Baffoe: The Tragedy Of Tom Thibodeau

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) Everything in entertainment has already been done by William Shakespeare (which he modernly westernized from ancient civilizations). You can only update and rehash, adding your own pop culture references and idioms.

The end of the Chicago Bulls' season at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers on Thursday night can be read as tragedy or comedy. What's great about The Bard's work is that is lends itself to such wide interpretations (such as an Internet sports column). That such an end will likely produce another end — that of Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau's tenure here in Chicago — is pure tragedy, though.

It's a matter of days until executives John Paxson and Gar Forman announce "how thankful we are for everything Thibodeau has done for the team, but after talking with Tom, right now we feel that both parties are best suited headed in different directions" and any other various and sundry clichés that sugarcoat a coach's firing. Thibodeau knows it and has known it for a while despite deflecting questions for months about it. While the corpse of this season was still smoking, it was evident in his voice.

The tragedy lies in the collective awareness that Thibodeau is a good coach, though fatally flawed. Read any Shakespearean tragedy, and you realize fairly early on what the flaw in a character is that will shuffle him off this mortal (or in this case, professional) coil. With Thibodeau, it was hubris and inflexibility. It was his handling of players' minutes to the point that management had to tie his hands, his refusal to pump the brakes in games that were clearly out of hand in the Bulls favor or otherwise, his iciness toward developing rookies. It was his general attitude of "How dare you, the viewing public or my bosses, question my methods?" It was his inability more than once to get his team to capitalize on a wounded, struggling Cavaliers team.

Since Christmas, the Bulls' season had the strange feeling of watching a winning team walking toward some slaughter and that come season's end, the knife over Thibodeau's head would finally land true. Its descent is in progress.

Dan Bernstein aptly compared these Bulls to T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men."

Marlon Brando's character of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (a modern rehashing of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness), a soldier who has turned so sour on the objectives set forth by his superiors that he goes insanely rogue, reads aloud "The Hollow Men" (while blatantly omitting the poem's first line that contains Kurtz's name). I laugh to think of Thibodeau right now alone in his office doing the same.

But that Shakespeare derivative still stands. "The Hollow Men" is a title alluding to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Caesar is offed in the play by his coworkers while Rome is in a pretty good state of affairs, though his hubris and inflexibility more than once blind him from saving his own life, making his death hardly sympathetic to the audience.

Brando received an Academy Award nomination for his role of Mark Antony, a nomination solidified in his speech at Caesar's funeral. He was a Caesar loyalist and friend and spoke in order to persuade the crowd that this "ambitious" man was more benevolent ruler than tyrant.

So might the lingering few Thibodeau loyalists say of him. Something like:

Friends, Chicagoans, Bulls fans, lend me your ears;
I come to bury a coach, not to praise him.
The evil and lingering injuries that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their buyouts;
So let it be with Thibs. The noble Paxson
Hath told you Thibs was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath the coach answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Gar Forman and the rest–
For Forman is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in this press conference.
He was our friend, faithful and just to the team:
But Paxson says he was ambitious;
And Pax is an honourable man.
Tom hath brought a 255-139 record home to Chicago
Whose United Center did the general red shirts fill:
Did this in Thibodeau seem ambitious?
When that Derrick Rose had cried, Thibs hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Forman says he was ambitious;
And Forman is an honourable man.
You all did see that in his tenure
He thrice was presented injuries to Rose,
Which quitting he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Paxson says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Garpax spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to bullish beasts,
And fans have lost their reason.

Thus is the tragedy of Tom Thibodeau. Paxon and Forman will slay him "not because they love Thibs less, but because they loved the Bulls more," to paraphrase Caesar's murderous friend's defense. More good coach than tyrant perhaps, but it was ultimately that fear of his potential tyranny that caused a conspiracy against him and eventually led to what presumably will be his soon exit from Chicago.

That and a fanbase that now sadly shakes its head not for his present state but at what might have been.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

In:
• John Paxson
• Cleveland Cavaliers
• Tom Thibodeau
• Gar Forman