Just came across this Joy of Six from last February about Kevin Pieterson. Great read
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/feb/21/joy-of-six-kevin-pietersen
@The Big Cheese enjoyed this piece
http://narrative.ly/epic-adventurers/secret-life-guinness-world-records-judge/
@The Big Cheese , do we consider KP to be an alright sort?
He is a cock, but he does his own thing
Wasnât sure where to put this, worth a read
11 October 2014Last updated at 08:33 GMT
[SIZE=6]DJ Campbell: Championship to playing for free in six months[/SIZE]
By Gary RoseBBC Sport
When DJ Campbell stepped out onto the Ewood Park pitch for Blackburn in October 2013, the striker - then earning a reported ÂŁ25,000 a week - did not expect he would be playing for free at non-league side Maidenhead United barely 12 months later.
Washing his own training kit and playing on sloping pitches is a world away from the life to which he had become accustomed during his career, much of which was spent in Englandâs top two divisions.
As recently as March, the 32-year-old was scoring goals in the Championship in front of thousands, but on Saturday he could take to the pitch in front of hundreds as Conference South side Maidenhead host Gosport Borough in the FA Cup third qualifying round.
But Campbell will not be turning out for a team that plays in the sixth tier of English football because his career is on a downward spiral.
The former Birmingham and Queens Park Rangers player is at Maidenhead to rediscover his love for the game, having come close to retiring after being wrongly implicated in a match-fixing scandal.
The toughest period of his career began one December morning last year, when a knock at the door at Campbellâs home preceded a dramatic arrest in front of his family, and did not end until nine months later when he was finally cleared of any wrongdoing.
DJ Campbell played in the Premier League with Birmingham, QPR and Blackpool
âThe whole situation was a joke and obviously depressing,â says Campbell.
"It was difficult because after all I had worked for, it tarnished my name and even now you still have managers saying this and that.
âBut I canât change any of that, all I can do is focus on getting back to where I was. Hopefully I can do that.â
Campbell was one of six people arrested[/URL] in connection with allegations of fixing in football matches, which came after ex-Portsmouth defender Sam Sodje allegedly [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25288657â]told an undercover newspaper reporter he could arrange yellow and red cards in exchange for cash. Sodje was later cleared.
Released on bail following his arrest, Campbell tried to focus on his football, but he was loaned by Blackburn to Millwall in January before leaving the Ewood Park club by mutual consent in July.
It was the culmination of a difficult time in Campbellâs life.
Having climbed from non-league to the Premier League with Birmingham, QPR and Blackpool, an increasing number of injuries in recent years - coupled with the spectre of the match-fixing allegations hanging over him - almost became too much for Campbell.
[SIZE=5]Campbellâs climb[/SIZE]
Released by Aston Villa as a teenager in 2000, DJ Campbell almost considers giving up on a career in football
Plays for Chesham United and Stevenage Borough before signing for Yeading in 2003
Campbell scores seven goals in the FA Cup as Yeading reach the third round, earning him a move to League One side Brentford in 2005
A prolific run of 12 goals in just six months, including a double against Premier League side Sunderland in the FA Cup, catches the eye of then Birmingham boss Steve Bruce
Joins Birmingham for half a million pounds in January 2006, less than a year after he was playing non-league football
âIt was all new things to deal with and my dad passed at the same time while the match-fixing rubbish came up, so it was a lot to handle,â he says.
"I got to the point where I thought âwhat is the point?â I didnât need all these problems and for what?
"But at the same time I reflected on my career.
"I had done a lot to come from nothing and really make something of myself, why would I throw it all away because of this?
âThere were plenty of people in a worse position than me who would love to play football, so I just decided to get on with it and do what I love.â
After leaving Blackburn, Campbell hired a personal trainer and took to training on his own in a park.
It was during that time he received a call from current Maidenhead boss Johnson Hippolyte - Campbellâs friend, mentor and former manager at non-league Yeading, one of the strikerâs first clubs, over a decade ago.
Campbell credits Hippolyte, âDraxâ to those who know him, as the man who kick-started his career, having convinced him not to quit football as a teenager after being released by Aston Villa.
Consequently, when Hippolyte made a tongue-in-cheek comment about joining Maidenhead, Campbell took it more seriously.
âI was waiting for the right club to come along,â continues Campbell. "But as time went by I thought about it more and more, and in the end thought âwhy not?â
âThe move will have surprised a lot of people but if there was anyone I was going to play for at this level it would be Drax, we have a lot of history together.â
There was, though, the issue of wages. Maidenhead clearly had no chance of offering Campbell the kind of money he had been accustomed to during his Premier League and Championship days.
Campbell scored seven goals for Yeading in the 2004-05 FA Cup, catching the eye of league clubs
But the discussion never came up.
âIt is not all about the money,â Campbell says. "It is about being happy and I have not been happy the last few years with all that has gone on.
"It is easy to think all footballers are motivated by money, and I could have signed for a club and just sat on the bench and taken a wage but I decided not to do that.
âIâve decided to play for Drax and get back to doing what I love doing.â
Hippolyte adds: "He is not getting paid at all.
"The players were really keen for him to stay and play for Maidenhead when he was initially just training with us, so much so that they offered a whip-round for him.
âBut it was never about the money for DJ, he just wants to play and enjoy himself again, and we want for him to show that he is still hungry and still has the ability.â
That ability is clearly still there.
In front of a crowd of about 400, Campbell scored on his debut last month as Maidenhead beat Faversham Town 4-0 to progress to the FA Cup third qualifying round.
To grab a goal in the competition, with Hippolyte watching on from the dugout, will reignite memories of the famous FA Cup run the pair enjoyed at Yeading back in the 2004-05 season.
[SIZE=5]Still got it?[/SIZE]
Since joining Maidenhead last month, DJ Campbell has scored three goals in three appearances
Campbell scored seven goals in the competition to help Yeading reach the third round, where they lost 2-0 to Newcastle.
But, having held out impressively for 50 minutes against the Premier League side, with the game broadcast to millions on BBC One, Campbell caught the eye, with Brentford giving the then 24-year-old his first chance in professional football.
From then on he flourished, scoring 12 goals in six months - including a double in a 2-1 win against Sunderland in the FA Cup which earned him a move to Birmingham City, then playing in the Premier League.
Less than a year after playing non-league football, Campbellâs form for Brentford helped secure a move to the Premier League with Birmingham
âThe FA Cup really put me in the shop window,â remembers Campbell.
"It made me get noticed because in those days it was tough for non-league players, not many got the chance they seem to do now.
"My form in the competition helped get me my move to Brentford. I continued to score lots there and Birmingham manager Steve Bruce was in the crowd when we played Sunderland in the FA Cup.
âI think he was looking at another player, but I scored twice and caught his eye, so that was a blessing.â
With just two qualifying rounds remaining in this seasonâs competition before the first round proper, Campbell hopes to be able to score the goals that could help Maidenhead replicate Yeadingâs famous FA Cup run from a decade ago.
But regardless of whether the Magpies can achieve that, Hippolyte, remembering the talented 16-year-old he first spotted playing in a park near his home, hopes Campbell will not be around long enough to be part of it.
âI really wish Saturday is his last game,â he says.
"In a perfect world he will play for us, score in the FA Cup and get us through and get his move on Monday.
âAs much as I would love to keep him here, as a father figure he should not be playing anywhere near this level.â
Considering the FA Cup arguably made his career in professional football, it would only be fitting if the competition now resurrected it.
I met DJ Campbell in a nightclub in Blackpool. There was a small club within a club downstairs full of black people. DJ was there with two bodyguards scoping young ones. He was behind a red rope for the VIP area which was akin to Ricky Gervais in Extras with the David Bowie scene. We went up beside the rope and chatted for awhile, but we had to leave as we were the only white people in there and it was starting to get uncomfortable, especially what with us wearing those pillow cases.
Fascinating interview by Kimmage with Harrington. Highlights;
- McGinley slapping the arse off who he thought was Harringtonâs wife
- his take on why Gallacher had to be picked
- out-planking Rory with Jim furykâs wife on his back
Funny, bizarre and everything Harrington.
[QUOTE=âScrunchie, post: 1029952, member: 1408â]Fascinating interview by Kimmage with Harrington. Highlights;
- McGinley slapping the arse off who he thought was Harringtonâs wife
- his take on why Gallacher had to be picked
- out-planking Rory with Jim furykâs wife on his back
Funny, bizarre and everything Harrington.
