A tribute to Coach Glenn Bell

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The death of Glenn Bell, who was a teacher and coach in the Los Angeles area for nearly 40 years, has caused former players and coaches to express sorrow but also appreciation. He died Monday at the age of 61. He had just retired from teaching at Los Angeles Santee.

He coached football at Santee, Dorsey, Palisades and Camp Kilpatrick. One of his former players was Mitch Gelman, who played quarterback at Palisades. Gelman was scheduled to speak at Bell’s retirement banquet on June 6. He is the CEO of THX Entertainment Technology.

Here’s Gelman’s heartwarming speech:

How many times have we done something just plain dumb, and heard that booming voice hovering, incredulously: ‘No, you didn’t!’ Or, mockingly, ‘Geeeee-minny Christmas!’ How many times have we thought about taking a short cut and heard, quietly, ‘You are only cheating yourselves, gentleman. Only cheating yourselves.”

Or started to feel the hubris of a fleeting success, only to be brought quickly back to earth by a voice saying, “If poop could roll, son, you’d be a big wheel!” Well, I know, I know he used a bit more colorful language! But this is a family event. How many times, every day, in all of our lives, does the pride and the integrity and the hope and the tolerance and the fundamental principles of self respect that we learned from this man’s example help us be better students, better workers, better citizens, better parents, better husbands or wives and better people?

That is the bond of this special family, a remarkable bond that we are so fortunate to share, a bond defined by a rare mathematical equation, a formula I can only describe as the Calculus of Coach Glenn Bell. Sharon, you are a remarkable woman. We know how many afternoons and evenings and weekends and summers and seasons – season after season – you have sacrificed to let us share in your husband’s presence.

We know how much you have given to support him in his more human moments, and what underlying strength you have enabled him to portray to the rest of us. Sharon, honestly, we can never repay you. We can only thank you. From the deepest portion of our hearts and souls, thank you so very much. Kandyce and Krysta, my-oh-my, Sharon, please let them know how much we thank them for letting us be part of your family.

Coach Bell’s brothers, Ken and Charlie, who are here today, you set him right. Sharon’s mom, Irene Foley, a young 99-years-old, is with us. Granny, we appreciate all you have done for this family. And Gladia (GLAY-dia), where are you? My Lord, what a son you have given us! Before we go any further, a standing ovation, please, for Coach Glenn Bell’s mother.

During the past four decades, I can confidently state that no one has done more for education in the state of California than Glenn Bell. He has spent 39 years as a teacher and coach in high schools throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, providing inspiration, mentorship and lessons for young men and women in the classroom, on the football and baseball fields and on the tennis courts from our barrios to our beaches.

Now, I am going to mention some of the places where Coach Bell worked – so please STAND UP when I mention your school, so he knows how appreciative we are – and what this exceptional turnout today represents related to the time he gave to each off these places. He has focused his career on the inner city, starting at Compton and then working with young men and women at Manual Arts and Dorsey and Santee High Schools.

He served at Palisades High School, and also spent a decade teaching and coaching football at the Pacific Lodge Boys Home and at Camp Kilpatrick, probationary schools for the toughest cases, young men who had been convicted of serious crimes. In a moment, I will tell a couple of stories that illustrate the impact he has had on three generations of student athletes, many of whom have emerged from his tutelage to become leaders in education, law, medicine, entertainment, engineering, business, communications and public service.

Indeed, this record of success is, in large part, the result of the confidence and courage that he was able to instill in us -- in those he coached, or in those he simply engaged in conversation. I, for one, learned as a young man playing on one of Glenn Bell’s football teams how to bounce back from adversity, how to work hard and how to think, and, at times, even, act like a winner. Anyone who came out of any of the schools at which he taught or coached – or who played on any of the teams that he competed against -- was influenced by Bell.

In one way or another, they are all part of this special family. When a student didn’t score well on PSATs, he would work with the young man or woman, tutoring him on weekends, before school or after practice to prep him for SATs, and if she didn’t score well enough on the SATs to get into a top school, he would encourage her to go to a community college, to reinforce her academic foundation – and to aspire to take advantage of the best this state and this country has to offer in terms of education.

Early in his career, when I met him, Bell was coaching the Bee football team at Palisades High School in the center of an upscale enclave in West Los Angeles. He entered as an outsider and quickly exhibited an integrity and incorruptibility that was rare in the sports department and among many of the teachers on campus.

