|
|
|
|
 |
Where Pride Still Matters | |
|
Where Pride Still Matters
Want to raise a kid who's polite, respectful, even neat?
Forget school or church. Send him to a good coach
Like most middle-aged American fathers, I drive to work lamenting the
decline of Western civilization - the erosion of standards, the lack of
responsibility, the inability of morning disc jockeys to shut up. But
something happened one morning last summer that lifted my spirits from
gloomy to positively rosy. I dropped my two eldest kids off at John
McCarthy’s baseball camp in Washington, D.C.
There were 150 6-to-12-year-olds sitting on some wooden bleachers,
their little baseball hats on their heads, their gloves in their laps,
when McCarthy opened camp by outlining his priorities. The first was
playing safe. "Safety is your responsibility. I will not tolerate
unsafe behavior," he said with a stern authority that had the kids rapt.
Then he talked about neatness - in 2001! He pulled forward one of his coaches.
"Look how he wears his uniform. Neat. Shirt tucked in. You will wear your
uniform properly and look sharp." Later he pulled out another coach. "Look at
the way he shines his shoes. A good shoeshine is a foundation for everything else."
Then he started introducing his 30-odd assistant coaches, who were in a
line behind him. Some were college players with impressive athletic and
academic records. Others were high-school kids who started at McCarthy’s
camp when they were 8 or 9. McCarthy said of one young coach, "I always
remembered him because he came up to me at the end of each day and said
‘Thank you.’ Politeness is important to me." McCarthy went on to describe
how one coach had impressed him because he always made eye contact when he
spoke. Another drew praise because he came early to help prepare the field.
McCarthy went down the line and asked each coach what book he was reading.
Then he dared to talk about the difference between being a successful player -
thinking, hustling, encouraging - and merely winning.
I left and headed off to my office feeling that something unusual had
happened. Here was a man willing to stand up in front of an audience
week after week and actually talk unironically about honor and character and
saying thank you.
We’ve all heard plenty about the fascist coaches who have turned their
youth teams into little professional academies for trophy accumulation. But
there’s also a positive side to the increasing organization of kids’ sports:
the emergence of good coaches, more and more of them each year. As I’ve reported
other stories on college campuses, in high schools, and around neighborhoods,
I’ve begun to notice something: Coaches have become the leading moral instructors
in America today.
We no longer regard them as dumb ex-jocks with whistles around their necks.
In fact, now our talk of coaches is infused with moral meaning. Notre Dame named
a research institute the Center for Sport, Character, and Culture. David Maraniss
wrote a best-selling book on Vince Lombardi called When Pride Still Mattered.
Nobody makes movies about streetwise young priests the way they used to, but
there are dozens of movies, such as Remember the Titans, in which the coach is
the beacon of virtue.
|
|
|
