A Winner : John Zinda’s Legacy at Claremont McKenna Isn’t Measured in Records of His Football Teams, Rather by the Way He Prepared Players for Life

It appeared a case of school property defacement, likely the work of a prankster.

Years ago, an assistant coach at Claremont McKenna College came upon an old desk while cleaning out a weight room in the athletic department.

The culprit had carved into the wood, the way lovebirds might scrawl a heart into a tree.

Except this inscription was curious: it read “I Love This College” and was signed “John Zinda.”

The assistant reported what he thought was an act of mockery to the football coach.

The coach stopped the assistant in mid-sentence.

“What a second,” he said. “I wrote that there.”

There was no doubt John Zinda loved Claremont McKenna College. Or that it loved him.

Zinda was head coach for 26 seasons, from 1968-1994. Yet, when the obituary for Zinda--who died July 14 at age 57 of leukemia--arrived in a downtown sports department, the sports editor regretted he had never heard of the man.

Indeed, what Zinda’s teams did on the field would warrant few headlines in a large metropolitan newspaper with limited space to devote to Division III football.

Zinda compiled a losing record, 92-133-4, in his 26 years. He never won a national championship or produced anyone who played a down in the NFL.

But like probably thousands of other small-school coaches whose careers go seemingly unnoticed, Zinda’s worth could not be measured in wins and losses.

“He was a second father to me,” Sam Reece, a former player said.

“A special man,” Bob Farra, class of ‘79, offered.

Zinda had a more revealing statistic: In 26 years, only one player who played four years for him failed to graduate.

To the end, Zinda’s widow Suzanne said, “John was still looking for that player. He was going to haunt him to come back and graduate.”

Zinda’s proteges became lawyers, bankers and entrepreneurs.

If a Claremont player had an afternoon chemistry lab, Zinda would work practice around the class . It was not uncommon to see CMC players studying textbooks on the bus en route to games.

Augie Nieto, a Stags’ center in the late ‘70s, used to run a small business out of the trunk of his car during college.

Nieto, in a suit and tie, was always rushing in late for practice.

“A couple of assistant coaches didn’t like it,” Farra, a former Claremont quarterback who now works in commercial real estate, remembered. “But Zinda said, ‘This guy is going to be rich one day. We want to keep him for a friend.’ ”

The business Nieto was running was Life Fitness, the exercise equipment company that makes Lifecycles. Nieto is president of the company and lives in Chicago.

Maybe Vince Lombardi had it all wrong about winning.

At least at Claremont.

At this quaint, Ivy-league West, academic, liberal-arts college located 35 miles east of Los Angeles, success was measured with different rulers.

While Zinda produced some small college powerhouses, winning four Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference titles, victory was never the end all.

How can it be?

There are no athletic scholarships. Coaches can not even visit potential recruits.

Zinda played the hands he was dealt.

“An awful lot depends on who shows up,” John Roth, professor of philosophy and one of Zinda’s closest friends, said.

Scholastic Aptitude Tests scores for CMC players averaged 1,200. (The minimum NCAA requirement to play Division I athletics is 700).

“He was more interested in what people were going to be when they became businessmen, not whether we beat Occidental in ‘94,” Roth said.

Unlike big-time college programs, in which the pressures on coaches to produce can be intense, Zinda was allowed to teach unburdened.

“His job was never in jeopardy,” Jack L. Stark, CMC president for the past 25 years, said. “That never came up.”

Under Zinda’s watch, there was never the taint of scandal or NCCA probation, although Zinda was adamant against a rule that prohibited coaches from teaching players in the off season.

Zinda always believed himself a teacher first. The football field was his classroom. A former history teacher, he was a full tenured professor with a Master’s degree. One of his biggest thrills was being allowed to grade senior theses, a requirement for all Claremont students.

Zinda didn’t play favorites.

Nieto, the future fitness-machine king, turned in a thesis Zinda deemed unacceptable.

Farra tells the story: “Zinda says, ‘Augie, I’ll give you one more chance to rewrite it,’ and Augie says, ‘Coach, I can’t. I have to have it back to where I got at by 4 p.m.’ ”

Zinda shook his head.

And flunked him.

While teaching at Claremont’s El Roble Junior High in the 1960s, Zinda took a group of students cross country on an educational trip. The highlight was Zinda getting to speak privately with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He talked about the Eisenhower meeting the rest of his life.

Farra, who led the nation in passing while he was quarterback at Claremont, remembers visiting the campus before deciding to attend.

“The first thing he did was take me over to hear Henry Kissinger, who was speaking on campus,” Farra said. “I didn’t even look at the football field.”

Zinda used football as a metaphor.

“He talked about the four quarter in football and the four seasons in a lifetime,” remembers Reece, an Los Angeles lawyer and Claremont graduate of 1974. “The curious thing about a football, he said, was that it was oblong. It’s never going to bound the same way all the time. Life was like that. You’ve got to be ready to go all four quarters.”

