them, it’s dismissed as “passion” or praised as “tough coaching.” Nothing to see here or look at further.

Yet it’s somehow fair game to detail the coach’s decades-long estrangement from her father, presenting as a sympathetic figure a man who devastated his daughter by cheating on her mother and walking out on his family, suggesting instead that it’s Mulkey who is the heartless one.

There are debates to be had about the ethics of digging that far into Mulkey’s background, even if she did write about her father in her book. Even the best of families are complicated and messy. Treading into the fractures in one that isn’t is dangerous territory that reeks of tabloid voyeurism.

The character flaws of Mulkey’s father are his and his alone. The suggestion her reaction to them is evidence of one of hers is both inappropriate and unseemly, armchair psychology at best given Mulkey didn’t talk to the Post.

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You might not like Mulkey. You might not like her players. But if you are not bothered by the public discourse that surrounds them and cannot see the sexism and racism at its root, the problem isn’t them.

It’s you.

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Some of it she brings on herself. She says, does and wears things that shock and offend. She frames things to suit her purposes, including her claim following Saturday’s game that she didn’t know the Post story had been published despite being asked about it before the game.

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