The eCrozier

The old coach is in the late fourth quarter of his last game. The ability he once had to manage the clock, make substitutions, and call the right play is gone. He’s slipping away. Strokes and other medical issues have brought with them a steadily increasing loss of short-term memory and the confusion caused by dementia. The once robust, barrel-chested man who seemingly could do anything he set his mind to, is now bent over, holding on to a walker, shuffling uneasily from bed to chair to restroom and back again.

My father is the old coach. Visiting him this past week brought back so many memories of my childhood: teaching me to swim by throwing me into the deep end, jumping in with me, and then without touching me, telling me I could do it by myself, encouraging me all the way to the pool’s edge; showing me the right and safe way to change a flat tire; explaining in painstaking detail the gentlemanly way to behave when I carried a young lady out on a date; and so much more.

My earliest memories of my father are sitting on his knee in our living room with the lights low helping him (or so I thought) evaluate next week’s opposing football team as the projector played the game film on the screen. He’d say something like: “See how their safety cheats up to the line of scrimmage on first down? By the second quarter we’ll fool him with a play action pass.” As a preschooler I had no idea what he was talking about, but by junior high I was helping him grade his players on film each week.

This week I loaded the old coach in his van and drove him to the cemetery where he and my mother will be buried. He wasn’t exactly sure where we were. We couldn’t find their gravestones, but we did find the marker for his grandparents, my great grandparents, Edward and Clara. We then drove on to the little house where he was born in the 1920’s. I wanted to see it again. In 1963 while staying with my grandparents there for the day my grandfather introduced me to the Ku Klux Klan with a picture book full of burning crosses. When my father came to pick me up at the end of the day and saw what I had in my hands, he threw the book in the trash, had some harsh words with my grandfather, and we drove off. It would be years before I’d see my grandfather again.

On the way home from seeing his old house, he needed to use the restroom, so I stopped at a restaurant and guided him in toward the restroom. There I had to help him do everything, even soaping his hands and drying them off before we left, just as he’d done for me fifty plus years ago. On the way out, people stared seemingly with pity at this shuffling old man bent over his walker slowly moving between the tables. I wanted to shout at them: “Don’t pity the old coach. Stand up, for a righteous man is passing by.”

A few years ago, when my father was elected to the Ohio Football Coaches Hall of Fame, one of his former players, who was the first black quarterback on one of his teams during a tumultuous time in the 1960’s, wrote to me about his “commitment to what was right, instead of what was popular and convenient.” All the players who ever played for him received that lesson in life from him. And so have I.

+Scott