Driving points home with academically minded players was a constant challenge. Claremont players didn’t buy into your typical “rah, rah” coaching rhetoric.

“You couldn’t bang lockers to get the players pumped up,” Chris Dabrow, star running back on Zinda’s last championship team in 1987, said. “He had a more cerebral approach.”

Once, on an insufferably hot and smoggy day in August back in the 1970s, Zinda cut short a lackluster practice.

Reece remembers: “He calls us in and says, ‘You guys are dragging, what’s the problem?’ And a guy steps forward, Jerry Petula, and he explains that the negative ions in the air are causing our depression. He just starts lecturing about negative ions and finally, the coach, says, ‘Practice over.’ ”

*

No one starts out coaching at Claremont expecting to end up there. Zinda, who had done an earlier stint as a Claremont assistant in the early 1960s, was still in his 20s when he was named head coach in 1968.

He was on the coaching fast track, having led Royal Oak High in Covina to the CIF championship in 1967.

Zinda turned around a struggling Claremont program, winning his first SCIAC title in 1970.

The longer he stayed, though, the more he fell in love with small-college atmosphere. Claremont McKenna, he believed, was one of the world’s best kept secrets, an Inland Empire oasis tucked against the San Gabriel Mountains.

“I grew up in Southern California, and I had never heard of it,” Dabrow admitted.

In 1982, just to see how the other half lives, Zinda took a sabbatical as an assistant at USC during John Robinson’s last season in his first go-around as coach.

Zinda reported back to friends that the shoe budget for the Trojan football team almost exceeded that of the entire Claremont athletic program.

Zinda coached the scout team at USC and considered the experience enjoyable.

But he returned to Claremont more resolute.

“John realized it was great fun,” wife Suzanne recalls, “but that was not where he wanted to be. He wanted to be at Claremont, doing what he liked.”

Zinda assumed a dual position as football coach and athletic director in 1983. In 1986, he experienced his proudest moment in coaching, turning a team that finished 1-8 the previous season into 8-1 champions. Zinda won NCAA Coach of the Year honors. He won his last SCIAC title in 1987, behind the running of Dabrow, now a pharmaceuticals field representative.

But the program then took a turn for the worse. Attracting football players that fit the Claremont profile had become increasingly difficult since the school went co-ed in 1976.

In 1992, the team was winless and fielded only 27 players. In 1993, the Board of Trustees met to decide the fate of the program. Largely out of respect for Zinda, and lobbying from former players, football was saved.

On his death bed, Zinda wondered to Roth whether the program would survive when he was gone.

“I told him, ‘In some ways, the legacy could be stronger,’ ” Roth said.

Zinda believed he had beaten the cancer first discovered four years ago. But after a relapse this summer, he was admitted to the hospital, where it was discovered the cancer had spread into his bone marrow.

Death came soon thereafter.

He was told on July 12 he was going to die and passed away two days later.

“He never feared death,” Suzanne said. “He thought it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to you.”

He left behind a wife of 35 years, five children and a thousand points of light.

Zinda was lucky in that his wake was ostensibly conducted before his death, at a November retirement ceremony. He had announced he was stepping down as coach after the ’94 season, although he planned to stay on as athletic director.

At the tribute, Zinda asked, “How many coaches with losing records have been honored like that?”

Zinda never needed or asked for attention. He was happiest knowing he had made an impact.

“I remember standing in the parking lot, the night before my first practice of my senior season,” Reece, his voice cracking over the phone, said. “I told him I couldn’t do it, I didn’t think I had the desire to play my senior year. But he encouraged me, and told me in fact that this would be my best year.

“I ended up being a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship that year.”

Not everyone can coach Michigan. Or should.

“He found his spot,” Dabrow said. “He found something he was good at. He was smart enough to realize that early, and smart enough to stay there.”

At his funeral, Roth delivered an eloquent eulogy, prefaced with a quote from II Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

Zinda kept the faith.

“John did not preach something he didn’t live,” Suzanne said. “He didn’t say ‘Don’t smoke’ and smoke. He didn’t say ‘Stay in shape’ and not stay in shape. He didn’t say ‘Go to church’ and not go to church. His teams saw that John lived the way he tried to teach him.”

Zinda’s impact would come full circle at a funeral parlor.

When Suzanne went to Claremont’s Oak Park Cemetery to arrange her husband’s burial, the mortician turned out to be one of John’s former junior high students.

“I still owe your husband 11 laps,” Joe Mendoza said.

For punishment, Zinda used to make students pull a card from a deck to determine how many laps they would have to run.

A face card was worth 10. An ace meant 11.

Mendoza drew an ace.

Suzanne told Mendoza he could work off the debt by maintaining her husband’s grave.

“You can take one lap off for that,” she said.