Tongues are wagging today throughout college football circles as the Wall Street Journal ($) runs with this front page story on former University of Alabama football coach Mike Price‘s libel lawsuit against Time Inc. The lawsuit involves an allegedly false story that Time’s Sports Illustrated magazine ran in May, 2003 involving a wild night that Coach Price had in Pensacola, Florida while attending an Alabama football-related golf tournament. That night of festive activity led to Coach Price’s termination as the Alabama football coach before he had ever coached a game for the Crimson Tide.
After sitting out a season, Coach Price endured the football coaching equivalent of an exile to El Paso, where he now coaches the University of Texas at El Paso football team. For those of you not familiar with the culture of college football, suffice it to say that there is little similarity between being the head coach of the University of Alabama and the head coach at UTEP. Thus, so long as Coach Price can get over the considerable liability issues in his libel suit against Time, establishing damages — despite the fact that Alabama fired Coach Price three days before the SI article appeared — will likely not be much of a problem.
As with any defamation lawsuit by a public figure such as Coach Price, establishing liability is a tough obstacle to overcome. To win his suit, Coach Price has to prove that the news organization acted with “actual malice,” which means that it published information known to be false or recklessly disregarded whether the information was false.

What’s particularly interesting about Coach Price’s lawsuit is that he is not claiming that he acted particularly well the night in question, just not as bad as the SI article portrayed:

Mr. Price says that the SI story was inaccurate. In a September 2003 deposition, Mr. Price said that on the afternoon when the magazine said he visited the strip club, he was flying to Pensacola, checking into his hotel and socializing with other golf-tournament attendees. Rather than making a “beeline back to” [the strip club] after dinner that evening, as the article states, Mr. Price said he visited three other bars first and arrived at [the strip club] at about 11:30 p.m., already “pretty intoxicated.” He denied seeing [a stripper], let alone groping or propositioning her.
Mr. Price said that he was so inebriated that he didn’t realize that his waitress from [the strip club] got into a cab with him and accompanied him to his hotel room. He said that they slept in their clothes and didn’t have sex. The next morning, he said, he “was shocked and surprised” to find the waitress there. “I didn’t recall that she stayed,” he said.
[Mr. Price’s counsel] says that the waitress, . . . confirmed Mr. Price’s account, saying in an informal interview that she was the only woman in the hotel room that night. She also confirmed his claim that she charged about $1,000 of room-service items to Mr. Price after he left the room in the morning to play golf.
At his deposition, Mr. Price was asked whether, given his admittedly incomplete memory of what happened that night, it was possible that he had “engaged in sexual activity” in his hotel room. “It’s possible, but very unlikely,” Mr. Price replied. He explained that he didn’t bring his Viagra anti-impotence medication with him to Pensacola, and, given all of his drinking that night, he wouldn’t have been capable of having sex.

The trial judge in this case will be able to sell tickets to people wanting to get on the jury panel for the trial.