Loara High Pays Tribute to a Football Coach Dear to Its Heart

The ballroom at the Grand Hotel was jammed.

There were lawyers, chiro practors, fire fighters, college students and cops. There were a few professional athletes and even a farmer from Oregon.

They had journeyed to Anaheim to honor a 58-year-old man with a big smile and little hair.

An emotional person who “cries at the drop of a hat.” An imaginative person who has spent years of his life puzzling over strategies. A person of strong opinions who believes that manners are the glue which holds civilization together.

A person who had influenced all their lives through his job as an assistant football coach.

Those who know Gib Dear might not be surprised to hear that he had wondered about attending his tribute, even after he had exacted a promise that there would be no speeches. In 24 years at Loara High School, since the day the school opened, Dear had enjoyed a behind-the-scenes role. He liked to leave what he called the “P.R. stuff” to his best friend, Coach Herb Hill.

His wife, Alice, was the only person to whom he mentioned misgivings.

Alice said, “Before we left home, Gibby was saying, ‘I don’t know who will be there. It might just be me and you and Herb and (Hill’s wife) Karen.”

Those who know Dear can imagine him laughing at the thought. But his estimate was wrong.

The booster club bought 400 name tags for the event and wound up having to borrow 125 extras from the hotel. With 525 tags gone and still more people coming, they lost count.

Wednesday night’s tribute was timed to coincide with Dear’s retirement at the end of the football season. Around Loara, it was known that the reason for his retirement was the cancer found in his lung last spring, and more recently, the malignant tumor in his brain.

The Saxon football team dedicated its last game to him. They wore jerseys with the word, “Gib” over their hearts. Other students decked Glover Stadium with banners proclaiming their love for the school’s longtime coach.

It was back in the spring when Alice first realized something was wrong. “He was tired and he was coughing,” she said. “The look in his eyes wasn’t quite what it should have been.”

Dear stopped teaching in May to undergo surgery, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. The thing that annoyed him about the disease’s timing was that it forced him to miss spring practice.

At the end of the summer, when Dear was planning for the next Empire League season, tests revealed the tumor in his brain. Although he was in no shape to teach, Dear chose to take radiation treatments in the morning and return to school in the afternoon to coach with Hill.

There was no change in his enthusiasm and no great difference in his outer condition.

He gained some weight--from a medication designed to prevent brain swelling during the radiation therapy, which made his face, girth and ankles puffy. The radiation cost him some hair, but it wasn’t that noticeable since he had always worn it short, anyway.

He began carrying a wooden staff with a tennis ball on the top to lean on when the coughing got intense. Of course, being Coach Dear, he turned it into a source of amusement and motivation by bonking an occasional player on the helmet with it, just for emphasis.

“You’ve got to create some fun out there because football practice is not fun,” he explained.

From his early days as the ‘B’ team coach at Garden Grove High School, Dear displayed a gift for getting his points across to players.

He has the dramatic skills of a natural storyteller. “He can get philosophical about almost anything,” Hill said.

The values transmitted in 30 years of Dear’s stories have become ingrained in the personalities of a host of adults in Orange County and beyond.

He passed along these ideas so well that many people at Wednesday’s party quoted bits of his wisdom back and forth.

“Pursue perfection and capture excellence.”

“Winning is everything, because if you don’t make it everything, the game becomes a travesty. But winning is not enough.”

Some paraphrased his thoughts. Others said they simply live by them.

“Coach Dear has been the little voice in my ear that tells me to get up and get going,” said Dick Bingham, a Fountain Valley travel agent and former football player at Rancho Alamitos High School, where Dear and Hill coached from 1956 to 1959.

“Coach Dear is Mr. Inspiration,” Bingham said. “There’s so much that a coach does besides just blow a whistle. He and Herb taught us some basic things about life.”

Bingham gestured to the men of all ages crowding the room. “All the kids here owe that to him,” he said.

At the other end of the age spectrum was Bobby Bodine, a 1980 Loara graduate and member of the Saxons’ second CIF Southern Section championship team.