Harrington makes shit of McGinleys lies. Go to the compulsive liars thread with this piece scrunch
If Harrington was English heâd be a right cunt.
Pleasant article from yesterdays Times
[SIZE=6]Talking-heads becoming more of a story than the game itself[/SIZE]
[SIZE=5]Why has so much been made about what RTĂ panel said about the Ireland game?[/SIZE]
Republic of Ireland assistant manager Roy Keane gives a team talk to the players before the game against Germany at the Veltins-Arena, Gelsenkirchen. Photo: Joe Giddens/PA
http://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.1062970.1360189810!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_40/image.jpg
Brian OâConnor
Mon, Oct 20, 2014, 06:00
First published:Mon, Oct 20, 2014, 06:00
Itâs interesting how so much post-Gelsenkirchen talk has wound up focusing on what a trio of ex-players back in a Dublin television studio thought of it. There was a time when sport used to be about sport. That faded when so much of sport became about the chat surrounding it. Are we now at a stage where chat about the chat is where itâs at?
Opinions, of course, are famously like backsides: everybodyâs got one, and everybody thinks everybody elseâs stinks. Messrs Giles, Brady and Dunphy poo-poohed the style of Irelandâs 1-1 draw against the world champions Germany, an opinion they are paid to give, an important âconversationâ distinction which nevertheless hasnât stopped people zeroing in on the pundits.
All of which is good news for them and their employers, but which somehow has managed to switch a substantial amount of focus away from one of Irish footballs greatest ever results. It appears talking-heads can actually be more interesting than the game itself, a curio that would probably be acknowledged with an intellectual sigh somewhere in Italy if Umberto Eco gave even the faintest of fiddlers for anything to do with football.
It was 1969 when Eco wrote his famous essay about âSports Chatterâ in which he argued that the boundaries between sport as activity, and simply talking about it, had got so blurred that chatterers think of themselves as participants. And if sport is waste, which he argued it was, sports chatter is a glorification of waste, but a dangerous one as it diverts public energy from so much that is validly important.
[SIZE=3]Validity definitions[/SIZE]
Forty-five years on , and nimbly skipping over validity definitions for the moment, Ecoâs argument that most people much prefer talking to doing can hardly be dismissed anymore as a grudge by someone whose schooldays might have been tarnished by being forced to go in goal.
For an awful lot of people, actual between-the-lines sport, its huff-and-puff mechanics, is comparative âmuzakâ to what really counts, the seemingly endless âconversationâ surrounding it.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in football. What was once about going to a stadium is now an experience swamped in the sort of gadgetry which can make standing on a terrace seem quaint, although with the option of going home afterwards to watch parsed-down, easily digestible highlights, accompanied by studio chatter, which in turn provokes chatter about the chatter, all of it perpetuating the idea that itâs about football when in fact a lot of the time it just isnât.
An awful lot of supposed football fans arenât really fans of actual football at all but the circus which goes on around it, the sort of circus that makes three guys who havenât kicked a defender in anger in at least three decades newsworthy.
In this case theyâre news because they appeared to pee on a euphoric mood of national celebration with actual football detail of a sort that didnât chime with a last-minute, plucky, boys-in-green storyline. But detail is for anoraks, a bit boring. And just as Eco predicted, football has become about so much more than mere sporting detail.
The game can be anything you want it to be, baby; political, moral, money, sex, conflict, an overwhelming torrent of context which the bare mechanics of 22 two people chasing a ball canât possibly compete with.
Roy Keaneâs new book for instance is about many things, but football is well down the list. At heart Keaneâs storyline is political, the politics of a middle-aged man unable to comprehend why The Man isnât fair, ordinarily an adolescent issue which, nevertheless, plenty other middle-aged men clearly havenât come to terms with either, but who lack the opportunity, the articulacy, or the ghost-writer to so vehemently express their angst.
[SIZE=3]Morality play[/SIZE]
Itâs fascinating stuff though, a morality play in its way, just as is the current debate about whether or not Ched Evans should be allowed return to the game after serving a sentence for rape. You donât need any actual knowledge of football to comprehend the nuances of a tawdry story replete with such an accessible assortment of tabloid-tweeting-trolling prejudices.
Who needs to know what â3-5-2â is to appreciate the relentless wave of âMourinho taunts Wengerâ type headlines which reduce tactical complexity to bite-size personalised convenience and contribute to a 24/7 yellow-tickertape soap-opera which is no more about football than Neighbours is about life, but with managers hogging the lines because players are, you know, too dense to say or do anything bar play, or go dogging.
That Giles & Co might be correct in what they said about the Germany game is actually mostly irrelevant. What isnât irrelevant is why so much has been made of what they said. It was opinion, the sort of chatter that Eco dismissed 45 years ago, just as he would dismiss this chattering about chattererâs chat, because itâs inconsequential to what really matters.
Where heâs vulnerable is that people somehow continue to insist on judging for themselves what really matters to them, rather than what should. It is perhaps the blind-spot in the old boyâs idealism, a reluctance to accept that sport can actually generate the sort of interest and passion which the political culture so conspicuously fails to.
Passions remain resolutely subjective. Eco simply never possessed one for sport, the sort that continues to make us shout at the telly and yelp âdid you see thatâ to the person sitting next to us. Sport without chatter would be empty. But chattering about the chat over the chat is surely going too far. So Iâm going to stop now.
I read these earlier, fascinating insight into American prisons from the prisoners perspective. Well worth a read and debunks a few myths. The articles on Prison sex and Weight lifting are excellent
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/drugs-chess-books-or-gambling-how-to-fight-boredom-1671431372
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/violence-is-currency-a-pacifists-guide-to-prison-weapo-1643807529
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/a-gentlemans-guide-to-sex-in-prison-1634995425
http://fittish.deadspin.com/chained-wimbledon-the-joys-and-perils-of-prison-tennis-1576826012
http://fittish.deadspin.com/an-ex-cons-guide-to-prison-weightlifting-1571930353
[SIZE=6]Gary Smith points the way to the long and the short of good sportswriting[/SIZE]
http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/columnists/michael-moynihan/michael-moynihan-gary-smith-points-the-way-to-the-long-and-the-short-of-good-sportswriting-303690.html
Sportswriters arenât famous for praising other sportswriters, but one man unites his peers like no other. Gary Smith, long-time star of Sports Illustrated, has delivered some of the great reads.
Even the greatest fishermen donât land them all.
Gary Smith, the great long-form sportswriter of our time, pauses when you ask about the stories that got away.
One stays with him, that of the late Al Davis, the famous, cantankerous, and famously cantankerous owner of the Oakland Raiders NFL team.
âI wouldnât call it a regret exactly,â says Smith. âBut I think if you could have had access to Al Davis in his last month of life, it would have been a hell of a story.
âDavis had battled death his whole career. Anyone he knew who got sick â or anyone he barely knew, come to that â he would galvanise a whole crusade to fight it, bringing in the best doctors, sit with the personâŚ
âIt was almost a personal campaign against death, and I had a sense that when he had to face death, that it would have been a great story.â
Smith and great stories go together like a horse and carriage. Thatâs why the sportswriting world was taken aback when it was announced earlier this year that he was stepping back from magazine writing with Sports Illustrated.
âI just started working on a book and was leaning more and more towards thinking of that rather than taking the three months off that are required for a magazine piece,â he says.
âI just figured it was better to honour that instinct that was so strong, so I decided to follow that.
âJaded? No, it was more of a sense that I wanted to work out what was going on with the book, to work on that.â
He mentioned the fact that he started work on a book: is he superstitious about talking up a project like that before he gets around to writing it?
âA bit â Iâm not superstitious as such, but I donât discuss the books too much while I write them.
âEven with the magazine pieces Iâd like to keep them wrapped up inside and riddle it all out without talking it out, as it were.â
Those magazine pieces â like Crime And Punishment, about a teenage basketball star convicted of rape, or Tyson The Timid, Tyson The Terrible, about the former world champion, are lengthy, discursive and penetrating.
The man who wrote them says that having the time to spend polishing the material was key.
âItâs huge. For me, that was the only way to get the kind of depth I was really interested in. Having those two-and-a-half months or whatever for the story was vital.
âThereâs face-to-face time with the interviews, but then when Iâd get back Iâd go over the material also, and thatâs often when it would dawn on me where the real heartbeat of the story was â and that would require a whole new wave of interviewing and phone calls.