With students bussed in to the school from throughout the city, Bell was the glue that held the student body together. He earned respect from all the students at Palisades who played for him or studied under him and saw – in his decision making and leadership – a color-blind meritocracy that showed that talent and skill and hard work and intelligence would rise to the top and lead his teams and score the best in his classes.

Unfortunately, that sense of equanimity was not the shared by many of the other coaches and teachers at the school. The rest of the athletic department, for the most part, was comprised of short-sighted, self-interested knuckleheads who ran the varsity programs, and who played favorites and put their sons or the kids pushed on them by the booster club into starting positions. Bell was ostracized by the other coaches, but persevered to win championships -- not to mention Teacher-of-the-Year awards.

He persevered to represent the type of character that all of the student-athletes in the program -- those, like me, who had to work hard to get off the bench and those whose natural abilities made them shoe-ins for All City honors, college scholarships and pro draft picks – he personified the type of character that all of us admired and sought to emulate. I was thinking recently about the first time I came into contact with Coach Bell.

It was during the summer of 1977. He was 29 years old. Out of Manual Arts High School by way of Whittier College. He stood outside the coaches’ room at the high school in Pacific Palisades. A tall, broad-shouldered man. Dynamic. Smart. Funny. Confident. Visible. He parked a Jaguar in a spot you could see from the coaches’ office window. That season, we had a rag-tag bunch of 15 and 16 year olds who were fiercely divided into cliques and camps and who came from backgrounds that ranged from poverty to privilege.

Out of that, this 29-year-old man was going to make a team! Well, he brought us together and showed us how to rise out of ourselves. By the end of that year, he had coached us to a championship – during a season that tugged at his own heart when he lost his beloved father, the man who raised him up from the floor of a barbershop in the City of Angels. Coach Glenn Bell’s steadfast integrity and uncompromised incorruptibility that season challenged the establishment coaches, who responded by exiling him. They sent him down to the other end of the boy’s locker room, past the showers, past the benches, past the lockers.

The establishment coaches – who by the way had a legacy of pretty much nothing but loitering, leering, drinking and consistently underperforming – kept their desks in the front room by their file cabinets and their phones. And they sent this broad-shouldered 29-year-old down to the other end of the locker room and told him he could have a chair in the old, sweaty, cramped and damp, closet-sized equipment room.

Coach Bell took that walk and took that room and turned it into a bastion of wisdom and vision and turned this humiliation into triumph and launched a legacy of tolerance and compassion and a lifetime of lessons during which he would, with the support of Sharon and his daughters and their extended family, teach three generations of young men and women how to grow up, how to learn, how to love, and how to live.

How to show pride without being prideful. Simply, how to win. I spent many lunch hours in that damp equipment room with Coach Bell. The tools of his trade were the han-me-down helmets and shoulder pads that he stitched back together, the chin straps and soiled jerseys – every one of which had a touch of the Manual Arts Purple and Grey, the sense that champions were not identified by what they wore, but by how they carried themselves.

Sure, he wanted us to look sharp, feel sharp and play sharp. But that was a mindset, not a fashion statement. I sat in that room and we talked about football, about slants and quick tosses and Power I’s and nickel backs … but we also talked about family, about fatherhood, about the ups and downs of being up and down. We talked about the racial make up of the school, about the kids who were bussed in and the ones who drove BMW’s during a period when bussing was tearing cities apart. About expectations, and realizations. We just talked. Man, could he talk! And all of us, everyone here this afternoon.

You know what I’m saying. Because we were all lucky enough to have had the opportunity to listen. And, looking back, we can reflect on just a couple of the people whose lives he touched in this environment. Off just one practice field at that time, two of Coach Bell’s student-athletes went on to win Academy Awards, one garnered a host of Emmys and another would be part of a team that would win a Pulitzer Prize. I am willing to bet there are not many coaches in America who have scored that Triple Crown!

Oh, he left me with at least one scar! Let’s just say I never had much speed, and I’ll never forget that one day at practice, half-way through the season, when he told the team that he was going to put in a shotgun formation, so that his fleet-footed quarterback, “Flash Gelman,” might get off pass! Fortunately, we had a great defense and a magical halfback – I know you guys remember! – so all I needed to do, really, was remember the plays!

