Who Will Coach The Coaches? Reflections on Tim Walz & High School Football

The recent stories about Tim Walz — the governor of Minnesota, and Kamala Harris’s running mate — which have emphasized his days as a football coach, reminded me of my years as an athlete who played football and lacrosse and who also wrestled in the 158-pound weight class — all under the watchful eyes of a handful of high school coaches. I remember the name of the football coach, Alfonso Donofrio, a short, stocky fellow, who picked me to be the co-captain of the team and who emphasized the desire to win. So did I. More than anything else in high school, I wanted to win the football games we played on Saturdays against teams from Babylon, Riverhead, Port Jefferson and our arch rival, Amityville.

We defeated Amityville, 21 -14 my senior year when Newsday selected me for the all-star Suffolk County team which worked wonders for my ego and persuaded Columbia College to accept me as a freshman in the fall of 1959, albeit ill prepared for learning. High school football stunted my academic growth. I did not play college football; the competition was intense and the locker room and gridiron a long bus ride from the campus at 116th Street & Broadway to Baker Field near the northern tip of Manhattan Island.

I played rugby for two years in college. Rugby was not an official Columbia team, but rather a club that drew upon athletes enrolled in the medical school and the law school who had played Ivy League football for Princeton and Yale. We used the school’s locker room and the football field for practice and games. We had winning seasons, season after season. I played Saturday after Saturday, and after our victories joined my big, heavy muscular teammates, like Paul Zimmerman, in pubs where we sang bawdy songs and drank beer and a beverage called a shandy, a mix of beer and 7-up which I favored. Once, Pat Moran, from Ireland, battled a Black South African. It was ugly.

The university did not provide the rugby club with a coach. We coached ourselves and did exceedingly well without one. We were in our 20s, we were talented and adults in many ways capable of making decisions and carrying them out on our own. We proved that we didn’t need a coach, though junior high school and high school athletes do need one, and preferably a coach as conscientious as Tim Walz who took the job seriously.

Sixty or so years after I graduated from high school, I wonder who coaches the coaches. Probably, they learn from experience, and like Walz are able to turn losing seasons into winning seasons. There's nothing like failure to teach you how to succeed.

I’m willing to believe that Walz learned as much from the football players as they learned from him. First and foremost, he understood and still understands the necessity of teamwork; without it, winning seasons will be elusive. And without teamwork, he and Kamala won’t make it to the White House. They seem to inspire one another.

I also suspect that they’re learning about politics and campaigning from one another. True, they have different styles, different ways of addressing crowds and different vocabularies, but the differences make for a powerful offensive weapon that Trump and company might not be able to stop.

Huntington High School boasted an assistant football coach. He and I were as close as a coach and a player could be. David Goldstein, who was Catholic and not Jewish, as his name suggests, taught me how to breathe when I was out of breath—expel air and the lungs will do the rest, he said. It worked for me. Goldstein also emphasized conserving my energy so it lasted from the opening kick off to the final whistle that ended the game. In high school, I was closer to the coaches than to the classroom teachers, even close to the coach for the lacrosse team who yelled at me not to bleed on my jersey when I bashed my nose against my helmet and blood poured out. An asshole, he didn’t even offer me a bandage. I wore a scar for years. Someone should have taught that coach manners and empathy.

I got back at him at the graduation ceremony when I explained to the crowd that he was a lush and drank cocktails at a bar in town and had to call a cab to get home. Unlike Walz and unlike Donofrio and Goldstein, he was dispensable, and should not have been the coach for teenage boys like me on the lacrosse team. Fortunately, he didn’t prevent the high school from making me a three-letter man, an honor I forgot by the end of my freshman semester at college when I learned how to read and study and take exams. Go Kamala and Tim. Beat Trump and his idiotic fellow candidate. I’m on your side.