âSometimes, if you had good fortune, the heartbeat of the story would come to you as you were engaged in the face-to-face interviews, but more often that came afterwards.
âThatâs why the time for all those follow-up calls was critical â and it was a big reason why I stayed with Sports Illustrated for all those years, because they gave me that time and space.â
What Smith is referring to there, of course, is legwork rather than divine inspiration.
âAbsolutely â the more you prize showing and not telling, the only way to show it is to have hard anecdotal material which brings alive the facets of personality versus just telling the reader.
âI kind of shifted it, too, I didnât use as many quotes because I wanted the thing to come alive on its own rather than me, or another character, having to explain it.
âThat shifted more onus onto the legwork to bring those facets of the character to life.
âIf something happened while I was there that could be used anecdotally, great, but nine times out of 10, the characterâs not going to reveal critical data right in front of you.
âUsually people can manage their image in a face-to-face setting â you might get a telling moment, but odds are the really telling moments occurred in the past.
âWriting like you were there⌠that again put the onus on the legwork, having the time to recreate scenes from the past so the reader feels theyâre right there while itâs happening.
âSo that shifted it from the journalism where you have lunch with someone for an hour and a half and you have to hang it all on that hook.â
Where did those ideas come from, though? A sudden light-bulb moment? Editors? Snippets in newspapers?
âAbout 50-50 â about half the ideas came from editors, and half from me. Sometimes it could be just a couple of lines, a brief reference which set the ripples going.
âI was living in Sydney for a year and someone brought USA Today while visiting â and there was a three-sentence reference to an African-American coach in an Amish-Mennonite community, that heâd led them to a state title but was now dying of brain cancer.
âI thought, âwait, heâs done this?â It seemed to me a story that might carry an 8,000 word piece, so when I got back to the States I called the high school, only for them to tell me heâd died a couple of weeks before that.
âI asked if I could come out, and thatâs how the story (Higher Education) took off.
âThen I saw a reference to a walker who committed suicide because heâd come fourth in an Olympic trial, and only three athletes were going to the games, and something struck me about the incongruity of that â an athlete so driven as to commit suicide but in a sport like walking, which you wouldnât associate with that kind of drive?
âI felt there was something there.
âA vibe from the couple of sentences was often what would set me off (Walking His Life Away was the story which resulted).â
Surely being from Sports Illustrated helped with access, though? Dropping the name of the magazine in an early phone call must have opened a few doors.
âA lot of times, no,â says Smith, who won the National Magazine Award for non-fiction a record four times. âI wasnât on TV much and I kept a pretty low profile with four stories a year. I was pretty unknown though the internet helped with that. If people wanted to know more I was always glad to send them examples to show them what they were getting into.
âBut while towards the end the internet helped with awareness, for a good part of it Iâd walk in a bit out of the blue. Iâd tell them it was very in depth, but using my name as a crowbar to get in the door⌠that wasnât the case.
âHere and there it helped, but not generally.â
He doesnât read a lot of journalism himself nowadays. He says he went through a Kundera and Camus phase a while back, but now he reads âa lot of philosophy, stuff about meditationâ.
Hardly a surprise given the depth of his approach, but the soulful connoisseur of the human condition retains a journalistâs eye for a yarn.
âThere are great stories all over the place. One doesnât work out, thereâs another one. If you put your full attention and heart into it, thereâll be something really valuable there.â
Gary Smith always found those stories.
Š Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved
This is one of the many great pieces from Gary Smith
âHIGHER EDUCATIONâ
by
Gary Smith
Sports Illustrated
March 5, 2001
THIS IS a story about a man, and a place where magic happened.
It was magic so powerful that the people there canât stop going back over it, trying to figure out who the man was and what happened right in front of their eyes, and how itâll change the time left to them on earth.
See them coming into town to work, or for their cup of coffee at Boyd & Wurthmann, or to make a deposit at Killbuck Savings? One mention of his name is all it takes for everything else to stop, for it all to begin tumbling outâŚ
âIâm afraid we canât explain what he meant to us. Iâm afraid itâs so deep we canât bring it into words.â
âIt was almost like he was an angel.â
âHe was looked on as God.â
Thereâs Willie Mast. Heâs the one to start with. Itâs funny, heâll tell you, his eyes misting, he was so sure theyâd all been hoodwinked that he almost did whatâs unthinkable now â run that man out of town before the magic had a chance.
All Willie had meant to do was bring some buzz to Berlin, Ohio, something to look forward to on a Friday night, for goodnessâ sake, in a town without high school football or a fast-food restaurant, without a traffic light or even a place to drink a beer, a town dozing in the heart of the largest Amish settlement in the world. Willie had been raised Amish, but heâd walked out on religion at 24 â no, heâd peeled out, in an eight-cylinder roar, when he just couldnât bear it anymore, trying to get somewhere in life without a set of wheels or even a telephone to call for a ride.
Heâd jump the fence, as folks here called it, become a Mennonite and started a trucking company, of all things, his tractor-trailers roaring past all those horses and buggies, moving cattle and cold meat over half the country. But his greatest glory was that day back in 1982 when he hopped into one of his semis and moved a legend, Charlie Huggins, into town. Charlie, the coach whoâd won two Ohio state basketball championships with Indian Valley South and one with Strasburg-Franklin, was coming to tiny Hiland High. Willie, one of the schoolâs biggest hoops boosters, had banged the drum for Charlie for months.
And yes, Charlie turned everything around in those winters of '82 and '83, exactly as Willie had promised, and yes, the hoops talk was warmer and stronger than the coffee for the first time in 20 years at Willieâs table of regulars in the Berlin House restaurant. They didnât much like it that second year when Charlie brought in an assistant â a man whoâd helped him in his summer camps and lost his job when the Catholic school where he coached went belly-up â who was black. But Charlie was the best dang high school coach in three states; he mustâve known something that they didnât. Nor were they thrilled by the fact that the black man was a Catholic, in a community whose children grew up reading tales of how their ancestors were burned at the stake by Catholics during the Reformation in Europe more than 400 years ago. But Charlie was a genius. Nor did they cherish the fact that the Catholic black was a loser, 66 times in 83 games with those hapless kids at Guernsey Catholic High near Cambridge. But CharlieâŚ
Charlie quit. Quit in disgust at an administration that wouldnât let players out of their last class 10 minutes early to dress for practice. But he kept the news to himself until right before the '84 school year began, too late to conduct a proper search for a proper coach. Willie Mast swallowed hard. It was almost as if his man, Charlie, had pulled a fast one. Berlinâs new basketball coach, the man with the most important position in a community that had dug in its heels against change, was an unmarried black Catholic loser. The only black man in eastern Holmes County.
It wasnât that Willie hated black people. Heâd hardly known any. âAll Iâd heard about them,â heâll tell you, âwas riots and lazy.â Few had ever strayed into these parts, and fewer still after that black stuffed dummy got strung up on the town square in Millersburg, just up the road, after the Civil War. Maybe twice a year, back in the 1940s and â50s, a Jewish rag man had come rattling down Route 39 in a rickety truck, scavenging for scrap metal and rags to sell to filling stations 30 miles northeast in Canton or 60 miles north in Cleveland, and brought along a black man for the heavy lifting. People stared at him as if he were green. Kids played Catch the ****** in their schoolyards without a pang, and when a handful of adults saw the color of a couple of Newcomerstown Highâs players a few years before, you know what word was ringing in those playersâ ears as they left the court.
Now, suddenly, this black man in his early 30s was standing in the middle of a gym jammed with a thousand whites, pulling their sons by the jerseys until their nostrils and his were an inch apart, screaming at them. Screaming, âDonât wanna hear your shoulda-coulda-wouldas! Get your head outta your butt!â How dare he?
Worse yet, the black man hadnât finished his college education, couldnât even teach at Hiland High. Why, he was working at Berlin Wood Products, the job Charlie had arranged for him, making little red wagons till 2 p.m. each day. âThis ****** doesnât know how to coach,â a regular at the Berlin House growled.
Willie agreed. âIf he wins, itâs because of what Charlie built here,â he said. âWhat does he know about basketball?â
But what could be done? Plenty of folks in town seemed to treat the man with dignity. Sure, they were insular, but they were some of the most decent and generous people on earth. The manâs Amish coworkers at the wood factory loved him, after they finally got done staring holes in the back of his head. They slammed Ping-Pong balls with him on lunch hour, volleyed theology during breaks and dubbed him the Original Black Amishman. The Hiland High players seemed to feel the same way.