After being passed over by the community and the school leadership for the head varsity football coaching job, Bell reluctantly left Palisades and moved to Dorsey High School. It was not far from Manual Arts, where he had attended as a student before going to East L.A. Community College and Whittier College, where Bell played wide receiver and defensive back. Yes, at one time, he could play! At Dorsey, he inspired the students and led the football team to a City Championship in one of his first years at the school.

Some of you may know that before the championship game at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a group of Palisades’ boosters called to him on the sidelines. They were impressed now with his skills and asked how much money it would take to get him to come back to Palisades. Insulted that they thought he was for sale, Bell politely told them that he was committed to Dorsey and that was where he would continue to coach. He stayed there through both great seasons and heartbreaking moments. None was so tragic as the shooting that took the life of the second baseman on the varsity baseball team. The player was heading home to get his practice gear.

He was waiting to be picked up by a friend in a car at the front of the high school. Across the street, two gangs engaged in a shootout. No gang members were hit. But one bullet sailed across the street and struck the second baseman in the back. He staggered around the block and collapsed and was dead by the time the ambulance reached the hospital. Bell would remain at Dorsey until he found a higher calling, one that would further test his skills as an educator and a molder of young men. This was an offer to teach and coach football at a probationary school.

He moved over to take some of the hardest-bitten, gang members and would work to shape them into citizens. Early in his years at the probationary school, he sat at his desk talking to a new student who had been sentenced to the school. Bell looked at the student’s folder. The student, it turned out, was the only person arrested in the killing of the Dorsey second baseman. Bell wanted to reach across the desk to strangle the young man. He didn’t.

He later came to learn that the teen had been only tangentially involved (he was visiting a cousin in Los Angeles, was from out of town, was not a member of either gang and did not have a gun; he was just the only person who the police were able to find to arrest in the highly publicized case). From that point on, throughout his time at the school, Bell never read another student’s rap sheet. He didn’t want their past crimes to prejudice his ability to help them change their lives and work toward a more promising future. His success at Camp Kilpatrick included a documentary and feature film called Gridiron Gang that chronicled the achievements of the football team that Bell helped develop, coach and use to give these young men confidence and character.

He would coach and teach at other schools over the years, bringing the same focus and compassion and toughness and sensitivity and humor to his relationship with the students. He remained on the front lines, in the rank and file, staying in the classroom and on the ballfields with the students. Some summers, he left practice to join his mother-in-law’s construction crew as a stone mason laying brick to earn extra money. Now, he will retire on a teacher’s pension. Any discretionary income he might have been able to save usually went to buying equipment, getting a better projector. Or to provide jobs as teaching assistants for students who would help him grade papers and thus learn how to be professionals.

In one case last year, he hired two students who had been struggling academically, and were not eligible for the Santee High football team. He hired them to help prepare for a health class he was teaching. He paid them five-dollars-an-hour – teasing them that giving them both jobs was going to cost him all his “mad money.” He hired them to help out, because he knew if they ended up going home in the afternoons now that they could not practice with the team, at best they would end up on the couch watching cartoons; at worst, well …. let’s just say that the fact that these two young men – and how many countless others of us who were touched by Coach Bell -- did not encounter circumstances that might have led us to confront our worst, let’s just say that is part of this man’s amazing calculus.

Coach Bell and I reconnected recently, 31 years after I played quarterback for one of his early teams. We met at Philippe’s, a sandwich shop not far from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. He looked well, still strong and thoughtful and optimistic. We talked well into the evening and kept talking until he looked down at his watch. It was nearly 9 p.m., but it was a Friday, so I’d thought that he wouldn’t have to do much but wake up to watch some college football the next day. To my surprise, he let me know that he should probably be getting home because he had to be at school at 8 o’clock the next morning. “Isn’t it a Saturday?” I asked. “Yes. But I teach math to some of the students on Saturday mornings,” he explained.

“It helps them shore up their academic foundations and builds confidence for the SAT’s.” That is just one of my Coach Bell stories. Some of you were kind enough to allow me to share a few of yours: -- -- -- -- Indeed, we all had the opportunity to listen to Coach Bell. And to watch: To watch how this man could, with a color-blind respect for the individual, with a classless outlook on society, how, without being naïve, he could rise above the insecurities of those around him, above the traits of those who tried to restrict him from getting opportunities, who used lies and deceit to try to frustrate him and to keep him down … we were lucky enough to watch how this one man transcended the rest and exhibited the epitome of the kind of class and courage that one can only imagine men like Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln were able to convey to their peers.