In high school, Bodine used to be called the Flea, an unlikely moniker for someone who became an All-CIF player. He was so small that he used to slip off his letterman’s jacket and get admitted to other teams’ games for the junior high kids’ price.

But Bodine, who has grown to a strapping 5-5, went on to play football at Fullerton College and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He says the intangible factor in his story was Dear.

“He taught me that size doesn’t mean anything,” Bodine said. “From the beginning, he showed so much confidence in me. Everyone else had always said I was too little.

“When I was a 5-3, 113-pound sophomore, he said, ‘Work hard and you’ll play a lot next year.’ I remember he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that size makes a difference. In football, it’s all in the heart.’ ”

Today, Bodine is finishing his physical education major at Cal Poly. When he is finished, he plans to get his teaching credential to work with the handicapped.

A coincidence? For years, Dear employed his sensitivity, patience and enthusiasm in teaching “adaptive P.E.” classes at Loara for the students with disabilities.

Dear likes to say he’s “just a school teacher,” but his background is a bit more unusual than he initially allows.

A sixth-generation Californian, he is a descendant of early California ranch owner Joseph Bandini.

Even today, a check for a few hundred dollars will occasionally come in the mail at Dear’s Balboa Island home. It is payment from the sale of old Bandini land. A century ago, the family loaned some land to railroad and utility companies, but when the utilities abandon its use, it still reverts to the 150 Bandini heirs--including Gib Dear.

The people that the cities of Arcadia and Bakersfield were named after were also ancestors of Dear. A great, great uncle was the postmaster general who invented the adhesive postage stamp.

His great grandfather was West Point graduate Cave Couts, whose published diaries are one of the important published historical sources of information about California during the Gold Rush.

Legend has it that Couts became part of the Bandini family while escorting Army wagons from Monterey, Mexico, to California in 1849. As Couts rode through the town of San Diego, two of Bandini’s daughters leaned out on a balcony to watch the Army pass.

The balcony suddenly gave way, but Couts had the presence of mind to spur his horse and catch one of the girls as she fell. He subsequently married her.

A century later, the way Dear met his wife is an eerie modern-day version of the Couts story. Alice Dear was a high-spirited teen-ager vacationing in Corona del Mar in 1948 when she accepted a dare from a friend to stand on a balcony and pour a bucket of water on the next person who came by.

It was Gib Dear.

Dear and Hill met a few years later as assistants at Garden Grove High. Their partnership later gave rise to one of the most consistently successful high school football programs in the county.

But it almost failed to come to pass.

The pair had worked together at Garden Grove, Rancho Alamitos, and Orange Coast College when Hill accepted the head coaching position at Loara in 1962. He stipulated that his sidekick and offensive strategist be hired in the bargain.

It was done. Gib Dear was hired as a teacher, assistant football coach and swim team coach, although the school had no pool.

In fact, when school “opened,” the building had not even been completed. The student body, actually just a sophomore class, spent a couple months in half-day sessions at Magnolia High. The football team had to practice in a clearing under the trees of La Palma Park.

It was a “little rag-tag bunch” in the beginning, according to Hill. There were tiny backs and chubby tackles and no of them knew a thing about varsity football.

Dear set up a directional drill, which teaches players to change directions while at a dead run. This was a new and challenging idea for the players.

“I ran the simplest drill and nearly killed about eight people,” Dear said. “There were a lot of near-misses. They were that bad. I guess at the time, I was too dumb to spread them far enough apart because I wasn’t used to coaching that level of youngster.

“I should have spread them about 9,000 miles apart.”

Dear claims he doesn’t remember leaving the park in disgust, with Hill chasing after him.

Hill: “That day of the first practice, he was ready to say, ‘The heck with this, I’m not going to have anything more to do with it.’ He came close to just walking away and saying, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

“I practically had to get down and plead with him to come back for another practice . . . But it finally worked out.”

Indeed, it did. The Saxons went on to win nine league titles in the next 24 years and twice went all the way to the conference championship.

