Published: July 02, 2008 01:26 am      

COLUMN: Brown had ‘Product Rodriguez’ for sale

MORGANTOWN — Just got back from the grocery store, somewhat frustrated. I mean I walked up and down aisles for half an hour and couldn’t find what I wanted.

I found Total and Special K, even Smucker’s jelly and Vlasek pickles.

But ‘Product Rodriguez’? Nowhere to be found.

I even stopped one of the clerks to inquire.

“Where do you keep ‘Product Rodriguez’?” I asked.

“Hmmm, ‘Product Rodriguez,’” he answered. “Never heard of it. My guess would be it would be in the hot dog section.”

Ballpark Franks were there, even Oscar Meyer.

But no “Product Rodriguez.”

“Could it be you’re sold out of ‘Product Rodriguez’?” I asked at the checkout line.

“No, I never saw anyone buy any of it. My guess would be that it turned sour and we had to get rid of it,” the clerk said.

Maybe, this ‘Product Rodriguez’ that was first mentioned by a dude named Mike Brown in a conversation with West Virginia University President Mike Garrison wasn’t a grocery store item at all.

So I checked at Toys R Us, but they had never heard of it either.

“Can you describe it?” the clerk said.

“I’m kind of guessing, but I suspect it’s an action figure, maybe one that throws his hat a lot or one where you pull a string on its back and he fires off a string of four-letter words,” I answered.

“Sounds like a new toy I heard about that they’re selling up in Michigan,” the clerk said. “You might call our regional office in Ann Arbor and see if they can help you.”

Obviously, by now I was intrigued and I wanted to get to the bottom of this.

Garrison had just been deposed in WVU’s lawsuit against former coach Rich Rodriguez in an effort to enforce the $4 million buyout in his contract and his deposition had just been released. Maybe he told the story in there.

So I curled up for the next four and half hours with a copy of the deposition and, sure enough, there it was. It turns out that all this time we thought Rodriguez was person, but we were wrong.

He was a product, according to his agent, Mike Brown, who couldn’t do more to hurt Rodriguez’s image than he has already if he had been the one who designed the game plan for the Pitt game.

Garrison testified that during his first meeting with Brown in July 2007, Brown admitted to him that he had pushed Rodriguez toward the Alabama job he eventually turned down and that he would continue to push him toward other jobs.

According to Garrison, “Brown did not believe West Virginia University was up to keeping, what he called — and I was surprised when he said this — ‘Product Rodriguez’ and that there were other jobs. He wanted me to be aware that he would continue to ‘shop,’ as he put it, ‘Product Rodriguez’ on the open market.”

Now isn’t that how you want the man into whose hands you put your future to look at you … like a box of Cracker Jack. No emotion, no feelings for family, friend, players. Just a product.

Brown was selling “Snap, Crackle and Pop.” Michigan wound up buying it but not before Rodriguez bought into it first.

You have to remember who Rodriguez is and where he came from, considering that he seems to have forgotten his roots, his days growing up just down the road from WVU, his walking on to the football team and earning a scholarship, his desire to return to his alma mater as coach.

Garrison testified he tried to convince Rodriguez that there were some values in working at WVU during a crucial meeting between the two on Dec. 15, 2007, just before Rodriguez took the Michigan job, a meeting in which Garrison admits losing his cool.

“I don’t know if I yelled or not, but there was, there was one point in the conversation where I did become aggravated, and it was the point in the conversation when I expressed my strong feelings — which I maintain today — that there is great value in coaching at your alma mater, at your home university and in your home state,” Garrison said.

Rodriguez responded not in kind and not kindly, saying he “didn’t think the place was necessarily any more special than anyplace else,” Garrison testified, “and I was angry about that.”

Garrison later would note Rodriguez had used an expletive before the word special.

This is the man who introduced singing “Country Roads” at the end of each victory, a tribute to the state he claimed to love, a state that was, shall we say, “bleeping special” to him at that time.

Of course, that was when he was Rich Rod, not “Product Rodriguez.” It was in the days when Jarrett Brown, not Mike Brown, was important in his life, and when loyalty had a special place in his heart.

Now he’s at Michigan, and the Wolverine faithful better hope that he dislikes Ohio State as much as he dislikes West Virginia University or he’ll have about as long a shelf life there as did Sony Betamax.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.