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Nebraska football vs. Nebraska basketball

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I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.

Ellen Sturgis Hooper

The Dial (July 1840) p. 123

I had hoped to do better.

But that’s the best I could do. For them. I wanted to say something pithy. But I had nothing. And as they looked to me, for answers, I felt inadequate.

“Recognition is the greatest motivator.”

Gerard C. Eakdale

Reading about Penn State’s iconic coach, Joe Paterno, I learned of the “experiment” he put into place early on in his career.

That high academic standards and athletic achievement were not mutually exclusive.

Paterno himself played football as an undergraduate at Brown. His parents wanted him to go to law school. He had other plans.

And so I borrowed an idea from him.

Perhaps I could demand high achievement from my students. But how would I do this? I didn’t have the athletic fields to reinforce any classroom ideas I might try out on them.

So I stumbled upon something else.

As a first year classroom survival technique, I got to know my kids. What made them tick? Where were they from? Who were their parents? What if I put them (the kids) first and not the “material?” It’s all I had. I didn’t know any better.

Show them that you love and respect them and they’ll run through walls for you. That popped into my head. I was on the look out for ways to recognize them.

Nicknames, likes, friends, aptitudes, eye-contact, accountability, one on one conversations, listening more than speaking.

In short: THEM.

Simple.

Not easy.

But, it works.

Can you do that?

Put others first. Listen more than you speak. Build others up. Hard work. Persistence. A positive attitude.

It never ends. Isn’t easy. Preaching to myself. Constant reminding.

It keeps me up at night.

And gets me up in the morning.

Another time ago, I sat at a desk.

I was a substitute teacher. In for a middle school science teacher who’d gone off for a week or two to find himself. As I sat there, I wrote down on a piece of paper how much I dearly wanted to have license to sit there. Without the word “substitute” attached.

It seemed so far off.

I was in another job. One I hated. It paid the bills. But at what cost? My soul?

So I tried to plan. With all the obstacles in the way, it seemed a daunting task.

Now I sit at another “desk.” My own kitchen table. With the reality of another school year staring me down tomorrow.

That other time was 15 years ago.

When I began my teaching career, I hoped for a time when I could call one of my students “colleague.” Hoping to inspire a young person to follow the path I had fought so hard to go after.

And just last week (during an in-service staff meeting), I heard my name called out from across the room.

Turning toward the voice, I found that student.

She had gone off to high school and college, and now she had become a teacher. And she told me of something I had mentioned to her another time ago.

“You’d make an excellent teacher.”

And with those forgotten words uttered by me, she had set forth too.

In case you were wondering, that’s what I do. Well, that’s what the gentleman who I was blessed enough to caddy for today told me. Yeah, God’s work. 

See once he found out that I was a teacher, he deigned my work to be that of a higher order.

“We need more people like you in the world, Mike,” he told me.

And he thanked me for doing such noble work.

As I cleaned his clubs.

And watched him drive off in his Bentley.

This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! you can all but speak!”

–from The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Flown in from some phantasm and contrasted against the melancholy grey clouds of another Valley like black-cloaked Bedouins on the white sands of the Sahara, came forth the Order. For payment on a line of credit signed by their own hands. Trying to get it right.

With sect-like stature amongst its devotees, The Order of the Horn wrested itself out from beneath the sand scrub fields like some flushed out springtime worm; its membership capped at inception.

And now that the deed’s been done, I don’t know what to do with it. Walking the thin line between friendly embellishment and doing it justice. Wishing I could expand the time we were engaged; knowing right from the start (we even acknowledged it), that it’d be gone in an instant.

Just cut my heart out.

Go ahead and cut it right out of my chest. Cut it out and and just stomp on it.

Might as well.

One: The Mentor. Scratch the surface, and you’d unearth an Orange and Blue before the Treys and Ashelys of Madison Avenue perverted its pill with a callous disregard for historic preservation. Like the others from Neptune Beach, Clewiston, and The Devil’s Milhopper he was a pure breed from the Dickey, Graves, and Pell lineage. He might have been one of Shug’s Plainsmen or perhaps even a Junkyard Dawg. Didn’t matter. Make much difference. He’d outwork you. You do that when you’re from the outside looking in. Not quite good enough. Come up just a yard short. Wait ’till the next year that hadn’t come. Wouldn’t come. Else the story’s end would change. No Hollywood Urban legend here. This was old school. Gimme some Skoal and Turkey and I’ll meet you inside Florida Field (sans Ben Hill Griffin).

He rode in on the Chandler, Reaves, Galloway, Brantley, Hutchinson, and Little steed. It’s all he had.