He was a strange cat, this black man. He had never said a word when his first apartment in Berlin fell through â the landlord who had agreed to a lease on the telephone saw the manâs skin and suddenly remembered that he rented only to families. The man had kept silent about the cars that pulled up to the little white house on South Market Street that he moved into instead, about the screams in the darkness, the voices threatening him on his telephone and the false rumors that he was dating their women. âThey might not like us French Canadians here,â was all heâd say, with a little smile, when he walked into a place and felt it turn to ice.
Finally, the ice broke. Willie and a few pals invited the man to dinner at a fish joint up in Canton. They had some food and beers and laughs with him, sent him on his merry way and then⌠what a coincidence: The blue lights flashed in the black manâs rearview mirror. DUI.
Willieâs phone rang the next morning, but instead of it being a caller with news of the school boardâs action against the new coach, it was him. Perry Reese Jr. Just letting Willie know that he knew exactly what had happened the night before. And that he wouldnât go away. The school board, which had caught wind of the plot, never made a peep. Who was this man?
Some people honestly believed that the coach was a spy â sent by the feds to keep an eye on the Amish â or the vanguard of a plot to bring blacks into Holmes County. Yet he walked around town looking people in the eyes, smiling and teasing with easy assurance. He never showed a trace of the loneliness he must have felt. When he had a problem with someone, he went straight to its source. Straight to Willie Mast in the school parking lot one night. âSo youâre not too sure about me because Iâm black,â he said, and he laid everything out in front of Willie, about racism and how the two of them needed to get things straight.
Willie blinked. He couldnât help but ask himself the question folks all over town would soon begin to ask: Could I do, or even dream of doing, what the coach is doing? Willie couldnât help but nod when the black man invited him along to scout an opponent and stop for a bite to eat, and couldnât help but feel good when the man said he appreciated Willie because he didnât double-talk when confronted â because Willie, he said, was real. Couldnât help but howl as the Hiland Hawks kept winning, 49 times in 53 games those first two years, storming to the 1986 Division IV state semifinal.
Winning, thatâs what bought the black man time, what gave the magic a chance to wisp and curl through town and the rolling fields around it. Thatâs what gave him the lard to live through that frigid winter of '87. That was the school year when he finally had his degree and began teaching history and current events in a way theyâd never been taught in eastern Holmes County, the year the Hawks went 3-18 and the vermin came crawling back out of the baseboards. Damn if Willie wasnât the first at the ramparts to defend him, and damn if that black Catholic loser didnât turn things right back around the next season and never knew a losing one again.
How? By pouring Charlie Hugginâs molasses offense down the drain. By runninâ and gunninâ, chucking up threes, full-court pressing from buzzer to buzzer â with an annual litter of runts, of spindly, short, close-cropped Mennonites! Thatâs what most of his players were: the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Amish who, like Willie, had jumped the fence and endured the ostracism that went with it. Mennonites believed in many of the same shall-nots as the Amish: A man shall not be baptized until heâs old enough to choose it, nor resort to violence even if his government demands it, nor turn his back on community, family, humility, discipline and orderliness. But the Mennonites had decided that unlike the Amish, they could continue schooling past the eighth grade, turn on a light switch or a car ignition, pick up the phone and even, except the most conservative of them, pull on a pair of shorts and beat the pants off an opponent on the hardwood court without drifting into the devilâs embrace.
The Hawksâ Nest, Hilandâs tiny old gym, became what Willie had always dreamed it would be: a loony bin, the one place a Mennonite could go to sweat and shriek and squeal; sold out year after year, with fans jamming the hallway and snaking out the door as they waited for the gym to open, then stampeding for the best seats an hour before the six oâclock jayvee game; reporters and visiting coaches and scouts sardined above them in wooden lofts they had to scale ladders to reach; spillover pouring into the auditorium beside the gym to watch on a video feed as noise thundered through the wall. A few dozen teenage Amish boys, taking advantage of the one time in their lives when elders allowed them to behold the modern world, and 16-year-old cheerleadersâ legs, would be packed shoulder to shoulder in two corners of the gym at the school they werenât permitted to attend. Even a few Amish men, Lord save their souls, would tie up the horses and buggies across the street at Yoderâs Lumber and slink into the Nest. And plenty more at home would tell the missus that theyâd just remembered a task in the barn, then click on a radio stashed in the hay and catch the game on WKLM.
Something had dawned on Willie, sitting in his front-row seat, and on everyone else in town. The black manâs values were virtually the same as theirs. Humility? No coach ever moved so fast to duck praise or bolt outside the frame of a team picture. Unselfishness? The principal might as well have taken the coachâs salary to pep rallies and flung it in the air â most of it ended up in the kidsâ hands anyway. Reverence? No congregation ever huddled and sang out the Lordâs Prayer with the crispness and cadence that the Hawks did before and after every game. Family? When Chester Mullet, Hilandâs star guardin â96, only hugged his mom on parentsâ night, Perry gave him a choice: Kiss her or take a seat on the bench. Work ethic? The day and season never seemed to end, from 6 a.m. practices to 10 p.m. curfews, from puke buckets and running drills in autumn to two-a-days in early winter to camps and leagues and an open gym every summer day. He out-Amished the Amish, out-Mennonited the Mennonites, and everyone, even those whoâd never sniffed a locker room in their lives, took to calling the black man Coach.
Ask Willie. âMost of the petty divisions around here disappeared because of Coach,â heâll tell you. âHe pulled us all together. Some folks didnât like him, but I was respected more because he respected me. When my dad died, Coach was right there, kneeling beside the coffin, crossing himself. He put his arm right around my mom â sheâs Amish â and she couldnât get over that. When she died, he was the first one there. He did that for all sorts of folks. I came to realize that colorâs not a big deal. I took him for my best friend.â
And that man in Willieâs coffee clan whoâd held out longest, the one given to calling Coach a ******? By Coachâs fifth year, the manâs son was a Hawk, the Hawks were on another roll, and the man had seen firsthand the effect Coach had on kids. He cleared his throat one morning at the Berlin House; he had something to say. âHeâs not a ****** anymore.â
THE MAGIC didnât stop with a ****** turning into a man and a man into a best friend. It kept widening and deepening. Kevin Troyer wonât cry when he tells you about it, as the others do. They were brought up to hold that back, but maybe his training was better. He just lays out the story, beginning that autumn day 10 years ago when he was 16, and Coach sat him in the front seat of his Jeep, looked in his eyes and said, âTell me the truth.â
Someone had broken into Candles Hardware and R&R Sports and stolen merchandise. Whispers around town shocked even the whisperers: that the culprits were their heroes, kids who could walk into any restaurant in Berlin and never have to pay. Theyâd denied it over and over, and Coach had come to their defense⌠but now even he had begun to wonder.
A priest. Thatâs what heâd told a few friends he would be if he werenât a coach. Thatâs whose eyes Kevin felt boring into him. How could you keep lying to the man who stood in the lobby each morning, greeting the entire student body, searching everyoneâs eyes to see who needed a headlock, who needed lunch money, who needed love? âDonât know what you did today, princess,â heâd sing out to a plump or unpopular girl, âbut whatever it is, keep it up. You look great.â
Heâd show up wearing a catâs grin and the shirt youâd gotten for Christmas â howâd he get into your bedroom closet? â or carrying the pillow heâd snagged right from under your head on one of his Saturday morning sorties, when he slipped like smoke into playersâ rooms, woke them up with a pop on the chest, then ran, cackling, out the door. Sometimes those visits came on the heels of the 1 a.m. raids he called Ninja Runs, when he rang doorbells and cawed âGotcha!â, tumbling one family after another downstairs in pajamas and robes to laugh and talk and relish the privilege of being targeted by Coach. He annihilated what people here had been brought up to keep: the space between each other.
His door was never locked. Everyone, boy or girl, was welcome to wade through those half dozen stray cats on the porch that Coach gruffly denied feeding till his stash of cat food was found, and open the fridge, grab a soda, have a seat, eat some pizza, watch a game, play cards or Ping-Pong or Nintendo⌠and talk. About race and religion and relationships and teenage trouble, about stuff that wouldnât surface at Kevin Troyerâs dinner table in a million years. Coach listened the way other folks couldnât, listened without jumping ahead in his mind to what heâd say next, or to what the Bible said. When he finally spoke, he might play devilâs advocate, or might offer a second or third alternative to a kid whoâd seen only one, or might say the very thing Kevin didnât want to hear. But Kevin could bet his motherâs savings that the conversations wouldnât leave that house.
