What Coaches Taught Me

Is Tim Walz an Exception to the Rule?

I have often said, to myself among others and in a tone of wonder, “I learned more about self-discipline and hard work on the playing field than from any class I ever took.” I know, that sounds ridiculous coming from an academic. But look, what my reading since the first grade has taught me is almost the opposite of self-discipline and the realism that’s supposed to come of it.

The reading has taught me how to let go of what I knew of myself at any given moment, and to give myself over, almost literally, to the experiences on offer from the writer whose words couldn’t be mine but could, without much effort, be made my own in the sense that for the moment I could believe in the worlds they depicted, the things they made me see, the places they let me inhabit—worlds elsewhere, unspeakable things, strange places. That lesson holds for the non-fiction as well as the novels and poems I’ve read, and once thought I was meant to write.

But playing football for six to eight years, depending on how you count my time in college ball, did teach me something about containing my self, which is to say concentrating my energy and suppressing my emotions. This, too, probably sounds ridiculous, coming from someone who played a team sport known for its insane bursts of energy and emotion. And yet I played my best when everything went quiet, when the chaos of the colliding bodies around me seemed to have slowed down and I could see the pattern of the play unfolding as if I had planned all along to be there, in the right place to make the cut, the tackle, the interception, whatever was exactly needed then.

Those moments happened because I had practiced them, or rather a coach had been on the scene, on the field, to force me to repeat them over and over in drills, to the point where they became predictable, replicable, even routine. Consciousness had nothing to do with it, except that, having scouted the opposing team, our coaches could diagram formations, draw up plays, and, most important, explain the “reads”—in other words, the tells, the clues, the signs, the symptoms—that would disclose what to expect from the first few flickers of movement on the line of scrimmage. If the tight end blocks down, for example, you look at and through the guard to the backfield to see what the running back is doing: if those two are moving laterally, it’s a sweep, so move with them, but stay inside out, don’t let the guard push you to the sideline because that means a big gain; if neither is moving laterally, they’re pass blocking and that tight end will be releasing to the flat, so get on him, he’s probably headed downfield. And so on.

Inspiration by coaches’ exhortation? That, too. had nothing to do with my best performances, and I’d bet it had the same effect on most, maybe all players, except perhaps in the first rush as you leave the locker room or break from the first huddle. The analogue is a sugar high—it lasts five minutes at most. Then it’s down to making the reads, getting to the place you planned on, doing what you did all week long in practice. At that lower level of existence, when all your senses are attuned to the task at hand, you’re actually operating on a higher plane of being, where “peak performance” becomes possible; but that state is simply not sustainable past an hour or two, unless the relative tranquility of a golf course is the setting of your exertion.

The high school coaches I can recall weren’t remarkable as sculptors of adolescent psyches or skills. They weren’t leaders of anybody, or in anything. I remember George Zigman, the sophomore basketball coach, not because he had anything significant to say about the sport in question but because he convinced me that American History, the required course he taught, under duress—he was fond of anecdotes about George Washington’s bad teeth—was quite possibly the most boring field of inquiry ever.

Under his influence, I studiously avoided history courses until I was forced to enroll in one by the English Department at Northern Illinois University, where I landed at the age of 21 after being expelled by Carthage College. The course was ENG 361: “British History 1750 to the Present”—basic background for the rise of the novel and all that—taught by one Marvin S. Rosen, the pan-sexual Marxist who became my mentor, friend, confessor, et al., then steered me toward graduate school in his benighted discipline.

I also remember Jerry Thompson, an English teacher and the defensive backs coach who, in an interesting twist on Kierkegaard’s dictum, bet all comers every year that he could run faster backward than they could forward; he never lost that bet. And Don Grothe, a phys-ed teacher, sophomore football coach, and ex-Marine who would punctuate his locker room perorations—not speeches, but random thoughts—by closing with a shrug, a grimace, some spit, and these cryptic words: “On that.” Or Tom Morrison, who would attempt inspiration by saying, “Well, if you play a sport, go ahead.” He specialized in the sport of baseball, but he had appointments in several others, at all levels.

And then there was Ron Hilt, a geometry teacher and the head coach my junior year, who tried to motivate me by pointedly (and unjustly) keeping me out of the starting lineup until it was first and goal at the 3-yard line, whereupon he sent me in with a play, Buck 831 on one, which, as the fullback who followed the right guard into the end zone untouched, let me score our first touchdown of the season. This crude psychological ploy worked. That was my favorite year of playing football.

In college, the head coach, Art Keller, had been my father’s roommate and teammate when they attended Carthage in the 1940s. He impressed me mainly because he led us in calisthenics as well as drills in the August heat—he was as fit as any of his players, including me, which, in view of my father’s jolly obesity, seemed impossible, even miraculous. Did he have super powers? He was a smooth talker, too, a good recruiter, who convinced me to keep playing after an orthopedic surgeon told me I risked permanent disability if I did (my knee was by then festooned with floating bodies that would occasionally lock the joint and put me face down on the field). I quit the team an hour after that conversation, having though it through, and I never went back to my locker. The college owned all the gear, anyway, right down to the t-shirt and the jock strap.

If there’s an exception to the rule I’m suggesting here, that coaches don’t easily translate as leaders, or even teachers, because they’re on the scene mainly to run drills, it’s my brother—who does remind me of what people say about Tim Walz as a coach and a teacher. He was the head football coach at Lake Park High School (in a Chicago suburb) for 17 years, where he also taught German and served as the president of the teacher’s union. Before and after that he coached high school football in the Catholic League of Chicago, at a four-year private college, at a power-house community college (the College of DuPage), and in Germany for a professional team there. His career as a football coach on all these levels spanned 39 years.

If we may judge from the composition of his staff at Lake Park, Andy was a leader, which is to say someone his students and players could “look up to,” try to emulate. At least half of his assistants were former players who had gone on to play college ball, to get teaching degrees, and then return to Lake Park to work with him. One of them became the head coach when Andy retired in 2011.

Buzz Bissinger, the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights (1990), recently warned us against falling for the wholly fictional Coach Taylor, the prince among would-be men in the beloved TV adaptation with the same title as Bissinger’s unsparing, non-fictional account of high-school football in Odessa, Texas. In the same op-ed, he warned us against equating Coach Taylor and Coach Walz (link is below):

“The best high school coaches, and there are some out there, believe in their players as more than just puzzle parts. They want to win, but much like Gary Gaines, the real coach featured in my book who inspired the character of Coach Taylor, they show qualities of grace when losing. They understand kids and approach them as mentors, as the kids struggle with adolescence and maturity and moodiness. When we talk about Coach Walz, we should hope for that kind of coach.”

We should hope because the cliche holds true—the exceptions prove the rule. Like Bissinger, I’m here to remind you that “there are some out there” like Coach Gaines, Coach Walz, and Coach Livingston. We don’t have to go back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/opinion/tim-walz-coach-friday-night-lights.html?