Fitts, the team's administrator, says the news media missed the point about McCown. The question wasn't whether he was a role model, she says. It's whether he showed up to coach when few others were willing to.
"People said he got in trouble and all that," she said, "but he was always there for ball season."
Another defender of a sort is Levi Watkins, the Hopkins surgeon who started the MLK awards 25 years ago. "I am disappointed but one of the things about Dr. King is he believed in mercy. He believed in second chances. I think this man must have done some good."
The jailhouse interview turns back to the Gators and the pleasure he took in them. Coaching, he says, has given him an identity. "Everybody [in the neighborhood] knows me as the coach."
And he wants to come back.
"For two more years I'd coach Pop Warner, but eventually move up to middle school, high school. Maybe college."
In reality, the team - under scrutiny by the league and appealing the fine - can't let him return. What he didn't know was that the Gators recently sent a letter to the league pledging that McCown "will no longer be affiliated with Old Town Football."
His absence from the team is "a shame," Anthony Graves, a fellow Gators coach, said recently.
"The kids keep asking how's he doing." He pauses. "There's not really anybody to take his place."
jeff.barker@baltsun.com
