Gillispie rewrites legacy with recent DUI

While most of us were sound asleep early Thursday morning, Billy Gillispie was out redefining his legacy.

Forget about VMI or the NIT.

Now it’s DUI.

And the thing about DUI: You always lose.

Gillispie was driving drunk and he got caught. Third time, in fact. The first two happened in Texas, and neither time did the drunken driving charge stick.

Whether or not the charges stick this time around is unimportant. The video clip is easy to find online, and it surely will get quite a number of views. Whether or not he’s found guilty, the video’s there.

What’s the lesson?

No matter how many PSAs are out there, people are still driving drunk. High-profile people, at that. And it’s because they get away with it.

Sure, it’s impossible to keep all drunk drivers off the roads, as much as I wish we could. But because drunk drivers (not just high-profile individuals, either) continue to get away with it, more pop up.

Part of it is a culture issue. We’re almost immune to drunk driving because horrible accidents happen all the time. If a horrible accident shows up on the afternoon news, it’s hard not to feel sick about it.

Change the channel, do what you need to do.

But after that initial shock, does the thought linger past the newscast? For some, I’m sure it does. I fall in that category. For others, I fear it’s forgotten after the first commercial break.

Part of it may be a media issue. Gillispie being pulled over and charged with drunken driving will likely generate more newsprint and talk radio time than most of the other thousands of DUI-related arrests in Kentucky that have happened or will happen in 2009.

And while Gillispie earned himself this moment in the news the second he sat down behind the wheel, it’s a rather tame example to demonstrate why one shouldn’t drink and drive. Nobody was injured, no cars were totaled. Gillispie was cooperatively transported to jail where he spent the night.

Then he was released in a matter of hours.

Generally speaking, this is what we picture when a celebrity is caught drunk driving. We default more toward Gillispie’s instance, anyway, than to an instance like Donte’ Stallworth’s, when an innocent person was killed.

And I understand that, in a way, because celebrity drunk driving cases like Gillispie’s are far more common. But outside the celebrity realm, families are put through unimaginable trauma far more often than we realize because of drunk driving.

I fear that when coaches like Gillispie or Bob Huggins (pleaded no contest to DUI in 2004) are pulled over for drunk driving — and thank goodness neither were injured in their humiliating incidents — young people see that the coaches get away with a slap on the wrist and they return back to normal life.

This shouldn’t keep Gillispie from straightening out his life and getting another coaching gig down the road. He had two drunk driving-related incidents hanging over his head when UK hired him in 2007, so this new case won’t stop future employers, nor should it.

It is a little sad, though, that his dodging and diving from the media when he was fired at UK seemed like a more embarrassing moment than his arrest Thursday morning.
Heck, the arrest may not have been the most embarrassing thing to happen to a former UK coach within that 12-hour span, thanks to Rick Pitino’s inexplicable presser in which he called the media liars, “except for what I’ve told you.”

Depending on how the Gillispie incident is covered within the next few days (and I’m going to assume Gillispie won’t be holding any unnecessary news conferences to yell at the media), impressionable youth — especially the ones getting drivers’ licenses for the first time in the near future — may get the idea that drunk driving is OK, as long as you have a second-hand connection to someone publicly unfaithful to his or her marriage.

Is it right? No. What Pitino did was despicable every way I can look at it. But his actions did not put himself or anyone around him in harm’s way. He didn’t jeopardize the personal safety of any innocent passersby at any point.

And that’s exactly what Gillispie did.

That’s exactly what thousands do every year in Kentucky alone, let alone the rest of the country and beyond.

And no matter what else happens in your life, it’s a surefire way to rewrite your legacy.

James Pennington is a journalism senior. E-mail jpennington@kykernel.com.