This story just won't go away.
Neuheisel's explanation hard to grasp
Les Carpenter / Times staff columnist
KENT — He is so good when he lies.
Yesterday the fibs spilled down on Rick Neuheisel in courtroom 3A of the Regional Justice Center. The former Washington football coach sat on the witness stand as a tape of an interview he gave to KJR radio in February 2003 played on the courtroom speakers.
It is an interview he freely admits was a sham.
But to listen to him tell radio host Mike Gastineau that he had been in San Francisco golfing with friends when he was actually interviewing for the head-coaching job with the San Francisco 49ers, the paradox of the former Huskies coach is suddenly so clear again.
His lies sound as good as the truth.
It was a curious strategy for his first full day on the witness stand. Neuheisel is asking for more than $6 million from the University of Washington because he thinks he was unfairly fired for lying to NCAA investigators. Then his lawyers had the jury listen as he coolly lied on the radio in a tape that was startling in its clarity. The lying Neuheisel sounded as smooth as the one sitting there under oath.
Which is, of course, the great question of this trial: When does the lying stop and the truth begin?
At one point, his attorney Cy Vance asked Neuheisel if he was lying when he told Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist John Levesque he was not interviewing with the Niners after the writer encountered him at the San Francisco airport.
"Unfortunately, yes," Neuheisel said. Moments later, the coach said his old boss, Barbara Hedges, "was not being truthful" when she told the media at the same time that she didn't know Neuheisel was talking to the NFL team. She has denied this in her testimony in what is becoming one of many gray areas.
Listening to Neuheisel yesterday, it was clear he will be himself right to the end, always maneuvering on the edge, dancing along the line between fiction and reality. Even as he talked under oath about the 49ers interview that he lied about in 2003, his story seemed filled with loose ends.
His testimony was heavy on cloak-and-dagger details (like secretly ducking into an SUV driven by Niners executive Terry Donahue outside the San Jose airport, or being whisked down a freight elevator at a hotel by team owner John York to keep from being spotted by reporters that may or may not have been in the lobby). But under the smoke, which included stories of Donahue promising to pay him as much as $3 million a year, he left out a critical point: The 49ers never offered him the job.
In fact, the general impression around the NFL is that former San Francisco coach Bill Walsh, then a consultant to the team, was so against Neuheisel as a candidate that he rejected him minutes into the interview.
Still, this wasn't the story Neuheisel conveyed as his attorneys gently led him through a narrative that ended up with him telling Donahue in the ride back to the airport that the job probably wasn't right for him. Left properly unexplained is why the 49ers — if Neuheisel was such an important candidate — dumped him like a dead body at the airport to fly home on a commercial jetliner.
Even Neuheisel's anatomy of a lie appeared hard to grasp. He told the jury that the Niners had requested a confidentiality agreement so as not to embarrass them should he decline the job. So to create a cover story, he said he reached into his briefcase during the trip and pulled out a golf ball.
"I had a golf ball and I like to golf," he told the jury, trying to make the illogical conclusion that the presence of a golf ball in his briefcase meant he could invent a tale of playing golf instead of interviewing with Walsh.
He said he "was very uncomfortable" doing this.
Yet he hardly sounded uncomfortable as he boasted of speaking in an undecipherable code to Hedges when he told her the next day that all she needed to know was that he was in San Francisco to play golf.
Nor did worry fill his voice on the radio when he told Gastineau, this time sans-code, that he had been golfing, not interviewing.
Rather, he sounded a lot like he did moments later when his attorneys played the tapes of a second interview with Gastineau recorded days later after the lies had been uncovered.
"I will never be in this situation again," Neuheisel said then. "Ever."
Vance had the tapes turned off.
"Were you being genuine?" he asked.
"Absolutely," Neuheisel replied.
What a mess the jurors must have been by the end of the day. Here was a football coach who is suing his former employer for firing him for lying, admitting to lying, then saying in the same voice and tone he used for lying that he was now telling the truth.
And to think Neuheisel hasn't even gotten to the whole lying-to-the-NCAA-investigators thing yet.
Which is the whole reason he's here.
