Nutt, Mustain and all that

We don't really have any business knowing the inner-most thoughts of anyone in the Houston Nutt household other than maybe the coach himself about that ballyhooed young quarterback from Springdale, Mitch Mustain, or the quarterback's mom, Beck Campbell.

We do not know if it was the coach's wife who sent this e-mail from the coach's household computer account telling a Nutt family friend that it would have been pleasant to beat the you-know-what out of Mustain's mother. Except that the e-mail didn't say you-know-what. That's my family-newspaper evasion.

We know the coach is famous for doing his exhaustive electronic communicating not from home, but via portable texting. We know his wife has gained a bit of fame for combative e-mailing. But that's all we know.

Well, we also know this: The e-mail was sent in late May, well after young Mustain had bailed. It looks like more than one party to this bad soap opera simply cannot let it go.

We can almost begin to understand the resentment, if not the viciousness. Almost.

This Mustain lad had committed and "decommitted" and committed again to Nutt. Then a book came out about the young man's storied senior football season at Springdale High. The lad got quoted in it as saying something unflattering about Nutt. Then the boy's mom joined other Springdale parents in a highly irregular meeting with the athletic director to air complaints about how the football coach was deploying their kids.

Mustain was 17 at the time of the book comment, 18 at the time of the parents' meeting. A high school senior accomplished at the game of football probably shouldn't have a book written about him. But in this case one was. The youngster said what he said. He should have been expeditiously forgiven by any aggrieved adults.

And his mom was merely one of several parents in that meeting, and not the primary organizer.

But you know how these things work. Nutt says all the appropriately dismissive and forgiving things publicly. He says none of this is any big deal. He says his mind is only on the next game. Then he goes home after a hard day and says what he really thinks about spoiled kids and obsessed parents. He gets reinforced by a supportive loved one, who, in turn, gets even more worked up.

The next thing you know, someone with access to that e-mail account has sent an e-mail to a Nutt family friend about liking to beat the bleep out of the boy's mom.

Specifically, this latest disclosed missive recalls that Mustain's mom had gotten this you-know-what beaten out of her years before by two women she'd evicted from rental property, with one of the assailants using a board, and adds, "I wish I were one of them, do you blame them?"

My goodness. That's rather extreme. Mustain's mom sustained a concussion, lacerations and separated ribs. One of her assailants got six years in prison.

Then a crazy confluence of controversies led to this e-mail being included in a batch of hundreds of documents subjected to a newspaper's Freedom of Information request because it became part of an investigation, by which I mean whitewash, by the University of Arkansas, a public institution.

While we don't have any business knowing all that we know, we can't unknow any of it once we do. And what we can't unknow tells us plainly that the coach's circle was uncommonly resentful, petty and crude.

For goodness sakes, couldn't the coach's family and friends have let the kid get coddled long enough to see if maybe he could actually chunk the football as well as some were saying he could?

But, no. A physical therapist close to the Nutts sent that famously horrid e-mail to the kid himself, ridiculing him as "Mr. Interception King" and demanding that he leave. The kid's mom gave a copy of this altogether unfathomable e-mail to the university chancellor, and the university let the coach investigate his own circle, and an untimely and perfunctory apology was all that was imposed, and, well, here we are.

I don't think we've heard the last of it, unless, maybe, this coach does what his physical therapist chum wanted Mustain to do, which is not let the screen door hit him.

(John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbru mmett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.)