“Gib was always the backbone of the staff,” Hill said. “It hasn’t been a one-man operation at all. Anything we’ve accomplished, we’ve done together.”

People wondered why Dear, who played fullback for UC Santa Barbara, never tried to land a head coaching position of his own. He certainly had the credentials--an incredible work ethic, a creative tactical mind, a knack for motivating players.

The answer is simple and sincere.

“I’ve always wanted to be happy . . . and I’m happy,” he says with a grin. “You look at people who are driven and maybe that’s what makes them happy.

“I’m happy doing what I’m doing and one of the reasons is that Herb lets me do strange things sometimes. We’ve had a lot of success and that has to do with letting people do the things they think are right.”

Not that they haven’t had their share of disagreements.

“He’s always been a very imaginative kind of coach. He seems to see some things other people don’t see,” Hill said. “But if you give him too much time to think, he can get you in trouble.”

Dear: “Herb is super sound and I’m the change-up.”

El Modena Coach Bob Lester, a longtime friend who attended the party Wednesday, said, “Herb is kind of down-to-earth and Gibby’s been about three feet off the ground all his life. Sometimes Herb has to lasso him and pull him back down to earth.”

Dear: “I’m gambling with other people’s money, and nothing’s more fun. You ask me why I stay and that’s part of it.”

Hill: “Whenever we’re at an impasse, he’ll throw his ‘You’re the head coach. If that’s what you want to do, them do it’ line at me.”

There is another famous line Hill has learned to expect.

“Sometimes after a Sunday or Monday meeting, we’ll leave with things still not finalized,” Hill said. “Then Gibby will come in the next day and say, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I was just lying there and I could see it.’

“And I’ll say, ‘OK, what is it this time?’ ”

“Twenty years ago I dodged a bullet,” says Dear.

He has had an immune system disorder called lupus since 1963. One night that year he ran such a high fever, he nearly died. It was his first sign that he had lupus.

Since then, Dear said, he has had about one-fifth the number of infection-fighting white blood cells of a normal person.

This has made treating his cancer more difficult. He needed a series of whole blood and platelet transfusions prior to his unsuccessful lung surgery in May.

“He’s dealing with this the way any athlete deals with a fourth-and-one,” said Dick Gorrie, a teammate of Dear’s from Santa Barbara and a football coach at Rancho Santiago College. “He’s fighting it and he won’t quit.”

Bingham: “He’s going to fight this the same way he taught us. He’s always been an up guy and very courageous, and those are the things he taught us.”

Dear said he knows he may not be back for his beloved Saxons’ 1986 season, even as a spectator.

“You try not to dwell on it,” he said simply. “It’s like the oncologist was telling me: ‘You can plan for tomorrow, but you live for today.’

“You spend your whole life planning and putting things off until tomorrow. Now, you have to turn that whole thing around and start living for today. Doesn’t that make sense?

“It really doesn’t take courage. You think it would, but when it happens to you, it’s easy. It just takes patience.

“It’s actually a lot easier than people think--the idea of maybe you will and maybe you won’t be here tomorrow.”

The guest of honor no longer has the endurance that once allowed him to prepare for a game by working Friday through Tuesday--without sleep.

At 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, a friend told Alice that Coach Dear seemed to be tiring.

Shortly afterward, he quietly left the roomful of former teammates, colleagues and ex-players.

But the party inspired by his sunny character continued into the night as smaller groups of people left together to renew acquaintances. Long after Dear’s early departure, the men whose lives he touched carried on as if he were still among them, laughing.

“This shows how much respect and love we have for Coach Dear,” Bodine said. “Everyone here cares about him. They’re not here to drink and have a good time, they’re here because the party is for Coach Dear.

“Maybe in high school, you wouldn’t be able to admit it, but I think a lot of people here would throw away the jock image and say they love Coach Dear.”

Dear’s players celebrated integrity, hard work, humor, emotional warmth, and two kinds of courage--the stuff displayed on the football field and the stuff seen in certain lives.

They honored Gib Dear, the man they will always call Coach.