There has to be a name for it, if there is I don’t know what it is, but Juwan Howard is a victim of the insecure male “respect” fallacy.
Juwan Howard isn’t an angry “black” man. I don’t think he’s angry at all, I think he’s a victim of the tired “give me my respect” male trope.
We’ve seen this time and time again in sports, “us against the world”, “(insert city here) vs. everybody”, “shock the world”, etc. I’ve never understood this mentality as it is often highjacked by teams that are really good and expect to win. It’s a tired old motivation tactic that hasn’t evolved and has only cause some to take it to heart and use “give me my respect as a man” as a crutch to do tremendously dumb stuff.
Juwan Howard is an accomplished man by any measure, but he is very immature in terms of self awareness and self respect, his claim that “Gard put his hands on me” and he felt threatened is embarrassing. Gard simply tried to have a conversation with Howard who acted like an immature child and tried to walk away from the problem, he felt disrespected by Gard for calling a timeout with a few seconds left in the game. If Juwan was a mature adult he would have had a conversation with Gard, informed him that calling a time out wasn’t appropriate in his opinion and taken his team back to the locker room. Instead he let his gooberized version of respect damage his legacy forever.
Admit it, how many times have you seen men square off over a childish belief that they have been “disrespected” by the offender? It happens every weekend in bars and nightclubs around the world. Everybody wants respect but nobody wants to make the hard decisions to earn it. If you have to fight to gain respect that is likely where the problem beings and ends.
If Howard wanted to enhance his standing and therefore his “respect” among his peers, he would have had an adult conversation with Greg Gard, even if they disagreed and let that be the end of it. If he had chosen this option, his standing and respect would have been enhance in the eyes of all involved, his own players, opposing players, rival coaches, the media and his bosses. Instead his reputation is in shambles and he will have to work for years to repair it in the eyes of those who like and appreciate him.
This will blow over, but Juwan must work to repair his reputation. He isn’t a drunken goober in a bar in a Friday night, he’s the Head Coach at on of the top college programs in America, he has all the respect he could ever possibly need, it’s time for him to grow up and leave his childhood insecurities in the past. He needs to take the respect he’s always had and enhance it for the good of the program and himself.