Coachâs home became the studentsâ hangout, a place where they could sleep over without their parentsâ thinking twice⌠as long as they didnât mind bolting awake to a blast of AC/CD and a 9 a.m. noogie. There was no more guard to drop. Parents trusted Coach completely, relied on him to sow their values.
He sowed those, and a few more. He took Kevin and the other Hawks to two-room Amish schools to read and shoot hoops with wide-eyed children who might never get to see them play, took the players to one anotherâs churches and then to his own, St. Peter, in Millersburg. He introduced them to Malcolm X, five-alarm chili, Martin Luther King Jr., B.B. King, crawfish, Cajun wings, John Lee Hooker, Tabasco sauce, trash-talk fishing, Muhammad Ali.
And possibility. Thatâs what Coach stood for, just by virtue of his presence in Berlin: possibility, no matter how high the odds were stacked against you, no matter how whittled your options seemed in a community whose beliefs had barely budged in 200 years, whose mailboxesstill carried the names of the same Amish families that had come in wagons out of Pennsylvania in the early 1800s â Yoders and Troyers and Stutzmans and Schlabachs and Hostetlers and Millers and Mullets and Masts. A place where kids, for decades, had graduated, married their prom dates and stepped into their daddiesâ farming or carpentry or lumber businesses without regard for the fact that Hiland Highâs graduating classes of 60 ranked in the top 10 in Ohio proficiency tests nearly every year. Kevin Troyerâs parents didnât seem to care if he went to college. Coachâs voice was the one that kept saying, âItâs your life. Thereâs so much more out there for you to see. Go places. Do things. Get a degree. Reach out. You have to take a chance.â
The kids did, more and more, but not before Coach loaded them with laundry baskets full of items theyâd need away from home, and they were never out of reach of those 6 a.m. phone calls. âIâm up,â heâd say. âNow you are too. Remember, Iâm always here for you.â
He managed all that without raising red flags. He smuggled it under the warm coat of all that winning, up the sleeve of all that humility and humor. Everyone was too busy bubbling over the 11 conference titles and five state semifinals. Having too much fun volunteering to be henchmen for his latest prank, shoving Mr. Prattâs desk to the middle of his English classroom, removing the ladder to maroon the radio play-by-play man up in the Hawksâ Nest loft, toilet-papering the school superintendentâs yard and then watching Coach, the most honest guy in town, lie right through all 32 teeth. He was a bootlegger, thatâs what he was. A bootlegger priest.
âKevin⌠tell the truth.â
Kevinâs insides trembled. How could he cash in his five teammates, bring down the wrath of a community in which the Ten Commandments were still stone, own up to the man whose explosions made the Hawksâ Nest shudder? How could he explain something that was full of feeling and empty of logic â that somehow, as decent as his parents were, as warm as it felt to grow up in a place where you could count on a neighbor at any hour, it all felt suffocating? All the restrictions of a Conservative Mennonite church that forbade members to watch TV, to go to movies, to dance. All the emotions heâd choked back in a home ruled by a father and mother whoâd been raised to react to problems by saying, âWhat will people think?â All the expectations of playing for the same team that his All-State brother, Keith, had carried to its first state semi in 24 years, back in 1986. Somehow, busting into those stores in the summer of '91 felt like the fist Kevin could never quite ball up and smash into all that.
"I⌠I did it, Coach. We⌠"
The sweetest thing eastern Holmes County had ever known was ruined. Teammate Randy Troyer, no relation to Kevin, disappeared when word got out. The community gasped â those six boys could never wear a Hawks uniform again. Coach? He resigned. Heâd betrayed the townâs trust and failed his responsibility, he told his superiors. His âsonsâ had turned to crime.
The administration begged him to stay. Who else was respected enough by family court judges, storekeepers, ministers and parents to find resolution and justice? Coach stared across the pond he fished behind his house. He came up with a solution both harder and softer than the townâs. He would take Randy Troyer under his own roof, now that the boy had slunk back after two weeks of holding up in Florida motels. Heâd be accountable for Randyâs behavior. Heâd have the six boys locked up in detention centers for two weeks, to know what jail tasted and smelled like. But he would let them back on the team. Let them feel lucky to be playing basketball when theyâd really be taking a crash course in accountability.
Kevin found himself staring at the cinder-block wall of his cell, as lonely as a Mennonite boy could be. But there was Coach, making his rounds to all six lost souls. There was that lung-bursting bear hug, and another earful about not following others, about believing in yourself and being a man.
The Berlin Six returned. Randy Troyer lived in Coachâs home for four months. Kevin walked to the microphone at the first pep rally, sick with nerves, and apologized to the school and the town.
Redemption isnât easy with a 5â11" center, but how tight that 1991-92 team became, players piling into Coachâs car every Thursday after practice, gathering around a long table at a sports bar a half hour away in Dover and setting upon giant cookie sheets heaped with 500 hot wings. And how those boys could run and shoot. Every time a 20-footer left the hands of Kevin Troyer or one of the Mishler twins, Nevin and Kevin, or the Hawksâ star, Jr. Raber, Hilandâs students rose, twirling when the ball hit twine and flashing the big red 3âs on their T-shirtsâ backs.
Someday, perhaps in a generation or two, some Berliner might not remember every detail of that postseason march. Against Lakeland in the district championships, the Hawks came out comatose and fell behind 20-5, Coach too stubborn to call a timeout â the man could never bear to show a wisp of doubt. At halftime he slammed the locker-room door so hard that it came off its hinges, then he kicked a crater in a trash can, sent water bottles flying, grabbed jerseys and screamed so loud that the echoes peeled paint. Kevin and his mates did what all Hawks did: gazed straight into Coachâs eyes and nodded. They knew in their bones how small his wrath was, held up against his love. They burst from that locker room like jackals, tore Lakeland to bits and handily won the next two games to reach the state semis. The world came to a halt in Berlin.
How far can a bellyful of hunger and a chestful of mission take a team before reality steps in and stops it? In the state semifinal in Columbus, against a Lima Central Catholic bunch loaded with kids quicker and thicker and taller and darker, led by the rattlesnake-sudden Hutchins brothers, Aaron and all-stater Anthony, the Hawks were cooked. They trailed 62-55 with 38 seconds left as Hiland fans trickled out in despair and Limaâs surged to the box-office windows to snatch up tickets for the final. Lima called timeout to dot its iâs and cross its tâs, and there stood Coach in the Hiland huddle, gazing down at a dozen forlorn boys. He spoke more calmly than theyâd ever heard him, and fear and hopelessness leaked out of them as they stared into his eyes and drank his plan. What happened next made you know that everything the bootlegger priest stood for â bucking the tide, believing in yourself and possibility â had worked its way from inside him to inside them.
Nevin Mishler, who would sit around the campfire in Coachâs backyard talking about life till 2 a.m. on Friday nights, dropped in a rainbow three with 27 seconds left to cut the deficit to four. Timeout, calm words, quick foul. Limaâs Anthony Hutchins blew the front end of a one-on-one.
Eleven seconds left. Jr. Raber, whose wish as a boy was to be black, just like Coach, banked in a driving, leaning bucket and was fouled. He drained the free throw. Limaâs lead was down to one. Timeout, calm words, quick foul. Aaron Hutchins missed another one-on-one.
Nine ticks left. Kevin Troyer, who would end up going to college and become a teacher and coach because of Coach, tore down the rebound and threw the outlet to Nevin Mishler.
Seven seconds left. Nevin turned to dribble, only to be ambushed before half-court by Aaron Hutchins, the wounded rattler, who struck and smacked the ball.
Five seconds left, the ball and the season and salvation skittering away as Nevin, who cared more about letting down Coach than letting down his parents, hurled his body across the wood and swatted the ball back toward Kevin Troyer. Kevin, who almost never hit the floor, who had been pushed by Coach for years to give more, lunged and collided with Anthony Hutchins, then spun and heaved the ball behind his back to Jr. Raber as Kevin fell to the floor.