Given no choice; they’d do. Would be his alter egos on the Sandlewood back lot of his boyhood field of dreams. And he could state with certainty that in Athens and on The Plains was aroused in him the hardened reality that but for some cruel Mephistophelean geographical anomaly, he’d been spared the fate that would forever shackle him to a life he wouldn’t alter for even a sniff of the non chalance that could have been his. That’d be too easy. He had a chip on his shoulder. Gotta want it. Have some pride about yourself. And quite frankly, he was glad for it. Kept it honest. Run hard, run scared. “Oh, look at the sugar falling from the sky! Look at the Sugar falling from the sky!”

And he was just one. And he taught us things. Like caring, pride, and of course, the health benefits of liver.

Two: The Brain. Born as some sort of anachronistic Old Hickory and hamstrung with that same unholy triumvirate of acumen, lack, and tenacity. Back then (in the Valley of our collective youths), he could have gone on to a life of mediocrity. Mailed it in. Become beige. And no one would have blamed him. Cared. He had the built in excuses. Dragging for wayward balls in some non-descript Vedra lagoon (“hush, hush. Here comes T-hop”). For McDonald’s Monopoly tokens? Or maybe even a Big Mac. Take what you can. What was it that would drive him? Carry him forward even after having been dealt an unplayable hand (lie?). Plying his nascent wares on the grasses of Thousand Oaks and the “not so” Tru-Courts of The Fountains, there was an internal boil which festered unnoticed to those outside of The Know.

But he knew.

And so did The Heart.

He knew too because he had returned his serve. Had been on the receiving end of the chip-in par at dusk which squared the match. The dawn’s dusk. When all they had was an eccentric set of unmatched clubs and beat up, cat-gut Donnay rackets, handed down from club members who had no use for them (or maybe filched out of an unknowing locker). Two parts of a whole. And they’d go on in later years, fighting battles within (and without) trying to make some sense too. Just like I’m doing now.

It was the trip to Tallahassee that probably was to blame.

Gone off to Boy’s State to return to Man’s Country armed only with the standard issued tee-shirt and a roll of quarters (spending money from the sending VFW post). Hearing the Great One speak about commitment, integrity, and hard work. Didn’t have to tell him. Just an affirmation of the storm already burning inside. Some shoeless Guatamalan boys and girls thirty years later grateful for Bowden’s speech and quarters collected from grizzled ex-GI’s.

Three: The Dealmaker. He was the one with the heart of gold. A shirt off his back riverboat gambler. What was his was yours. Nothing less then; today. Rolling the dice. Winning more than losing (like a Mark Twain tale gone awry). Riding on the back of his motorized bike, he took me with him. Gained me access to places I had no right to be because that was what he was about. Showed me that the other half wasn’t as whole as I had been led to believe (they had bad breath, could lay a deuce, and left hair in the sinks too). The Rec-Room of youth. Matches in hand. You were one of his. And I was grateful. Indebted. And perhaps, he never even knew. A big man then; bigger man now. Could give him your keys and carte blanche. Good night Irene, that dog will walk. With a hearty laugh that belied an even heartier heart, he knew no bounds. In all things. And as I write these words now, I wonder how much’ll find its way home.

Four: Finally, The Heart. Equal parts broken and mended; wending his way back and forth on some self-imposed journey of reconciliation; stage right in his mind’s eye. Saw those orange helmets back when the snow covered the ground of some disguised northwestern Jersey town kept him physically inside. That was ‘77 and in El Paso’s Sun Bowl was unleashed his burden.

They’d take a trip along the Valley side of A1A in an attempt to find his father’s dreams which, while never fulfilled, would nonetheless open other doors. Doors to his dreams which lie latent yet primed for torment. And those same dreams would begin to manifest themselves on University Avenue, on the banks of the old Raritan, and even on some open yard in Central Park. In a whiffle ball game played three decades later. During a ruse that would bring them all back to the time when Rams roamed free. And the Order of the Horn could assemble once more.

I don’t have horns.

Yet that’s the sort of look I get when I tell people I teach middle school.

“But how do you deal with those attitudes?” they’ll inevitably ask.

My experience has shown me that “the kids of today” are not a whole lot different than they’ve always been. I ought to know. I was once one of “them.”

One of my guiding principles is that if you show them you care, they’ll “run through walls for you.”

And it’s true too.

Simple? Yes. Easy? No.

Robert Frost once said, “and that has made all the difference.”

I read somewhere that when a plane is in flight, it’s basically off course most of time. But its radar system, knowing its destination, continually makes the proper adjustments to get it back on track and ultimately to where it’s going.

And with us too?

In December of 1994, I was that plane.

