"NO, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, THE DOOR WAS REALLY DURNED TRICKY"
Someone will always try to tell you a story about a coach after they leave town. The worst stories are outlandish slander, but the best straddle the line between outright untruth and total plausibility. Late night oral sex in a car gone wrong, for instance, leaving a job to escape the mafia, or simply not washing your hands one night at a bar after using the bathroom: attach each to the right subject in the right situation, and it all becomes myth before you can get it sanitized by cold, antiseptic wash of fact.
The key to making it stick even in a rain of facts, dear messageboarders and commenters, is making it sound like something that could totally happen to the subject. The best example of this ever comes via the late, great Blue-Gray Sky, and features former Notre Dame and current New Mexico coach Bob Davie convincingly and plausibly fighting with a hot dog machine at a 7-Eleven.
During my junior year in 1999, two of my female friends from Welsh Hall went off-campus to the 7-Eleven Store on the corner of Edison and Jefferson. They were shopping for snacks when they heard someone in the rear of the store banging on the hot dog machine (you know the kind -- the multi-pronged device capable of cooking up nasty 7-Eleven nostril-dogs at any time of day).
It turns out to be Bob Davie, who was having problems getting the little plastic door open.
According to my friends, when his last attempt to get the door open failed, Bob slammed his fist against the side of the machine and bellowed, "I swear, this whole town is trying to f--- me!"
The punchline seems contrived. Angrily tussling with a hot dog machine, though, and actually thinking that was a food one could put in one's mouth for nutritional purposes, despite having a six-figure salary one could use to purchase real, non-horrible food? That part seems all too real, or at least close enough to it to stick in your memory forever like...well, like the jammed door of a hot dog machine reinforcing the futility and sadness of your existence.