Three seconds left. Jr. took three dribbles and heaved up the impossible, an off-balance 35-footer with two defenders in his face, a shot that fell far short at the buzzer⌠but he was fouled. He swished all three free throws, and the Hawks won, they won â no matter how many times Lima fans waiting outside for tickets insisted to Hiland fans that it couldnât be true â and two days later won the only state title in school history, by three points over Gilmour Academy, on fumes, pure fumes.
In the aisles, people danced who were forbidden to dance. The plaque commemorating the crowning achievement of Coachâs life went straight into the hands of Joe Workman, a water and towel boy. Kevin Troyer and his teammates jumped Coach before he could sneak off, hugging him and kissing him and rubbing his head, but he had the last laugh. The 9 a.m. noogies would hurt even more those next nine years, dang that championship ring.
SOMEONE WOULD come and steal the magic. Some big-cheese high school or college would take Coach away â they knew it, they just knew it. It all seems so silly now, Steve Mullet says. It might take Steve the last half of his life to finish that slow, dazed shake of his head.
Berlin, you see, was a secret no more by the mid-1990s. Too much winning by Coach, too many tourists pouring in to peer at the men in black hats and black buggies. Two traffic lights had gone up, along with a Burger King and a couple dozen gift shops, and God knows how many restaurants and inns with the word Dutch on their shingles to reel in the rubberneckers. Even the Berlin House, where Willie Mast and the boys gathered, was now the Dutch Country Kitchen.
Here they came, the city slickers. Offering Coach big raises and the chance to hush that whisper in his head: Why keep working with disciplined, two-parent white kids when children of his own race were being devoured by drugs and despair for want of someone like him? Akron Hoban wanted him. So did Canton McKinley, the biggest school in the city where Coach had grown up, and Canton Timken, the high school he attended. They wanted to take the man whoâd transformed Steve Mulletâs family, turned it into something a simple and sincere country fellow had never dreamed it might be. His first two sons were in college, thanks to Coach, and his third one, another guard at Hiland, would likely soon be too. Didnât Steve owe it to that third boy, Carlos, to keep Coach here? Didnât he owe it to all the fathers of all the little boys around Berlin?
Coach had a way of stirring Steveâs anxiety and the stew of rumors. He would walk slow and wounded through each April after heâd driven another team of runts to a conference crown, won two or three postseason games, and then yielded to the facts of the matter, to some school with nearly twice as many students and a couple of 6â5" studs. âItâs time for a change,â heâd sigh. âYou guys donât need me anymore.â
Maybe all missionaries are restless souls, one eye on the horizon, looking for who needs them most. Perhaps Coach was trying to smoke out even the slightest trace of misgivings about him, so he could be sure to leave before he was ever asked to. But Steve Mullet and eastern Holmes County couldnât take that chance. They had to act. Steve, a dairy farmer most of his life, knew about fencing. But how do you fence in a man when no one really understands why heâs there, or what he came from?
Who was Coachâs family? What about his past? Why did praise and attention make him so uneasy? The whole community wondered, but in Berlin it was disrespectful to pry. Canton was only a 45-minute hop away, yet Steve had never seen a parent or a sibling of Coachâs, a girlfriend or even a childhood pal. The bootlegger priest was a man of mystery and moods as well as a wide-open door. Heâd ask you how your grandma, sister and uncle were every time you met, but you werenât supposed to inquire about his â you just sensed it. His birthday? He wouldnât say. His age? Who knew? It changed every time he was asked. But his loneliness, that at last began to show.
There were whispers, of course. Some claimed heâd nearly married a flight attendant, then beat a cold-footed retreat. A black woman appeared in the stands once, set the grapevine sizzling, then was never glimpsed again. Steve and his pals loved to tease Coach whenever they all made the 20-mile drive to Dinofoâs, a pizza and pasta joint in Dover, and came face to face with that wild black waitress, Rosie. âWhen you gonna give it up?â sheâd yelp at Coach. âWhen you gonna let me have it?â
Heâd grin and shake his head, tell her it would be so good it would spoil her for life. Perhaps it was too scary, for a man who gave so much to so many, to carve it down to one. Maybe Jeff Pratt, the Hiland English teacher, had it right. Loving with detachment, he called it. So many people could be close to him, because no one was allowed too close.
A circle of women in Berlin looked on him almost as a brother â women such as Nancy Mishler, mother of the twins from the '92 title team, and Peg Brand, the school secretary, and Shelly Miller, wife of the booster clubâs president, Alan. They came to count on Coachâs teasing and advice, on his cards and flowers when their loved ones were sick or their children had them at witâs end, and they did what they could to keep him in town. âI wish we could find a way to make you feel this is your family, that this is where you belong,â Peg wrote him. âIf you leave,â sheâd say, âwhoâs going to make our kids think?â The women left groceries and gifts on his porch, homemade chocolate-chip cookies on his kitchen table, invited him to their homes on Sundays and holidays no matter how often he begged off, never wanting to impose.
But they all had to do more, Steve decided, picking up his phone to mobilize the men. For Godâs sake, Coach made only 28,000 a year. In the grand tradition of Mennonites and Amish, they rushed to answer the community call. They paid his rent, one month per donor; it was so easy to find volunteers that they had a waiting list. They replaced his garage when a leaf fire sent it up in flames; it sent him up a wall when he couldnât learn the charityâs source. They passed the hat for that sparkling new gym at Hiland, and they didnât stop till the hat was stuffed with 1.6 million bucks. Steve Mullet eventually had Coach move into a big old farmhouse he owned. But first Steve and Willie Mast had another brainstorm: road trip. Why not give Coach a couple of daysâ escape from their cornfields and his sainthood, and show him how much they cared?
Thatâs how Steve, a Conservative Mennonite in his mid-40s, married to a woman who didnât stick her head out in public unless it was beneath a prayer veil, found himself on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Standing beside Willie and behind Coach, his heartbeat rising and stomach fluttering as he watched Coach suck down a Hurricane and **** his head outside a string of bars, listening for the chord that would pull him inside.
Coach nodded. This was the one. This blues bar. He pushed open the door. Music and smoke and beer musk belched out. Steve looked at Willie. You could go to hell for this, from everything theyâd both been taught. Willie just nodded.
They wedged into a whorl of colors and types of humanity. When Steve was a boy, heâd seen blacks only after his parents jumped the fence, became Mennonites and took the family in their car each summer to a city zoo. Nothing cruel about blacks was ever said. Steveâs parents simply pulled him closer when they were near, filled him with a feeling: Our kind and theirs donât mix. Now there were blacks pressed against his shoulders, blacks on microphonesscreaming lust and heartache into Steveâs ears, blacks pounding rhythm through the floorboards and up into his knees. People touching, people gyrating their hips. You could go to hell for this. Steve looked at Willie as Coach headed to the bathroom. âI canât take this,â Steve said.
âItâs Coachâs time, bub,â Willie said.
Coach came back, smelled Steveâs uneasiness and knew what to do. âLiven up,â he barked and grinned. They got some beers, and it was just like the Hawksâ radio play-by-play man, Mark Lonsinger, always said: Coach stood out in a room the instant he walked in, even though he did everything to deflect it. Soon Coach had the folks nearby convinced that he was a Black Amish, a highly obscure sect, and Steve, swallowing his laughter, sealing the deal with a few timely bursts of Pennsylvania Dutch, had them believing the three of them had made it to New Orleans from Ohio in a buggy. Before you knew it, it was nearly midnight, and Steveâs head was bobbing, his feet tapping, his funk found deep beneath all those layers of mashed potatoes. You know what, he was telling Willie, this Bourbon Street and this blues music really arenât so bad, and isnât it nice, too, how those folks found out that Mennonites arenât Martians?
When they pulled back into Coachâs driveway after days filled with laughter and camaraderie, Steve glanced at Willie and sighed, âWell, now we return to our wives.â
âYouâre the lucky ones,â said Coach. âDonât you ever forget that.â
Steve realized something when they returned from the road: It wasnât the road to ruin. He felt more space inside himself, plenty enough room for the black friends his sons began bringing home from college for the weekend. He realized it again the next year, when they returned to Bourbon Street, and the next, when they went once more, and the one after that as well. âSome things that I was taught were strictly no-nos⌠theyâre not sins,â Steve will tell you. âAll I know is that it all seemed right to do with him.â
Funny how far that feeling had fanned, how many old, deep lines had blurred in Berlin, and what occurred in a dry community when Coach overdid it one night four years ago and tried one last time to leave. âI screwed up,â he told school superintendent Gary Sterrett after he got that second DUI, 14 miles up the road in Sugar Creek. âYou need to take my job.â
What happened was sort of like what happened the time the ball rolled toward the Hawksâ bench in a game they were fumbling away that year at Garaway High, and Coach pulled back his leg and kicked the ball so hard that it hissed past a refereeâs ear and slammed off the wall, the gym hushing in anticipation of the technical foul and the ejection. But nothing happened. The two refs had such enormous respect for Coach, they pretended it away.
