Tim Moellering, history teacher and baseball coach at Berkeley High School, died on a Tuesday in 2011, after a lengthy struggle against cancer. Moellering's Berkeley High career followed nineteen years cross town teaching and coaching at Willard Middle School.
According to a friend, Moellering, who was born in 1957, played centerfield on a youth baseball team in the 1970s. On that same team were Gary Pettis, playing right field, Rickey Henderson, in left, and Shooty Babbitt at shortstop. Moellering's line about that experience recounted that there were scouts at every game, but he would have had to play standing on his head to ever have been noticed amid all the future major league talent surrounding him.
The future history teacher was a peace negotiator at an early age. An eye witness swore that Tim Moellering, at age thirteen, turned a potential gang fight at Live Oak Park, with teens four to five years older involved, into a football game that got no more violent than hard tackles. Decades later, the same attitude at Berkeley High allowed him to talk students bringing guns to school into handing over their weapons before full scale incidents might ensue.
Moellering loved music, beer, and sports. He was a lifelong San Francisco Giants and Cal fan. He attended nearly forty consecutive years of UC home football games. His favorite pro baseball team finally rewarded him with a World Series title in early November, 2010. A little over two months later he died of pancreatic cancer, with his Giants cap on his head.
Like most good history teachers Moellering could wisecrack. In the year before he died, he appeared on the Judge Mathis television series in a show about a dispute between Stanford students. Moellering said, “You know, common sense is something I am afflicted with because I didn’t go to Stanford, I went to Cal.”
His Willard teaching colleague Richard Hourula said of Moellering, “Among his greatest talents was the ability to listen and to relate to people of all types.” While many in Berkeley celebrate its diversity, Hourula said, “[Tim] lived it."
At both schools at which he taught, Moellering often was able to find a commonality with students no one else could reach. He was fond of saying, “There are no bad kids, only bad situations.”
It is safe to say that in nearly three decades of teaching and coaching he connected with hundreds, if not thousands, of students with his kindness and integrity. Perhaps no one student was more influenced by Tim Moellering than Santiago Rizzo. In the mid-1990s, Rizzo was living in troubled circumstances at home and acting out at school. “I was on the road to expulsion,” Rizzo remembered. “I had been arrested several times, had been in juvenile hall for a night, and was about to get put on probation.”
Santiago Rizzo gravitated toward Moellering because he wanted to play sports. The story of what happened between Santiago Rizzo and Tim Moellering is lightly fictionalized in the new film, Quest. Due to time constraints Quest was the only movie I attended at this year's Mendocino Film Festival, and only then because of my own connection to Berkeley and the fact that a friend's brother had known Moellering.
I can't give Quest a ten out of ten in film making, but I'd give it an eleven for heart, realism, and the themes it imbues. If you are offended by the type of language that kids use everyday or the harshness of real life home lives prevalent in the 1990s and today this is still a film you should gird your Pollyanna tresses and loins and view anyway. