A NEW GAME PLAN

Here’s what was supposed to happen.

Pete Shinnick would get his first college football head coaching job and his first hire would be his father, Don Shinnick. Don, big and strong and with a handshake that could crack a walnut, would be the defensive coordinator. Don would teach Pete’s players all about being tough and being kind, about making tackles with the impact of a sequoia falling on a toothpick, about being as kind as a priest in the confessional.

For Pete Shinnick could imagine no better man for the job than Don Shinnick. Don was an accomplished linebacker at UCLA and played 13 years with the Baltimore Colts. He once held the NFL record for career interceptions by a linebacker (37). Don was an assistant coach for the Chicago Bears, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots.

Don might have the bull neck and the deep, loud voice of a linebacker, the forearms thick and hard as a tree, but Pete grew up watching how Don the coach was gentle with his players, how he never swore or even raised his voice, how he treated his players as human beings with feelings. That’s how Don had attracted Marsha. Marsha met Don at UCLA, not at a football game but at a Campus Crusade for Christ.

“How did we meet, honey?” Don asks Marsha.

Don and Marsha are sitting in the living room of Pete’s Glendora home. Pete, the 34-year-old rookie head coach at Azusa Pacific University, is still at practice. Azusa Pacific, the defending NAIA champion, is preparing for Saturday night’s second-round playoff game against Hastings (Neb.) College.

And Don is not the defensive coordinator. Don and Marsha are visiting from their Modesto home for the Thanksgiving weekend and for the Saturday night game. But Don can’t be a coach because, no matter how strong his handshake, how steady his gaze, no matter how enthusiastically Don greets visitors and wishes a safe trip home, Don doesn’t remember much. Not how he met Marsha or the name of the medical condition which has brought him to the age of 64 without much sense of who he is or how wonderful a job he’s done in raising five sons.

“What’s that I have?” he says, looking at Marsha.

Frontal Lobe Dementia is the name of the condition and no one would want to remember the name. It is rare, it is progressive and there is no cure, not even medication that might slow the deterioration in the afflicted person’s behavior.

After nearly a year of searching for reasons why Don’s personality seemed to be changing, why he might be short-tempered sometimes or act inappropriately at others, Marsha and Don finally got the diagnosis in the fall of 1997.

“It was almost a relief,” Marsha says, “just because it had been so frustrating. You know something is wrong with this man you love and yet you can’t find out what. Is it just some sort of midlife crisis? What is it?”

Frontal Lobe Dementia is similar to Alzheimer’s disease in that the patient gradually loses more and more brain function, the part of the brain which helps make Don Shinnick Don Shinnick, the function which would allow Don Shinnick to stand on the sidelines with Pete, devising a defense, telling a linebacker to square his shoulders and to hit hard.

“It had always been my dream that my dad would be a coach with me,” Pete says.

Pete is the third oldest of the five Shinnick boys. Joel, the oldest, wasn’t much into football. He was, and is, more interested in motorcycles, according to Marsha. But Josh played football for UCLA, just like his dad; Pete was an offensive lineman at Colorado--”I wasn’t fast enough to play my dad’s position,” Pete says--Adam was recruited by Penn State but injured his hamstring and never played; and Christopher, the youngest, played at the University of Hawaii. So you know football was important.

“Always,” Pete says, “but in a good way. The thing about Dad was that he was a very good coach, but he never put coaching above his family. He wasn’t that coach who was at the office from dawn until dusk. He was home for us, he was a part of our lives. My dad came to as many of our games as possible, and that was a lot of games.”

That’s what Pete first noticed. That you could be a football coach and still be a dad. Pete also noticed that you could be a football coach and not scream until the veins in your neck bulged. You didn’t have to speak one obscenity-filled language at work and switch to another when you arrived home.

“I’ve had coaches who were yellers,” Pete says, “but I learned from dad that you don’t have to be a yeller.”

In 1995 Pete was up for the Northern Michigan coaching position. He would have been young, barely 30, but he would have had Don at his side. Pete was born on Don’s birthday, 30 years later. There was the bond of the son who followed in his father’s footsteps. Pete didn’t get the job, but it didn’t seem a terrible disappointment. For Don was still young. He was still strong and active. He could still get out there on the field with some of those teenagers and knock them back a step or two.

Don has four championship rings and a Super Bowl tea set. He got two rings playing for the Colts, two coaching the Raiders. Once Don had a choice between a ring and a tea set. Marsha talked him into the tea set. But there are five Shinnick sons. “One of us is going to get a tea set,” Pete says, “and one of us won’t be happy about that.”

There is laughter all around. Don laughs too but he doesn’t quite understand. “What’s it about?” he whispers to Marsha.

Marsha and Don moved to Placerville, 45 miles east of Sacramento in the Sierra Nevada foothills, after he was retired “involuntarily,” Marsha calls it, in that last house-cleaning in New England that cost all the coaches their jobs.

But after Don’s condition was diagnosed, Placerville was too far away. In Modesto, Marsha can be closer to UC Davis, where she has found excellent social workers who help her and Dr. Maxine Verma, a registered nurse and a PhD who is doing research into Frontal Lobe Dementia.

Don is part of a research group. He goes to UC Davis once a year to be tested. The testing is to see how much more Don has lost, how much less Don remembers and understands. That’s all. There is nothing else to be done. “What do we do?” Don asks Marsha. “We go to be tested,” she says.

Pete says that sometimes he and Don can still talk football. Don will remember a play or a game. Sometimes they will watch video of the Joe Namath Super Bowl, when Don was on the field for the Colts. Don will remember that he played against Joe Namath.

This is not a sad story, though. For Don is inside Pete. Deep inside. When Pete doesn’t turn red and howl at a missed tackle or poorly run pass route. Or when Pete comes home each night in time to play with his two daughters and to have dinner with his wife, Traci. The father has taught the son. And lessons last forever.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.