He apologized to every player and to every playerâs parents for the DUI. Steve never mentioned it. The community never said a word. It was pretended away.
THEYâVE COMBED through the events a thousand times, lain in bed at night tearing themselves and God to shreds. There were clues, after all, and it was their job to notice things Coach was too stubborn to admit. They thought, when he holed up in his motel room for three days in Columbus last March, that it was merely one of his postseason moods, darker than ever after falling one game shy, for the third straight year, of playing for the state title. They thought he was brooding two months later when, preoccupied and suffering from a cold he couldnât shake, he started scrambling names and dates and getting lost on country roads.
It all came to a head one Saturday last June, when he climbed into another rented tux because Phil Mishler, just like 50 or 60 kids before him, had to have Coach in his wedding party. At the reception, Coach offered his hand to Tom Mullet and said, âIâm Perry Reese Jr., Hiland High basketball coach.â Tom Mullet had been Hilandâs assistant athletic director for ten years.
Phone lines buzzed that Sunday. People began comparing notes, discovering new oddities. On Monday night two of Coachâs best friends, Dave Schlabach and Brian Hummel, headed to Mount Hope and the old farmhouse Coach had moved into just outside Berlin, the only house with lights in a community of Amish. They found him shivering in a blanket, glassy-eyed and mumbling nonsense.
Their worst possible fears⌠well, it went beyond all of them. Brain tumor. Malignant. Inoperable. Four to eight months to live, the doctors at Cantonâs Aultman Hospital said. You canât bring down a sledgehammer faster than that.
Jason Mishler, Coachâs starting point guard the past two years, was the first kid to find out. He stationed himself in the chair beside Coachâs bed, wouldnât budge all night and most of the next day. His cousin Kevin Mishler, from the state championship team, dropped his vacation on Hilton Head Island, S.C., and flew back. Dave Jaberg, who had played for Hiland a few years before that, dropped the bonds he was trading in Chicago and drove for six hours. Jr. Raber was on the first plane from Atlanta. Think a moment. How many teachers or coaches would do that for you?
The nurses and doctors were stupefied â didnât folks know you couldnât fit a town inside a hospital room? Coachâs friends filled the lobby, the elevator, the halls and the waiting room. It was like a Hiland basketball game, only everyone was crying. Coach kept fading in and out, blinking up at another set of teary eyes and croaking, âWhatâs new?â
What do people pray for when doctors donât give them a prayer? They swung for the fences. The Big M, a miracle. Some begged for it. Some demanded it. A thousand people attended a prayer vigil in the gym and took turns on the microphone. Never had so much anger and anguish risen from Berlin and gone straight to God.
Steroids shrank the tumor enough for Coach to return home, where another throng of folks waited, each telling the other tales of what Coach had done to change his life, each shocked to find how many considered him their best friend. When he walked through his front door and saw the wheelchair, the portable commode, the hospital bed and the chart Peg Brand made, dividing the communityâs 24-hour care for Coach into six-hour shifts, he sobbed. The giving was finished. Now all he could do was take.
Go home, he ordered them. Go back to your families and lives. He called them names. They knew him well enough to know how loathsome it was for him to be the center of attention, the needy one. But they also knew what he would do if one of them were dying. They decided to keep coming anyway. They were family. Even more in his dying than in his living, they were fused.
They cooked for him, planned a trip to New York City heâd always dreamed of making, prayed and cried themselves to sleep. They fired off e-mails to churches across the country, recruited entire congregations whoâd never heard of Coach to pray for the Big M. Louise Conway, grandmother of a player named Jared Coblentz, woke up three or four times a night, her heart thumping so hard that she had to drop to her knees and chew Godâs ear about Coach before she could drop back to sleep. People combed the Internet for little-known treatments. They were going to hoist a three at the buzzer and get fouled.
Coach? He did the strangest thing. He took two radiation treatments and stopped. He refused the alternative treatments, no matter how much people cried and begged and flung his own lessons in his face. Two other doctors had confirmed his fate, and damned if he was going to be helpless for long if he could help it. âDonât you understand?â he told a buddy, Doug Klar. âItâs O.K. This is how itâs supposed to be.â
He finally had a plan, one that would make his death like his life, one that would mean the giving wasnât finished. He initiated a foundation, a college scholarship fund for those in need, started it rolling with his $30,000 life savings and, after swallowing hard, allowed it to be named after him on one condition: that it be kept secret until he was dead.
He had no way to keep all the puzzle pieces of his life in boxes now; dying shook them out. Folks found out, for instance, that he turned 48 last August. They were shocked to meet two half sisters theyâd never heard of. They were glad finally to see Coachâs younger sister, Audrey Johnson, whose picture was on his refrigerator door and who was studying to be a social worker, and his younger brother, Chris, who helps run group homes for people who canât fend for themselves and who took a leave of absence to care for Coach.
It turned out that Audrey had made a couple of quiet visits a year to Coach and that the family had gathered for a few hours on holidays; there were no dark splintering secrets. He came from two strict parents whoâd died in the '80s â his dad had worked in a Canton steel mill â and had a mixed-race aunt on one side of the family and a white grandfather on the other. But there were never quite enough pieces of the puzzle for anyone to put them together on a table and get a clean picture.
Coachâs family was shocked to learn a few things too. Like how many conservative rural white folks had taken a black man into their hearts. âAmazing,â said Jennifer Betha, his half sister, a supervisor for Head Start. âAnd so many loving, respectful, well-mannered children around him. They were like miniature Perrys! Our family was the independent sort, all kind of went our own ways. I never realized how easy it is to get to Berlin from Canton, how close it is. What a waste. Why didnât we come before?â
Coach had two good months, thanks to the steroids. Berlin people spent them believing that God had heard them, and that the miracle had come. Coach spent the months telling hundreds of visitors how much he cared about them, making one last 1 a.m. Ninja Run and packing his life into 10 neat cardboard boxes.
The first week of August, he defied doctorsâ orders not to drive and slipped into the empty school. Gerald Miller, his buddy and old boss at the wagon factory, found him later that day at home, tears streaming down his cheeks. âWorst day of my life,â Coach said. âWorse than finding out about this thing in my head. I cleaned out my desk. I canât believe it. Iâm not gonna teach anymore. Iâm done.â
In early September the tumor finally had its way. He began slurring words, falling down, losing the use of his right hand and leg, then his eyesight. âHow are you doing?â he kept asking his visitors, on blind instinct. âIt there anything I can do for you?â Till the end he heard the door open and close, open and close, and felt the hands, wrapped around his, doing that too.
On the day he died, Nov. 22, just over a week before the Hawksâ first basketball game and 17 years after he first walked through their doors, Hiland looked like one of those schools in the news in which a kid has walked through the halls with an automatic weapon. Six ministers and three counselors walked around hugging and whispering to children who were huddled in the hallway crying or staring into space, to teachers sobbing in the bathrooms, to secretaries who couldnât bear it and had to run out the door.
AN OLD nettle digs at most every human heart: the urge to give oneself to the world rather than to only a few close people. In the end, unable to bear the personal cost, most of us find a way to ignore the *****le, comforting ourselves that so little can be changed by one woman or on one man anyway.
How much, in the end, was changed by this one man? In Berlin, theyâre still tallying that one up. Jared Coblentz, who might have been the Hawksâ sixth man this year, quit because he couldnât play for anyone other than Coach. Jason Mishler was so furious that he quit going to church for months, then figured out that it might be greedy to demand a miracle when youâve been looking at one all your life. Tattoo parlors added Mennonites to their clientele. Jr. Raber stares at R.I.P. with a P beneath it on his chest every morning when he looks into the mirror of his apartment in Atlanta. Jason Mishler rubs the image of Coachâs face on the top of his left arm during the national anthem before every game he plays at West Liberty(W.Va.) State.
