coach
Reviewed by Duncan Jamieson, Ashland University
AUGUST 8, 2007 archive
Growing up in New York as an avid Yankees' fan, my friend and next door neighbor Frank supported the New York Giants. Andrew Blauner begins Coach with a wonderful reminiscence of Casey Stengel by George Vecsey. Vecsey did not play for Casey Stengel. Rather, Vecsey first met Stengel in 1960 when his editor at Newsday sent him to Yankee Stadium to cover the game. Later in the collection, Benjamin Cheever's essay includes the following great bon mot by Giants' manager, Leo Durocher: "If Lincoln had coached Little League, we'd be two nations under God."
For me, the joy of this collection is the way the essays seem to live and breathe as the individual authors recall how coaches influenced their lives, both positively and negatively. They have a personal feel about them that is very engaging. Vecsey's essay recalls my childhood, when Stengel managed the Bronx Bombers to World Series victory after World Series victory. Later, though no longer as interested in baseball, I enjoyed Casey's work with the New York Mets. Frank Deford's essay about Marquette's basketball coach, Al McGuire, reads as if Deford were saying it on Wednesday mornings on NPR's "Morning Edition." Although I never went to summer camp and never played any sport in high school or college, Christine Brennan's incredible story about her legendary Miss O took me back to Andrew Jackson High School where our basketball team made it to the citywide finals, only to be beaten by Commerce.
Bob Wolff's childhood dream was to make it to major league baseball. Now in his ninth decade, he has never seen baseball as a "pastime"; to him, it was and remains a passion. In the days before Little League, he played pick up games, and then in high school his first coach, Pop LaRue, sharpened his skills in center field. Wolff went to Duke University to play for former Philadelphia A's pitching star Jack Coombs because he saw it as the best path to the majors. While he played for Coombs, he also worked at the local radio station. A couple of injuries led Wolff to ask Coombs' advice about the future, and Coombs recommended Wolff focus on broadcasting, which not only got him into the majors, but gave him the opportunity to be the first sportscaster to do play-by-play for the four major professional championships-baseball, football, basketball, and hockey.
While most of the coaches the authors write about influenced them as children or young adults, a few of the essays defy this construction. George Plimpton reminds us that good coaches came along at any time. Tired of watching his golf game get progressively worse, he went to the Callaway Test Center in California, where John Redman and Mike Donaway took him on. Jane Leavy's essay about coaching an AIDS victim on dying explores the coaching relationship-"exhorting and cajoling others to get the most out of their bodies" (p 217)-in an interesting fashion, because despite the fact Bob called her "Coach," he actually coached her and those around him on how to live. Jane Leavy's essay about coaching Bob on dying reminded me of my father, who at 82, I believe to this day, decided that if he had to live tethered to an oxygen tank, it was time to die, and did so in a matter of weeks.
The authors are all well known, newspaper and magazine columnists and editors, broadcast commentators, and professors. They all share their memories, positive and not so positive, of coaches who influenced their lives. Unlike the authors, many of the coaches are people who have achieved no lasting fame, no name recognition, no place in the appropriate hall of fame. At the same time, however, they have achieved something much greater; they have had a significant, lasting impact on someone's life. E. M. Swift writes lovingly of Frank Ward, who coached, served as athletic director and taught history at an Illinois country day school. When students reconnected after he retired, they found him living in economically constrained circumstances. Students touched by his teaching and athletes who played for him raised sufficient money to move him and his wife into a retirement community. To Frank Ward, coaching equaled happiness; he enjoyed the opportunity to shape young lives. "That what I always thought of my job, that I was in the business of molding" (p 28).
Not all of the essays held my attention with equal force, and a couple of them left me wondering why the editor agreed to their inclusion. My only other criticism is the overwhelmingly maleness of the collection. Of twenty-five essays, only four are written by women. Surely, the editor could have located more women writers who found inspiration in a coach. These criticisms aside, this is a wonderful collection of essays. While there's little here for scholars, there is much inspiration. It is also a collection that would be well suited to a class on the role of sport in American life.
Blauner, Andrew (ed). Coach. New York: Warner Books, 2005. x + 291 pp. $14.99 ppb.
Copyright © 2007 by Duncan Jamieson.