And his lessons followed us. I read about his City Championship at Dorsey High School in the International Herald Tribune in Europe. We heard about his work at the probationary school when Gridiron Gang was released. And now, we are all here, today, to honor his magnificent career. Oh, we’ve met a few in our day who can talk the talk. What an honor to be part of the life of a man who knows how to walk the walk. How many of us have fought temptation by drawing on the strength we’ve gained from Glenn Bell? How many have refused to steal? Refused to cheat? Refused to accept the easy way out? How many have stayed in school? Stayed in marriages? Stayed true to the principles that he showed us were paramount to living a life with dignity and honor?

So, you see, in preparing these remarks – and thank you all for bearing with me, because I have so much to say in this exceptional man’s honor – I thought about how to quantify his impact. Actually, I am not sure it is possible. He is the math teacher, so perhaps he can devise the theorem or an algorithm that may begin to quantify this impact. I am just a writer, but what the heck, let me try to do a little math. You start with one man. Then, you think about the lovely woman that he married, their wonderful daughters and the 12 grandchildren that are so beloved by Glenn and Sharon. And you realize that through their children and grandchildren, the character of this family has permeated the towns and communities of the Western plains, and reached the churches and neighborhoods in the soul of South Africa.

Next, you look around this room – and connect the dots. You apply the Calculus of Coach Glenn Bell. It goes like this: Each year, let’s say Glenn Bell touched the lives of, say, 500 people – and I know, Coach, that is a very conservative number for a man of your charisma and charm. I remember the lessons in simile and metaphor. But, nevertheless, by my math, 500 people times 39 years is 19,500 people who had the benefit of your direct teaching. If each of those people touched 100 friends, co-workers, cousins or kids and passed along some of the learning, that gets you to 195,000 people, nearly 200,000 easy. If each of them touches, say, 50 people, well, now we are up around the 10-million mark. So, let’s be very conservative here, and take this down just one more generation and say that these folks only pass along the character they’ve gained to another 10 people each, and now you have one man – who through a career of small conversations – has lifted the lives of at least 100-million.

That is more than 25 times the number of people who live in the City of Los Angeles. Three times the size of State of California. One third the population of the United States of America. And more than enough men and women to influence the history of the world. We know that this legacy will continue to build. We know that Coach Bell will continue to work with young men and women in Los Angeles, that he will be a valued speaker at leadership seminars, universities, professional societies and corporate events. I can imagine no better motivational or inspirational messenger than Coach Glenn Bell! We are here, this afternoon, to pay tribute to a man who has connected with his city, inspired his state, influenced his nation – and changed the calculus of our world.

A man who taught us how to fight with honor. Win with humility. Concede with dignity. A man who showed us how to care with passion. Who taught us what to accept and when to question. Who told us when it was right to stand up, and when it was okay to lie down. A man who demanded of us hard work. Who made us realize that there is a price for achievement -- and that nothing is to be taken for granted. He taught us how to lead. Persevere. Come back. Carry on. Always, carry on. I had the chance a few months ago to introduce my five-year-old son to Coach Bell. As kids often do, my son had what I at first thought was a rather odd question. “How come your hands are so big?” he asked. “Well,” Bell responded. “Because I am a pretty big guy. It wouldn’t look right if I had teeny, little hands.”

My son nodded. Of course, he realized, this was a man who has carried a lot in his day. Now, you ask Glenn Bell what he is grateful for, and he will tell you that he feels fortunate that the philosophical outlook he had on teaching, coaching and living was accepted by his students. His message was strikingly simple. He tried to let everyone know they were important and were necessary. He tried to make every situation a learning situation; and to respect everybody. The only time we look down on a man, he taught us, is when we are helping him up. Although Coach Bell never expected us to adopt his standards of decency, he recognized that everyone had a different representation of the truth – and that no one was any better than another. What a remarkable opportunity we’ve had to be but a small part of his legacy. To have had a chance to learn a little higher math from him, the kind we can apply, each and every day, to our lives. It is all part of the amazing Calculus of Coach Glenn Bell. Coach Bell. Sharon. On behalf of the people here today – and the 99.9-million who could not make it -- thank you.’