In a bookstore, I happened upon “Coaching Football” by Tom Flores and Bob O’Connor. I was going somewhere yet nowhere. In chapter 2, entitled “Why We Play the Game,” there’s a section devoted to an overview of how Homer C. Rice (former Georgia Tech athletic director and college and professional coach) talks about how he went from dirt poverty to those lofty postions. I was intrigued. He discussed the role that football played in his success, how the game taught him to overcome adversity, and how to set goals. I was motivated to reach out to him, so I wrote him a letter.

He responded by sending me a very personal letter and a book that he had written called “The Attitude Technique.” This book became my “radar system” as I, with blind faith, implemented the practices that he used to successfully transform his life. He also mentioned another book which his father had given to him when he was a young boy. That book was called “I Dare You,” by William Danforth (the founder of The Ralston Purina Company). “I Dare You” is about how to live the “Four Square Life” (and if you ever buy any product made by Purina, you’ll notice that the company’s logo is the “four square checkerboard.”) That checkerboard is based on Danforth’s “four square” philosophy for living. After more letter writing to other coaches, I was astonished to discover that many of these same coaches had used Rice’s “Attitude Technique” as part of their team’s overall football program.

Both books and the subsequent correspondence I had with Homer Rice, literally changed my life. Since then, I have purchased multiple copies of “I Dare You” which I give to my students to read on a rotating basis. Every student gets one week to read the book, sign and date it upon completion, and return it to me to pass along to the next pair of students to read.

So “I Dare You.” If not now, when. Remember this: all can, some will, but most won’t. Which group are you in?

When she was in seventh grade, Noel told me she wanted to be a teacher. It was an exercise we did each year. Writing down your goals, that is.

Someone had taught me, so I blindly followed his advice. What did I have to lose? Already I was broke. No degree in hand, I had practically flunked out of college.

Now (then), I sat alone with a piece of yellow legal paper. I did what I thought I was supposed to do. Putting my head down, I ran hard and scared. For two years.

He was right.

I have the letter he sent in my binder. If he could know how he continues to inspire others. My students now. While he goes on, so do I. He walks with me though. He’s a coach and a teacher. He taught me with one condition: treat others as you wish to be treated. It’s written on my desk. For my kids to see. More importantly, it’s written in my heart.

And so they’d write down their hopes and dreams. And they’d do it just like I was taught to do. And they’d doubt too. But I could speak now with a passion burned in from experience. From failure. And heartache. And continued self-doubt. But I had something to hold on to. And that would change things.

Then in eighth grade, she’d tell me again how she wanted to teach. Again, she’d write it down. On a piece of paper. Dated and signed. So many years ago.

Coming back to see me years later, now a junior in high school, she’d tell me that it would be “early decision” she’d seek. All her eggs in one basket. “If not you, than who?” (and a good thing she couldn’t see me crossing my fingers too).

You know the rest?…

“Mr. C., I got in! Can you believe it? I actually got in. I am going to be a teacher!”

(I couldn’t help but go back to that day in ‘98 when I’d be asked, “Why would anyone want to be a teacher?” Would she know the answer now? Could she ever know?)

So today, coming into school, I’d stop to get my mail in my box. I’d see Gabby, the little first grader who was dropped off each day for “morning care.” She’d look at me like I had all the answers. With a smile on her face that could (and would) remind me of the answers that I continue to look for (maybe she wants to be a teacher?) Getting down on one knee, I’d give her the “high five” that the two of us tacitly agreed to give each other every time we meet. I’d tell her that she had a gift. And give her a wink.

Then putting down the mail, a letter of reference fell to the floor. It was for Noel.

She’s applying for a teaching position. At my school. Our school. And she wanted her teacher to vouch for her.

Brushing the tears aside and all alone, I filled it out.

Welcome home, Noel. Thank you.

Just staying afloat has been difficult enough. Making it to the other shore?

That’s another matter.

Mrs. Polovina was handing back our anatomy tests. She made a point of telling the class that most of us had done a lousy job.

“Most of you failed,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in these scores.”

Making my way up the long aisle to get mine, I readied myself for a red “F.” Instead, a “C” brought a bit of a relieved grin to my face.

Turning around to walk back to my seat, my steps were halted by her call of, “Just a minute, Michael.”

“What’s the matter,” I asked.

“Your grade?” she questioned.

“I got a C. Most of the class failed, you said.”

“Yes,” she quietly affirmed, “but I expect more from you.”

And almost thirty years later, I would find my role reversed.

Sitting down next to me, Alyssa had her head down. One of my most reliable students, she had just finished her test. “I know I didn’t do very well, Mr. C,” she announced with a tear streaming down her cheek.

An 86.

“Not your best effort?”

And so I recounted my 11th grade anatomy test story knowing too, that that same message Mrs. Polovina had relayed to me so many years ago, would have a similar effect on this future teacher.