If you heard about Andrew Giuliani’s lawsuit against Duke University after he was kicked off the golf team and immediately thought about Cosmo Kramer, you’re hardly alone. If you take the time to actually read the lawsuit, you’ll be even more convinced that, if anything, Kramer’s lawsuit had more merit.
As you may recall, in one episode of Seinfeld, Kramer sued Sue Ellen Mischke, the Oh Henry candy bar heiress, when he injured his shoulder after crashing his car into a lamppost. Kramer was happily distracted by Mischke walking down the street wearing only a bra. At the trial, Kramer claimed the injury stunted his dream of joining the senior golf tour. The trial ultimately got derailed when Stan the Caddy advised Kramer to have Mischke try on the bra. It didn’t fit. Mischke walked and Kramer’s dream of a pro career was derailed.
Giuliani looks to be headed for a similar fate, without the side benefit of seeing Mischke parade by in her bra.
Coming across every bit the pampered, spoiled son of privilege, young Giuliani is claiming that his dreams of joining the PGA Tour have been severely hampered by what Kramer’s lawyer Jackie Chiles would probably call the preposterous, outrageous, and salacious conduct of the Duke mens golf coach, O.D. Vincent. Except Giuliani’s version of Jackie Chiles, attorney Robert Ekstrand, didn’t have the benefit of Seinfeld’s writers. Thus he was left to claim in rather boring fashion, that the purpose of the suit was to establish what “common sense and basic morals plainly dictate: each of the acts described…is wrongful and must be stopped.”
Of course, it tends to go without saying that common sense and basic morals were thrown out the window the minute the lawsuit was filed, but it’s worth saying anyway. Suing a coach because you didn’t make the team may be a relatively new response to an age-old issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s a reasonable or even rational response. That these sorts of lawsuits are now more commonplace isn’t so much an indictment of the justice system as it is an indictment of the parents who can’t tolerate seeing junior unhappy.
The lawsuit itself is remarkable in its intent. Peeled away, Giuliani is a whiny non-scholarship golfer who claims that his tuition payments, coupled with various student handbooks, constituted a contract that Duke and its golf coach have now breached. That’s a stretch, legally, to be completely generous. Much more of a stretch are the alleged breaches.
The complaint weaves a tale of back-room dealing and imagined conspiracies all of which served to deny poor Giuliani his God-given right to play and practice for free at Duke’s golf facilities. And if it’s not too much trouble, he’d like his tuition reimbursed.
In young Andrew’s version of the events, he begrudgingly owns up to some juvenile conduct, with the emphasis on begrudgingly, but says it hardly justifies the draconian punishment of permanent banishment. Of course, as you read the 29-page complaint, a few additional layers of the onion get stripped away and make you say “hmmm, maybe there is another side to this.” For example, all the aforesaid conduct caused was an indefinite suspension, not banishment. Giuliani had various opportunities to gain reinstatement but chose instead to ignore these opportunities in favor of lawyering up.
Article comments
1 - Marny
Your ability to make me laugh will always be your saving grace.