Talking the Talk, and They Mean It

Any coach can talk the talk. Any coach can look a recruit in the eye and tell him, “We’re in this together, son. Wherever we go as a team -- you’re going to take us. Whatever happens to you, happens to me, too. Whatever you need, I’ll be there for you. That’s not just a promise, it’s a commitment.”

Then the coach leaves for another job.

Or recruits another kid at the same position.

Or goes to NBC.

And the people left behind shrug and say, “Business as usual.”

Over the weekend a couple of coaches who had probably talked the talk in their careers -- John Calipari of the University of Massachusetts and Mike Holmgren of the Green Bay Packers -- got a chance to walk the walk too.

Calipari saw his star player, Marcus Camby, crumbled up in the corridor outside the locker room in Olean, N.Y., Sunday, a few minutes before the scheduled start of the Massachusetts-St. Bonaventure game. Camby had collapsed mysteriously, and was unresponsive to spoken commands for about 10 minutes.

This is a frightful situation for any basketball coach; the memories of what happened to Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis are all too familiar. This is even more frightful for Calipari, because earlier in the week a U-Mass. swimmer, Greg Menton, was stricken with an apparent heart attack after swimming two events in a meet at Dartmouth, and died there.

Now, Calipari is the coach of the No. 1 team in the country, so no game U-Mass. plays is a small game. U-Mass. is undefeated. It is playing every game with a chance to become the first team to go through a regular season unbeaten since Nevada-Las Vegas in 1991 -- beyond that lies the chance to become the first unbeaten national champion since Indiana in 1976. So it is no throwaway gesture to give up coaching even one game.

But Calipari walked the walk. He unhesitatingly accompanied Camby in the ambulance to the hospital, and turned the team over to an assistant, James Flint. “An incident like this puts things into the perspective they should be in. Basketball is not life or death,” Calipari said.

Only life or death is life or death.

Calipari is one of those young, self-anointed geniuses with a big shoe contract and too facile a smile. Folks often wonder if Calipari’s hands get tired from patting himself on the back. If he were any more self-serving, he’d be a waiter at an automat.

So it was encouraging to see how Calipari’s heart was sincerely tugged by his player’s health. He could easily have coached the game. He could easily have announced, “I’ve talked to Marcus. He’s in good hands. I’m coaching this game because the whole team needs me, and I know Marcus would want me to be here coaching.” Let me not disparage that road. But Calipari walked a different one.

Mike Holmgren didn’t have any choice but to coach. When his dear friend and assistant, Gil Haskell, was knocked unconscious in a collision on the sideline -- and later taken off the field on a stretcher -- the Packers-Cowboys game was already in progress. Holmgren could hardly go to the hospital with Haskell; the Packers were playing for the right to play in the Super Bowl.

But Holmgren was deeply affected for the rest of the game. And in his postgame remarks, Holmgren echoed what Calipari had said, the day before and 1,500 miles away: “It puts things in perspective. Here we are, playing for the Super Bowl, but all this has to pale in comparison to the seriousness of Gil’s situation.”

When you are confronted with what seems to be a life or death situation you realize that whether the tight end makes the right read and blocks the blitzing linebacker isn’t that big a deal.

After going back to Green Bay with his team, Holmgren and his wife turned around and flew back to Texas to be with Haskell’s wife. “Obviously, I can’t do anything but just be there,” Holmgren said.

Often, a coach professes that his priorities put family first, and coaching second. But then you find him sacked out on the couch in the film room. Joe Gibbs, who was notorious for sleeping over at Redskin Park seemingly for months on end, tells the story of coming home late one night, and walking into his youngest son’s room to kiss him good night. As Gibbs knelt to kiss his sleeping son, he saw his boy had chin whiskers! Talk about being away for a while.

On the day Gibbs announced his sudden retirement from coaching he came close to explaining his decision simply by telling that anecdote.

Gibbs was one of those men who was consumed by his work. He couldn’t not coach. He was so addicted to the job, so absorbed by it, he came to realize that the only way he could spend any more time with his family was by quitting.

We don’t think of coaches as having families, or as having the kinds of emotional problems that plague the rest of us. We think of them only on the bench, or on the sideline with their teams. We conveniently forget the attachments they have as people. Gene Keady, a man who is much like Gibbs in his intense approach to his coaching, seems to be wrestling with the same conflict between his personal life and his professional life.

Last week the Purdue basketball coach was staggered by two personal tragedies: First, his daughter had to undergo brain surgery after falling in her New Jersey home and lapsing into a coma. Then he learned that his father had died after a long illness.

Keady left the Purdue team and flew to his daughter’s side for the operation. Two days later he left her with her mother in the hospital, and flew to Minneapolis to coach Purdue against Minnesota. The next day Keady flew to Sacramento for his father’s funeral, then flew back to campus to coach Purdue against Indiana. Wednesday, Keady returned to New Jersey to be with his wife and daughter, who remains in a coma. “I think we all learn that family is what counts, not basketball,” Keady said. He coached, he said, because he thought his father and daughter would have wanted him to.

We ask our coaches to be leaders. But we never specify the way to do it, other than by winning games.

We assume somehow they’ll know.