Way back in October, head football coach Mike Locksley decided he had enough.
Lack of on-field production was something he could deal with.
Lack of production in the classroom, however, was not. So against his better sense of compassion, he jettisoned tailback Demond Dennis, citing Dennis’ failure to fulfill the academic standards the coaching staff had deemed necessary.
Add that to the short list of things Locksley has done right since he took over for Rocky Long.
With tap-dance footwork and jaguar-like reflexes, Demond Willie Dennis might have eluded defenders, but he couldn’t outrun the cops or the long arm of the law.
If the allegations against Dennis are true — that he drove a getaway car after three men robbed his cousin at gunpoint — then it’s far too easy to deduce why Locksley, who has a penchant for not dismissing players who have committed more reckless offenses than not turning in homework, parted ways with the once-prized recruit. And why, in doing so, he was so forceful in proclaiming that, “Demond Dennis’ chapter is done. Demond Dennis is done as a Lobo.”
Far be it from me to speculate so aggressively about someone’s character, but the truth is that football wasn’t Dennis’ issue.
Neither was academics. It wasn’t just that Dennis was apathetic toward his studies; it was that he was indifferent to everything — and everyone.
Rules were more like behavioral suggestions to Dennis. To Dennis, people, more specifically people in the media, were nothing more than faceless caricatures with whom he was forced to interact. We all know what I’m getting at.
The only mistake that former Albuquerque Journal beat reporter Greg Archuleta made when he tried to contact Dennis last year to inquire whether he had quit the team was that he tried to contact Dennis at all. What he didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, is that Dennis is a wolf in sheep’s clothing — his closet contempt for the media never amounted to so much as a blip on the radar.
Up in front of the podium, when the cameras were engaged, Dennis was soft-spoken and wasn’t particularly fond of the attention, but there was no evidence to suggest he had any pent-up anger toward those who covered him.
All that vitriol came out later, after Archuleta was already reassigned.
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In one of the few text-message exchanges I had with Dennis, I asked him why, if he didn’t want to be at UNM and was contemplating withdrawing from school and heading back to Georgia, he chose to hand over Archuleta’s email to the Athletics Department.
His response told me everything I needed to know: “I hate the media.”
True to form, Demond Dennis was about exacting revenge for some perceived injustice. How dare he be expected to grant interviews unless they, in some way, benefited his agenda.
Maybe a week after that conversation, Dennis texted me, saying that he was ready to divulge what led to him being booted from the UNM football team. He instructed me to call him the next day.
Reporters are paid to write stories, and knowing there could be one there, I obliged. But he never picked up. Not once. And he never returned my calls.
See, Demond Dennis got some sort of twisted gratification out of toying with reporters. In retrospect, I’m glad I never landed the interview. Judging by the evidence, it seems reasonable to believe that Dennis’ account would have likely been an embellished version laced with half-truths, and it would have been an intentional dig at Locksley — character assassination.
In the end, it morphed into an unfair case of credibility assassination and a miscarried, albeit valiant, attempt to uphold journalistic ethics.
The Dennis-Archuleta episode will always exist for me as a jumbled parable about the current state of journalism, indicative of the complex, one-way highway reporters must now navigate — one in which the reporter must strive for objectivity while being prodded because of bloodless, excuseless competition to get stories by almost any means necessary.
Of course, this by-any-means doctrine was spawned out of sheer survival, a defense mechanism adopted to combat the airtight filter of public relations and the rolling, 24-hour news cycle.
Having covered Lobo football during Locksley’s tenure, I can sympathize with what Archuleta endured. Many untapped informational wells were quickly capped. Finding out about contentious issues in the football program was equal parts building rapport and dumb luck.
So “he-said, he-said” became our threshold of proof. Get one side, get the other. Boiled down to its essence, that is what passed for “objective” journalism.
The hard part was actually getting those sides without taking sides, even if that just meant convincing a source that you were attuned to his or her plight, which is what Archuleta tried to do when he suggested it might have been “a step in the right direction” if Dennis had quit.
This is where the “creed of objectivity” — something that Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and respected author, derided because it “banishes empathy, passion and a quest for justice” — breaks down: when a source doesn’t have empathy or passion, doesn’t strive for justice or doesn’t respect a reporter’s job, and has less-than-upstanding motives.
Archuleta tried building rapport with a snake. And even a snake charmer will tell you, no matter how close you get to it, no matter how many hours you spend with it, a snake instinctively bites.
In the short time he played for the Lobos, Demond Dennis wore the number 1. It’s indicative of the way Dennis carried himself. He didn’t give a damn about anybody or anything but himself. Didn’t care about his grades. Didn’t care about representing the University. Didn’t care about Archuleta and how that email might impact his career. And now we have come to find that, if the allegations are true, how could we have expected anything else?
Demond Dennis didn’t even care about a member of his own family.
Inattention to academics isn’t what did Demond Dennis in. It was indifference to his fellow man.
