Make the Big Time Where You Are
I’m appalled. This is going to sound childish, but it’s not. I’m upset about our local collegiate football team, but I’m more disappointed in the message this whole mess of coaching musical chairs conveys and that so many people seem okay with it. Whatever happened to the virtues (I hate the word ‘values’) of commitment, honesty, love? Of making the best of where you are, of teaching virtue and morality by example instead of giving it repeated speeches and a passing wave of the hand as if you mean it?
‘Make the Big Time Where You Are’ is a euphemism (and a book title) from the late, great hall of fame football coach, Frosty Westering. I get it. You probably consider yourself a football fan, yet you’ve never heard of him. It doesn’t dim the fact he coached his college teams to more wins than all but eight men, all-time. 305. Look him up. A man far ahead of his time; a trailblazer. Yet, he chose to do that trailblazing at an NAIA/NCAA DIII school, Pacific Lutheran. Why? Because that’s where circumstances and opportunity landed him. Once here, he built a program that reached the National Championship game 8 times, winning four of them. More than that, he built a program based on love and commitment to self and each other, the servant warrior. And he stuck by that commitment, coaching at PLU for 31 years before retiring. Countless coaches, whether they know it or not, model their programs after what he created.
Where does that happen anywhere anymore?
Today we have coaches, like Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, who preach commitment, teamwork, love and dedication to your brother servant warrior and then at the first opportunity bolt for more money, more status, and the illusion of more potential glory. Where does this hypocrisy end?
At the other end of the spectrum, we have the 1936 Boys in the Boat, who with their coaches, actually did exemplify all these virtues. They, and the men who came before and after them, built a program that has endured. Why? Because they stood by what they built, they saw it through, they walked their talk. I admire the sport of Crew, and rowers in general, in much higher regard than today’s football players and coaches who seem to garner all the much publicized money and glory.
There is no meaning to the word commitment today. There is an obligation that is pushed to the wayside with the rationalization that ‘he can further his career.’ In what way, exactly? As I said, more glory, more status? How much money does one need? Certainly, no more than any head coach makes now. DeBoer made $5.2 million this last season, and UW had promised him more than $9M for the following years with a contract extension. It wasn’t enough.
The commitment he made two years ago to the young men he mentored wasn’t enough. It didn’t mean anything. They were words that were just convenient at the time. It was a beginning to re-build a program to greatness, to all those virtues we tell ourselves we hold dear. But they were shallow; they were never intended to endure. They were only to motivate, to fool us into thinking it was more than a transient pursuit of a few moments of glory.
And that’s where we are as a society today. Transient moments of glory. No commitment to the hard truths of life, to the work, the sustainment of committing to greatness, to growth of the self, to an enduring legacy that can remain as a beacon for those after us to follow. And it must be all of those things, not one or two. All of them. Washington Crew and the Boys in the Boat exemplify that. Washington football and its coaches do not.
