The Cult of Coach

From Slate:

The Coach as Culture Hero
What's so great about the guy with the whistle around his neck?
By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Jan. 6, 2006, at 4:39 PM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.
Narrative nonfiction has lately gone gaga over coaches. Michael Lewis, who ordinarily writes in an elegantly skeptical vein, pays homage to the tough-loving jock who taught him persistence in Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life. David Halberstam, whose The Best and the Brightest skewered the blind arrogance of the Vietnam War's Ivy-educated architects, takes an altogether different stance toward authority in The Education of a Coach, about the lessons one coach learned from his father, who was also a coach. A new anthology titled Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, invites John Edgar Wideman, Pat Conroy, David Maraniss, Charles McGrath, and Francine Prose to ponder the centrality of coaches to their lives.

There is surely no American archetype more preposterously overpraised at this cultural moment than the Coach. He has become a vessel of redemption, a wise old pappy who could tell us a thing or two about this thing we call life if only we'd bother to listen. The Coach is the voice of dedication and grit, of giving 110 percent, of never saying no to your dreams. His subject is the playing field, but his message is universal. Persist and you will either prevail or go down knowing you gave it everything you had. It's all about heart.

Not every contribution to the Coach anthology is warm and fuzzy. Prose expresses loathing for her coach, one Miss G., an authoritarian bitch who undermined Prose's fragile confidence in her physical self and gave her an F that nearly kept her out of the college of her choice. Prose's grumbling is kind of refreshing. My own chief memory of high-school coaches (in my case, they were all physical-education teachers, since I was never on a team) is that they enjoyed being mean to the fat kids. That kept skinny-but-uncoordinated kids like me out of the line of fire.

Even in stating her lingering resentment toward her coach, Prose joins the anthology's other contributors in overstating the importance of coaches. I can't even remember the names of my coaches; in my mind's eye they all blur together into one sunburned composite who wore sunglasses even when he was indoors and overused the word "outstanding." As far as dispensing life lessons went, one of them was quoted in the Los Angeles Times earlier this week praising Jack Abramoff's work ethic.

While the article's tone is negative, and its apparent suggestion is a change in norms for a reduction in the importance of coaches, it does raise two points: coaches are important to many, many people, and usually, but not always, for the right reasons.

Coaches (doubly for those that teach as well) are remembered long after the games are won or lost and practice has ended. The strange fact is that as a teacher/coach you will be exposed to many people who you will never come into contact with again, and likely will forget. I find that I tend to remember some of the kids who made some key play or something special in practice or a game most vividly. The kids themselves may remember it, but even if they do, they are more likely to be affected by the small moments: the slight in practice; you too busy to talk when they came to your office with what felt like the weight of the world on their shoulders; when you did take extra time to talk or encourage them; pushed them to new levels; or lead by example.

To teach and to coach are still the most noble professions. Coaching is arguably harder because there is an immediate goal--winning games--that both controls your job security and often your ability to teach important values and lessons in life. Also, speaking honestly, football and whatever direct knowledge about schemes or techniques matters much less than what the kids learn in school.

The advantage of coaching is that I believe football naturally encourages important values and lessons in the spirit of fair competition and pursuit of self-betterment: to get on the field kids must work hard and better themselves; they learn not to taunt competitors and be gracious in victory; football requires impeccable coordination between all 11 men, unlike say tennis or even basketball; not hustling is likely to get you exposed on a given play and knocked on your butt or an obvious mistake. Bad habits and bad values help create losers. Last, the very fact that football is a "game" rather than "school" is that (in the vast majority of cases) kids can actually fail, safely. Never playing a down in football or failing to prepare properly for a game is not fatal to life, in fact, it may teach great life lessons. Failing at school, or work, or in family or relationships is unlikely to be so harmless.