Meiss Finds a Laugher at Orange

Everyone likes getting good press, but most of what we coaches say is so guarded it’s humorous. . . . Let’s get serious, a funny football coach is as rare as frog’s hair. --From the selected writings of Tom Meiss

The frogs in the biology labs of Orange High School are standard issue--there to be dissected, not shaved--but when it comes to football coaches, the Panthers have one of the rare ones.

Regardless of your definition, Tom Meiss qualifies as funny. Funny as in laughs and funny as in different.

Meiss is the kind of football coach who once, in an attempt to inspire his team, dressed as a duck hunter and pumped a shotgun blast into the air, thus taking the shotgun formation to a new dimension.

Meiss also is a licensed auctioneer, a former antique salesman and a restorer of classic automobiles. “My most famous car,” he boasts, “was a ’46 Ford convertible that Steven Spielberg bought and wrecked in ‘Back to the Future I.’ ” That was the car Spielberg had accessorized with a truckload of manure in the middle of the film.

Like all football coaches, Meiss is obsessed with preparation, but that, too, manifests itself in unusual ways.

Before sitting down for a lunch interview the other day, Meiss slid eight pages of his own handwriting across the table. Just a few thoughts he’d jotted down in advance of the meeting, just a few things he’d like to cover.

Some Meiss musings:

-- First of all, a smart coach praises his opponent. . . . Then you make sure you don’t say anything that can be put on their bulletin board for motivation. The next thing you do is try to get the names of as many of your kids as you can in print. . . . .If you can manage a line that includes the name of one of your assistant coaches, that’s a real coup; at least that’s what my assistants--Howard, Haley, Stroup, Bland and Conway--tell me.

--After 30 years of coaching, I’ve pretty well concluded the game is usually decided by fumbles and officials. The coaches are just along for the ride. --Yes, I am a walk-on head coach; at Orange that means I’m a classified employee. I get paid on the same day as the head custodian. We both had to have fingerprints taken to prove we weren’t perverts. Incidentally, he makes more in a month than I do for the season. --Now, if you want some truthful statements, don’t ask me about the game. Meiss’ name rhymes with Meese and, in the little world of Orange County prep football, the 48-year-old coach has had to contend with his own controversies. In 1984, Meiss was fired as coach at Santa Ana High after winning two league championships and compiling a 46-23-2 record in six seasons.

His sins?

Applying for other coaching jobs, espousing Christian principles in the Santa Ana game program and getting prominently quoted in a newspaper story about the demands of coaching at an inner-city high school. Apparently, several Santa Ana administrators objected to the idea of presenting Santa Ana as an inner-city school.

Meiss was retained as an English instructor--he still teaches five classes a day at Santa Ana--but went five years without finding another team to call his own.

The man who fine-tuned Steve DeBerg at Savanna High and took Santa Ana High from worst to first in two seasons can’t get a head coaching job? Meiss said he had offers, all of them geographically undesirable, but couldn’t even land an interview when he applied at Santa Ana Valley.

“And that was within our own district,” Meiss says. “I worked there in the ‘70s, I knew the faculty. I never did understand what happened there. That was always a mystery to me.

“There were times when I felt like--I didn’t want to be paranoid--but I felt like somebody might have been going out of their way, for spite or whatever reasons, to see that I didn’t get a job. There were several occasions where I wouldn’t get an interview and the job would wind up going to an assistant coach.”

The shotgun incident might have had something to do with it. In 1983, Santa Ana was readying for a big game with rival El Modena, which has a duck for a mascot. (Don’t ask. It’s a long story.) So, one rainy afternoon, Meiss pulled on some chest-high waders and a raincoat and told his team, “Yep, it’s definitely duck season.”

Then he fired a couple of shotgun blanks into the air.

“It was a great stunt,” Meiss says. And it worked. The Saints beat El Modena, 9-7.

District officials weren’t quite so charmed by the tale, which made print the following season. Meiss had to assure a district superintendent that the rounds fired were indeed blanks, but since maintains he was “harassed” following the incident.

“They assigned me five different preparations of the lowest English courses, made me move from room to room,” Meiss says. “They did everything they could to make me move on.”

Eventually, Meiss had to go outside the district to rejoin the head coaching fraternity. To Orange, which had had three winless seasons since 1981 and hadn’t played in a CIF title game since 1929. As a walk-on.

We said the man has a sense of humor.

“I like a project,” Meiss admits. “You can look at my background--antiques, auto restoration. I think it must come from growing up poor. If the toaster is broken, you don’t buy a new one. You fix it.”

Meiss fixed Orange, all right. Like a clockwork Orange. At 10-2-1, his Panthers will play Trabuco Hills tonight for the Division VIII championship--their first final-round appearance in 60 years.

Nice comeback.

“I’m pleased,” Meiss says, “but not overly surprised. I always felt this was within the realm of possibility.

“It’s a good feeling. It’s like taking somebody to Disneyland who’s never been there before. You can see the light in their eyes.”

And what’s so funny about that?