A Calm Has Settled Over Muir : Health Has Forced Football Coach to Alter His Fiery Style

The convenience of it all, for whatever it’s worth, is that Jim Brownfield can go almost anywhere and carry most of his life with him, tucked away in a beige athletic bag.

He has his roll sheets, his scribbled notes, his whistle and his small jar of nitroglycerin pills, and they go together like oil and vinegar.

Unfortunately, they will always go together. Brownfield has one because of the other, the price of working seven-day weeks every football season and skipping a summer vacation to work in football even more.

Brownfield, 57, the veteran football coach at Muir High School in Pasadena, has a high profile in the Los Angeles coaching community. He won the Coastal Conference title in 1985, then coached in the Shrine All-Star game and ran the National Football Foundation game last summer.

He is also one of the most excitable coaches and a person proud of his ability to motivate a team with pep talks. Loud pep talks, if necessary.

An old yeller is what he is.

Or what he used to be. Doctor’s orders after a recent diagnosis of hypertension, or extremely high blood pressure, forced a change-or-else attitude and the addition of the nitro pills.

Now, Jim Brownfield is looked upon as a china doll of sorts, an image that does have it’s advantages around Muir. Fights on campus have practically stopped in mid-swing when he walks up--”I’m gonna go off if you keep swinging,” he tells the combatants, with positive results--and the football team is extra cautious not to cross him, to keep him calm.

Now, the yelling can hurt both sides.

“I was very much aware of it,” he said of keeping calm at last week’s game against Inglewood Morningside, a 31-6 win that gave Muir a 3-0 record. “As the administrators would say, I was giving some real nasty looks. The kids were laughing. They said that I don’t have to yell, they could tell when I was mad just by the way I would walk.”

The team, and the school for that matter, got a pretty good scare when Brownfield missed the previous week’s game against Long Beach Jordan. Taking a week off and staying away from football was another of the doctor’s orders.

“The mere fact that he missed a game shows that he feels the severity of the situation,” said Bill Paul, a Mustang assistant coach and longtime friend. “However, the mere fact that he was back to work again after only a week’s absence indicates that football is his life.”

But what price his life in football?

Brownfield’s family has a history of heart problems, and he began feeling dull pains deep in his chest late last season. They went away after two days but returned the next week.

A visit to the doctor determined nothing, so Brownfield went from the playoffs to a summer passing league to the two all-star games and then another summer league without a vacation. When the 1986 season began, he got his annual sore throat from shouting earlier than ever and felt the chest pains again.

He also felt scared.

This time, the battery of tests came up with something. The diagnosis was hypertension, good news, considering what it might have been, but hardly a reason to celebrate, considering his makeup.

“I won’t cheat the athletes of my energy,” he said. “I have to learn to deal with it, but I won’t let off. I will just have to approach the game from a different frame of mind, just change the vocal thing a bit.”

Paul said: “Being so intense after 37 years of coaching, you can’t simply stop the trend you set for yourself. If he backed off, it wouldn’t be the same, and he would be the first person to realize it on the field.”

Good news in the form of the 31-10 win over Jordan was a help. It’s a good thing he wasn’t there, though, since Muir trailed, 10-9, going into the fourth quarter before coming back.

And what if Paul and Clyde Turner, interim co-coaches, hadn’t pulled out the win?

“It would have been women and children first,” Paul said. “Right after us.”

Clearly, the Mustangs wanted to win it for Brownfield.

“He told us he would be back, and we trusted him,” senior quarterback Vince Phillips said. “It was only one game. He told us we would have to do it without him, and we decided to do it for him. Everybody on the team felt we should do it for him just because he couldn’t be there. We felt we owed it to him.”

As for his future in coaching, Brownfield plans to decide after the season. Until then, there’s Saturday night’s game against North Torrance at Pasadena City College, then the rest of the schedule.

As expected, the Mustangs, The Times’ seventh-ranked team, are led by the versatile Ricky Ervins. He has lined up at running back, in the slot and at wide receiver and has 365 yards rushing in 57 carries for a 6.4-yard average. He also has caught 10 passes for 190 yards, returned 4 punts for 77 yards and 5 kickoffs for 97.

Phillips has also played well with a receiving corps that, Brownfield said, “has set a world record for dropped passes.” The nephew of former Blair High quarterback and USC All-American defensive back Charles Phillips, he has completed 33 of 52 passes for 414 yards and 7 touchdowns, with no interceptions.

Prep Notes La Puente Bishop Amat, coming off the 21-7 win over Long Beach Poly, is up one spot to No. 21 in the USA Today national football rankings. Wilmington Banning remains at No. 6, and the Pilots play Poly tomorrow night at Veterans Stadium in Long Beach. . . . Charlie Brande, the girls’ volleyball coach at Corona del Mar of Newport Beach who was suspended last week for insubordination and allegedly mistreating a player, was fired Tuesday after refusing to resign. The office of John Nicoll, the Newport-Mesa School District Superintendent, had received three letters that accused Brande of physically abusing players, but team members and parents had signed a petition asking for his return. Police also investigated the latest incident in which he is alleged to have grabbed a player by the back of her neck but found no evidence of wrongdoing. A former assistant at the University of Hawaii and UCLA and the coach when Corona del Mar won the state title in 1984, Brande told the Orange County Register that he is considering legal action against the school board and the parent whose letter prompted his dismissal. . . . Randall Johnson of Rio Hondo Prep, an eight-man team in Arcadia, got his 100th coaching victory last week in the Kares’ 22-20 win over Bloomington Christian. He is in his 12th year. . . . Twenty girls’ volleyball teams, including 14 ranked in the top 10 of the Southern Section polls, will compete in the Tournament of Champions Saturday at UC Santa Barbara. Among those will be Mira Costa of Manhattan Beach, the No. 1 team in the country and the defending state Division I champion. San Marcos High is the host.