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Eye of the hurricanes
Published: 10/18/2006 1:30 PM
Last Modified: 10/18/2006 1:30 PM




Hey coach, how do you feel about getting fired?
That was the question I had to ask Larry Coker a few years back. Coker had just gotten his pink slip when he was an assistant coach at Oklahoma. It was in the days before the Tulsa World had a "beat" system, where one reporter is assigned to one school for an entire season, so I drew the short straw and had to call Coker and ask him how he felt about losing his job.
It was not a fun question to ask and I'm sure it was not a fun question to answer. But I learned something about Larry Coker that day. He didn't say bad things about his former bosses. He didn't hang up the phone. He didn't chew out the reporter for calling him to ask what it felt like to lose a job. He more or less said that's the way the cookie crumbles and life goes on.
My guess is that Larry Coker is a really good man. Bad things sometimes happen to good people and Coker's team, the Miami Hurricanes, had a bad day when players got into a brawl with Florida International players last Saturday.
Coker likely will be made out to be the scapegoat. However it turns out, I bet he handles it like a champ.




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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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