The scholarship fund has begun to swell. Half the schools Hiland has played this season have chipped in checks of $500 or $600, while refs for the girlsâ basketball games frequently hand back their $55 checks for the pot.
Then thereâs the bigger stuff. Kevin Troyer has decided that someday, rather than teach and coach around Berlin, heâll reverse Coachâs path and do it with black kids up in Canton. Funny, the question he asked himself that led to his decision was the same one that so many in Berlin ask themselves when they confront a dilemma: What would Coach do? Hard to believe, an outsider becoming the moral compass of a people with all those rules on how to live right.
And even bigger stuff. Like Shelly and Alan Miller adopting a biracial boy 10 years ago over in Walnut Creek, a boy that Coach had taken under his wing. And the Keims over in Charm adopting two black boys, and the Schrocks in Berlin adopting four black girls, and the Masts just west of town adopting two black girls, and Chris Miller in Walnut Creek adopting a black girl. Who knows? Maybe some of them would have done it had there never been a Perry Reese Jr., but none of them would have been too sure that it was possible.
âWhen refugees came to America,â the town psychologist, Elvin Coblentz, says, âthe first thing they saw was the Statue of Liberty. It did something to them â became a memory and a goal to strive for your best, to give your all, because everythingâs possible. Thatâs what Coach is to us.â
At the funeral, just before Communion, Father Ron Aubrey gazed across St. Peter, Coachâs Catholic church in Millersburg. The priest knew that what he wanted to do wasnât allowed, and that he could get in trouble. But he knew Coach too. So he did it: invited everyone up to receive the holy wafer.
Steve Mullet glanced at his wife, in her simple clothing and veil. âWhy not?â she whispered. After all, the service wasnât the bizarre ritual they had been led to believe it was, wasnât all that different from their own. Still, Steve hesitated. He glanced at Willie Mast. âWould Coach want us to?â Steve whispered.
âYou gotâer, bub,â said Willie.
So they rose and joined all the black Baptists and white Catholics pouring toward the altar, all the basketball players, all the Mennonites young and old. Busting laws left and right, busting straight into the kingdom of heaven.
[SIZE=6]You draw the news: 2014[/SIZE]
This has been one year where the news cycle has been pretty brutal to say the least, but that did not stop many of you responding to our request to help with our alternative review of the news and attempt to illustrate the big events of 2014.
This year has seen the emergence of Islamic State[/URL], the [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28754546â]Ebola outbreak [/URL]in West Africa, and the crisis in [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26270866â]Ukraine[/URL]. We have also had the landing of the[URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30074258â]Philae probe [/URL]on Comet 67P, and the 100th anniversary of [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/ww1â]World War One, with many of these events inspiring you to take pen to paper.
Thank you for taking part in our âDraw the Newsâ project; a selection of your amazing efforts can be seen below, with others available in our Twitter collection.
This painting by Rodrigo Figueredo depicts the soldados de franela (T-shirt soldiers) comprised of students and other protesters of Venezuela who confronted Nicolas Maduroâs government in February. âIt would be an honour and a historical justice to make them known,â says Rodrigo.
The year saw the emergence of Islamic State or IS. The group formerly known as ISIS is a radical Islamist group that has seized large swathes of territory in eastern Syria and across northern and western Iraq. Farid Bachtiarâs cartoon seems to suggest the US will come and sweep away the group.
Meanwhile, Brice Hall has chosen to focus on the millions of people displaced by the conflict in Syria, of whom âthe vast number drift to refugee camps offering the slimmest of futures,â he says. The picture is based on a photograph by Baraa al-Halibi, with digital inks added with image-editing software.
Ugwu Kelechi looked at Boko Haram in Nigeria, reflecting on the victims and âthe governmentâs inability to care for internally displaced peoplesâ. Ugwu says he felt like sharing his mind through drawing: âI made a sketch on a paper, placed it on a board, then used paint to express it.â
Many campaigns throughout 2014 have sought to use social media to make their voices known. âThis year so many people have been out protesting for justice, and each protest now seems to come with a hashtag,â says Jamillah Knowles.
The US has seen several protests following deaths involving the police. People in Ferguson, Missouri took to the streets following the death of Michael Brown[/URL]. While in New York city, many demonstrations followed the [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30341101â]death of Eric Garner. Karen Kaapcke created this graphite-watercolour drawing of a âdie-inâ protest outside the Apollo Theatre in December.
The contrast between the Black Friday sales[/URL] and the deaths from the outbreak of [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28754546â]Ebola in West Africa and beyond puzzled Joshua Riches. He entitled his artwork âBlack Death Western Priorities in 2014â.
Luis Pastor felt compelled to draw the Ebola virus âbecause it has been one of the most terrible and unexpected plagues in the 21st Centuryâ.
Maryam Alsalah took this infamous image of Kim Kardashian and, with her version, drew the nude reality star sitting on top of a troubled world, adding: âsheâs not the biggest issue we should think about.â
The Scottish independence referendum inspired Kristina Macauley to paint an image of Alex Salmond. She said: âI wanted to show a man who was able to engage peoples sense of identity and relevancy. I evoked the political agenda through the Scottish flags with the blue, white, red and yellow resonating in Alex Salmondâs coat.â
The best development of 2014 according to @yellowmints[/URL] was the [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30012854â]Rosetta mission and the Philae Probe landing on Comet 67P. Philae made history in November when it was dropped by Esaâs Rosetta satellite to the surface of 67P - the first time this feat has been achieved.
For artist JotaCrabon, the currency and oil markets[/URL], combined with the [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30492518â]weak Russian economy, were his muse. He says: âWith the falling price of Brent, the oil dollars leave Russia and do break the rouble.â
âAs we head into winter again I was reminded of the terrible floods that were experienced by those that live on the Somerset Levels in England,â says Jan Woodhouse. She adds: âThere seemed to be a very slow response to their plight and no recent updates as to how they are now.â
Malaysian Airlines MH370 disappeared mid-flight on 8 March 2014. What happened to it remains a mystery, although Rifard Khalideen from Sri Lanka says: âEven though there was no debris of the flight found in oceans, we hope itâs safe somewhere.â
The UK tax debate embroiled major companies[/URL] in 2014, with avoidance addressed by [URL=âhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30420571â]measures in the Autumn Statement. Painter Bryan Hible, who uses âboard games and their related tokens, pieces, etc as props to tell little human stories,â took to his canvas to create this piece on the subject.
Tzuhui Tu looked at stories of artificial cell and organ renovation and pondered what they may mean for the future of organ transplantation.
âIn the midst of an already unstable scenery, hosting the World Cup only fuelled the indignation of the Brazilian people,â says Robert Temoteo. âWhile urgent matters such as hunger and extreme poverty torment the country, millions were spent building stadiums which will most likely never be used again.â
Ăigdem Mentesoglu is an artist from Turkey. She chose the gentrification of Istanbul as her topic. The image of a lone house in the midst of development in Fikirtepe became her subject. âThis is the symbol of resistanceâ she says.
The UK completed the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan in October 2014. âI chose to draw an extremely simple sketch,â says Ellie Cuff. âI drew this in about 10 minutes and made it look rushed to show the rush the troops would feel to get home, and how a 13-year campaign can be over in a flight.â
Hamid Khan from Pakistan, responded to the Talibanâs attack on a school in Peshawar with this drawing. He says children in his country âwant to study, to dream about a bright future, but then terrorists change our future; they not only kill us, they steal our lives, our dream, our culture, our peace, our schools, our markets, our streets.â
For Glenn Fitzpatrick, it was the offer by tech giants Facebook and Apple to freeze the eggs of female employees, which inspired this picture. He says: âAs the gap between rich and poor gets bigger it is as if the super power companies are now looking into the genetics of what makes a successful candidate.â He wonders if this is the beginning of a âBrave New Worldâ or if it suggests the gap between rich and poor will get wider.
Thank you for all of your contributions, sadly we did not have room to showcase them all here, but do continue to share your pictures and drawings with us in 2015.
Meeting Paul K. tomorrow for a coffee. If anyone has any questions theyâd like me to ask him, post em up. Anyway, together weâre going to drive rugby into a prohibited activity.
Ask him about the GAA team he and Walsh believe are involved in systematic doping.
Tell me a bit more Mbb, I hadnât heard this
Tell him he is a truly great journalist, but ask him why he had such a pop at amateur cyclists trying to cycle up the alpe.
Check your texts.