How to survive being chewed out

When Alabama football coach Nick Saban had a serious talk with offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin on the sidelines of the Sept. 9 game against Western Kentucky, some publications called it an “a--- chewing.”

Such tirades can be found in many areas. Last month I heard a secretary chewing out a janitor, and a TV station employee told me about receiving such a blast from network headquarters in New York.

When our son was in grammar school and I took him to his first football practice, I told him he had an advantage over some of his teammates: “Some of those kids have never been yelled at before.”

The first time I can remember being a recipient of a rant was when I was on a junior high basketball team visiting a nearby town. The coach’s halftime oration was not a pep talk so much as a chewing out. He watched his language, but he did compare our first-half performance to what went into the nearby locker room toilet.

Two of my most memorable instances of being chewed out came when I was in Officer Candidate School in the Army.

I was the parade coordinator for our class. For one of our parade practices I neglected to include field jackets in the uniform of the day. On that nippy day I heard about my error loud and clear.

We were members of Class 007-67. The lieutenants who supervised us had suggested we adopt the motto, “Licensed for Leadership,” in imitation of the James Bond phrase, “Licensed to Kill.” After I wrote a news release that mentioned the motto. I stood at attention in front of the company commander, who clearly stated that we shouldn’t be connected with words that implied we had any interest in killing. While he made his point, I quietly wadded up the news release in my hand.

I reenacted that performance before a higher ranking officer in Vietnam when I was a public information officer.

Management experts say it’s best to criticize underlings quietly and in private, but where could you do that on the football sidelines?

Most of the years I spent supervising newsrooms I didn’t have an office. Only once can I remember delivering a major reprimand in the newsroom. An Anniston Star reporter around 1971 was critiquing a Birmingham News story in a voice that everyone could hear. I interrupted him by saying “D--- it, (his first name)” and a hush fell over the room: “If you were as critical of your own writing as you are of other people’s, you’d be a better reporter.”

An ex-Marine, the publisher of the Advertiser and Alabama Journal in 1984 gave me my last memorable chewing. As the new weekend editor, I published a Journal story about a woman on death row in the combined Sunday edition of the two papers, and he thought I shouldn’t have done so without more about the victim’s family.

I survived the chewing out the way I had learned in the Army, standing at attention and saying “Yes, sir” a lot.

A longtime newspaperman, Coke Ellington worked for the Montgomery Advertiser from 1984 to 1997. He taught in the Alabama State University communications department from 1997 to 2014.