Soccer Sage : Major Surgery Can Keep El Camino’s Coach Norman Jackson Off the Field; It Can’t Keep Him From Talking About His Sport

Nothing can keep Norman Jackson from talking soccer. Not even major surgery.

For more than 50 years the Liverpool native has been in and around the game. So it was hardly a surprise recently when he continued to talk while laid up in intensive care.

Stomach surgery has kept Jackson, El Camino College’s soccer coach since 1982, away from his team throughout the season, and his painful recovery will prevent him from coaching in Saturday’s playoff game against Glendale College (9-5).

But the ordeal hasn’t slowed Jackson’s mind. He has trouble walking, but his stay in the hospital hasn’t stopped him from talking.

“The first night out of surgery, he wanted to but he couldn’t even talk because his lips were stuck together from dehydration,” said Jim Millander, Jackson’s assistant coach who has taken the El Camino helm in Jackson’s absence. “I said, ‘Take it easy, Norm, I’ll do the talking.’ ”

Jackson would have none of it. Golden West, El Camino’s South Coast Conference rival, edged the Warriors, 1-0, in the second to last game of the season and a hospitalized Jackson phoned Millander the next morning to talk. The loss had given him insomnia.

Jackson probably won’t sleep much until his club wins the state championship or is eliminated. But he won’t be recovering quietly.

Growing up in England, Jackson, 60, walked, talked and played soccer. He continued as a member of the Canadian National Team before coming to America in 1957. Until 1963 he played in a Los Angeles semipro league and the following year began coaching with the American Youth Soccer Assn. He’s been a staff coach with the U.S. Soccer Federation for 12 years, an assistant coach for the L.A. Aztecs from ’79 to ’82 and he led the nation’s West team to a silver medal at the 1986 Olympic Sports Festival. He also worked alongside Lakers announcer Chick Hearn on soccer broadcasts in the late ‘70s.

All phases of the game interest him. Teaching stirs him.

“I equate coaching to teaching,” Jackson said recently from his home in Torrance. “A teacher will teach Monday through Thursday and then on Friday he tests his students to see what they’ve learned. There is no difference in soccer.

“Game day is the players’ exam, and my job is to get them ready in practice like the teacher would. I want them to do it on their own when game day comes.”

Jackson, an aircraft engineer at Northrup Corp., likes to use a hands-off approach in coaching. As a child he never had a coach, just a manager who made sure the team had uniforms. He says a coach would have made him better as a youngster, but he questions the tactics of some coaches.

“I think there is too much emphasis on coaching and some tend to over-coach,” he said. “Some players in the middle of the game look at the coach like ‘What do I do now?’ They should know. When a team goes onto the field the coach is finished. He should have done his job.”

Such attention to coaching has made Jackson a self-professed easygoing teacher, one who has dealt with so many players that having fun, not setting rules and regulations, has become his prime objective.

In the next few weeks, enjoying the game may not be easy. El Camino (11-3-2), which starts eight freshman, could have captured the conference championship and a No. 1 seed in the playoffs if it had won just one of its last three games. But consecutive shutouts by the feet of Mt. San Antonio, Golden West and Fullerton ruined the Warriors’ unbeaten record and left them with a tougher road to the state championship, which they’ve won three times since 1982, including back-to-back victories in 1984 and ’85.

Although he wasn’t involved in the losses, Jackson felt their impact and lamented their cause.

“It was a combination of overconfidence and playing poorly,” he said. “They just panicked a little and you can’t do that. They went from really high to really low, and it’s gonna be tough to get back to where we were.”

The Warriors have won close to 90% of their games in the last 10 years and Millander thinks winning has hurt his team’s motivation. “There is lots of psychology involved,” he said. “I think they almost get kind of bored when they win so easily. The result was three losses in six days.”

The difference now is that the Warriors’ season will end if they lose again.

To ease the pressure and to help players understand what it takes to win during postseason play, Millander asked Jackson to talk to the team. He didn’t refuse.

Jackson probably will watch his team in the playoffs, though he said he shouldn’t. These days he spends as much time as he can watching soccer.

In lieu of network television coverage which doesn’t exist, he lowers the volume on his TV and views games on a Spanish-language UHF station. He purchased a shortwave radio so he can listen to matches broadcast from England.

Soccer’s lack of major media coverage in America mirrors its lacking interest among Americans, Jackson said, and he wants that to change, particularly for younger players who could learn from observing.

“I learned the game watching teams play in Liverpool, copying the players and their skills,” he said. “Here, you don’t have that. I find it a pity that you can’t use (soccer on TV) as a teaching aid. When you see the best play, you can put that into your game. Here, all you have is a coach and he can’t give the kids everything they need to be successful.”

Coaching is all young people have, however. Major networks shy from soccer because of its small viewing audience and because, Jackson suggested, the game’s lack of timeouts makes it difficult to televise.

“In England,” he said, “they just superimpose the commercials on the screen and the game goes on.”

In England, the newspapers’ sports pages are filled with soccer news. Here, “we can’t get one thing in the paper,” Jackson complained. “If we phone in the score, they’ll put it in but that’s slacking.”

Jackson thinks many coaches just don’t have enough interest to convince their players that watching soccer is beneficial. “I love the game so much,” he said, “that I have difficulty walking past a game, any game, without stopping to watch. But a lot of coaches don’t do that. I don’t think they care.”

It’s also questionable whether the community cares.

El Camino’s games often attract 100 fans to a 12,000-seat stadium. Jackson watches his five granddaughters play soccer in community leagues before decent crowds, and he believes these children and those who use the stadium for soccer just prior to Warrior contests should stay to watch, as should all of the area’s high school soccer players.

Jackson calls soccer the greatest spectator sport in the world. He would like to foster more respect for the game.

Millander, a 1980 U.S. Olympian, thinks Jackson has done plenty for soccer. Jackson filled in when Millander lost his father as a teen-ager. Millander, then 16, moved in with Jackson, who coached him at North Torrance High and helped him make a decision about turning pro when the now-defunct N.Y. Cosmos drafted him.

Since then the two have worked together often, not only at El Camino but at clinics they’ve organized around the state.

Notoriety is the result. “The name Norm Jackson comes up all the time around here,” said Millander, a stockbroker. “He’s one of the most knowledgeable people on soccer. He’s touched the life of all of Southern California’s best players and all he wants to do is talk soccer.”