Neuheisel's explanation hard to grasp
Les Carpenter / Times staff columnist
KENT — He is so good when he lies.
Yesterday the fibs spilled down on Rick Neuheisel in courtroom 3A of the Regional Justice Center. The former Washington football coach sat on the witness stand as a tape of an interview he gave to KJR radio in February 2003 played on the courtroom speakers.
It is an interview he freely admits was a sham.
But to listen to him tell radio host Mike Gastineau that he had been in San Francisco golfing with friends when he was actually interviewing for the head-coaching job with the San Francisco 49ers, the paradox of the former Huskies coach is suddenly so clear again.
His lies sound as good as the truth.
It was a curious strategy for his first full day on the witness stand. Neuheisel is asking for more than $6 million from the University of Washington because he thinks he was unfairly fired for lying to NCAA investigators. Then his lawyers had the jury listen as he coolly lied on the radio in a tape that was startling in its clarity. The lying Neuheisel sounded as smooth as the one sitting there under oath.
Which is, of course, the great question of this trial: When does the lying stop and the truth begin?
At one point, his attorney Cy Vance asked Neuheisel if he was lying when he told Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist John Levesque he was not interviewing with the Niners after the writer encountered him at the San Francisco airport.
"Unfortunately, yes," Neuheisel said. Moments later, the coach said his old boss, Barbara Hedges, "was not being truthful" when she told the media at the same time that she didn't know Neuheisel was talking to the NFL team. She has denied this in her testimony in what is becoming one of many gray areas.
Listening to Neuheisel yesterday, it was clear he will be himself right to the end, always maneuvering on the edge, dancing along the line between fiction and reality. Even as he talked under oath about the 49ers interview that he lied about in 2003, his story seemed filled with loose ends.
His testimony was heavy on cloak-and-dagger details (like secretly ducking into an SUV driven by Niners executive Terry Donahue outside the San Jose airport, or being whisked down a freight elevator at a hotel by team owner John York to keep from being spotted by reporters that may or may not have been in the lobby). But under the smoke, which included stories of Donahue promising to pay him as much as $3 million a year, he left out a critical point: The 49ers never offered him the job.
In fact, the general impression around the NFL is that former San Francisco coach Bill Walsh, then a consultant to the team, was so against Neuheisel as a candidate that he rejected him minutes into the interview.
Still, this wasn't the story Neuheisel conveyed as his attorneys gently led him through a narrative that ended up with him telling Donahue in the ride back to the airport that the job probably wasn't right for him. Left properly unexplained is why the 49ers — if Neuheisel was such an important candidate — dumped him like a dead body at the airport to fly home on a commercial jetliner.
Even Neuheisel's anatomy of a lie appeared hard to grasp. He told the jury that the Niners had requested a confidentiality agreement so as not to embarrass them should he decline the job. So to create a cover story, he said he reached into his briefcase during the trip and pulled out a golf ball.
"I had a golf ball and I like to golf," he told the jury, trying to make the illogical conclusion that the presence of a golf ball in his briefcase meant he could invent a tale of playing golf instead of interviewing with Walsh.
He said he "was very uncomfortable" doing this.
Yet he hardly sounded uncomfortable as he boasted of speaking in an undecipherable code to Hedges when he told her the next day that all she needed to know was that he was in San Francisco to play golf.
Nor did worry fill his voice on the radio when he told Gastineau, this time sans-code, that he had been golfing, not interviewing.
Rather, he sounded a lot like he did moments later when his attorneys played the tapes of a second interview with Gastineau recorded days later after the lies had been uncovered.
"I will never be in this situation again," Neuheisel said then. "Ever."
Vance had the tapes turned off.
"Were you being genuine?" he asked.
"Absolutely," Neuheisel replied.
What a mess the jurors must have been by the end of the day. Here was a football coach who is suing his former employer for firing him for lying, admitting to lying, then saying in the same voice and tone he used for lying that he was now telling the truth.
And to think Neuheisel hasn't even gotten to the whole lying-to-the-NCAA-investigators thing yet.
Which is the whole reason he's here.
