Servite’s Toner Shows Alter Ego

An interview with Servite High School football Coach Larry Toner on the eve of the Southern Section Division V championship game is 90 minutes of fits and starts, set to the tune of a ringing telephone and the “Excuse me, Coach Toner” choir.

A reporter from OCN is on the line.

“Who are you looking for?” Toner deadpans into the mouthpiece.

“Larry Toner?

“I think he got fired today.”

A former player, an old offensive lineman, is on the line.

“Yeah, we made it,” Toner says, accepting congratulations. Then, he teases: “Well, we finally got a decent line. See what happens?”

Toner hangs up, chuckling.

“Is this place a zoo or what?”

Toner’s Friars are to play Newport Harbor tonight at Orange Coast College, Servite’s first appearance in a football final since 1983. Eleven years is long time to wait for anything, especially at a school that used to expect football in December. But in his sixth season as head coach, Toner has brought the Friars back and is clearly enjoying the fruits along the countdown to kickoff.

Abruptly, the mood is broken by a courier knocking on the door and handing Toner a large Manila envelope. The return address reads: “Scripps Memorial Hospital, Stevens Cancer Center.”

Toner opens the envelope and silently scans the letter inside for a few moments.

“Mmmm, wow,” Toner says somberly. “I don’t like this.”

Toner begins to read the letter aloud. The writer introduces himself as a member of the Servite championship team of 1982. Twenty-nine years old, married, three kids. Still a Servite supporter who attended several games early in the season but hasn’t been back, he writes, because in November he was told he had an untreatable malignant tumor on his brain stem.

He says he has been told by neurologists that he has three months to live.

“Who is this guy?” Toner says, flipping to the second page.

The letter is unsigned.

Haltingly, Toner reads the rest of the letter. The words catch in his throat as he reaches the final paragraph:

“ ‘I will not become a subject of distraction or sympathy for you. Life is for the living, and I ask that you pray that there is a final Christmas for my wife and family . . . I am and shall always remain a Friar, (pause) football champion.

“ ‘The opportunity to be the same is now upon you. May God bless and protect you all and may the Holy Spirit give you the hearts and minds in your quest for the CIF championship. A Friar, Class of ’83.’ ”

Toner’s eyes are red as he sets the letter down.

He makes a phone call, to Scripps Hospital, to see if someone on the staff can identify the letter writer. “She says they can’t release that information,” he says.

Toner hands the letter to an assistant coach and asks him to ask around, conduct an ID search.

If this were an elaborately staged win-one-for-the-Gipper ploy, Toner would be better off teaching drama instead of blocks and tackles. Larry Toner doesn’t cry, right?

Not the facemask-grabbing, helmet-slapping, raging-lunatic drill sergeant who tormented Servite freshman football players for 15 years before taking on the varsity in 1989.

Not the legendary sideline foghorn renowned for his screaming crimson rants and jackhammer finger pokes into the chest of some poor junior wide receiver who ran the wrong route.

Can’t possibly be one and the same.

When Toner was hired as head coach at Servite, returning after four years in Portland as the defensive coordinator at Jesuit High, it was “hard,” he says, “because first of all, there was a lot of myth about who I was before I came back. . . . There were all these ugly stories out there, like I was mean and demagogic and things like that.”

Feigning astonishment, Toner nods and quips, “I don’t know where they got this idea. I would yell at people, all these things. I mean, gosh, I would never ever. I’m so mellow.”

In truth, Toner has had to tone down the assault on this level, largely, he says, because “you’re now in a greater public arena. It becomes counterproductive, because the people who are outsiders that have no understanding of what’s going on . . . the interference is not worth the tactic.”

Toner will still grab a facemask in practice, where “I don’t have to worry about an audience. It’s like, people used to worry about me hitting (players) in the helmet. That always used to confound me. Because they’re going out there and they run at each other at 15 miles an hour and they collide full on without a break, one on the other, and the impact is outrageous. And they’re worried about a hand.

“The only thing that ever happened when you hit a guy in the helmet is your hand hurts. I never could understand the consternation that that particular thing did.

“You would never hit a kid with your fist, or a kid who’s unprotected, but why they would object to that strikes me as very strange, when there are so many other things I would’ve been much more concerned about. That you call a kid a complete and total loser, or tell a person ‘you’ll never play on my team because you’re not good.’ Or if you run a drill where there’s real cause for physical injury because the man’s fatigued.

“To me, things like that are damaging. Smack a kid in the helmet--you’re never going to hurt anybody. But because people are so taken by it, you can’t do it.”

Outsiders would also never guess, on sight, that Toner spent 11 years in the seminary, studied for four years at the Gregorian University in Rome, has degrees in philosophy and theology, and is a lover of books who can drop words like “demagogic” into conversations about coaching the belly dive.

“I will read usually every day,” Toner says. “I love Edgar Allan Poe. Probably because he can really use words and get right to the quick of things. Which,” he adds with a laugh, “is very useful in football. He understands the gamut of human emotions--let’s put it that way.

“I love to read about Lombardi. In many ways, he’s a very singular man. . . . He talks about football and says, ‘It’s a game for madmen.’ He’s right, if you think it’s only the game you’re there for.”

Toner points to the anonymous letter in front of him.

“That’s why you’re here,” he says. “Because of the values you give kids to show them, ‘This is the way to do things.’ ”

The lesson is one Toner believes is worth driving home. With or without the helmet slap.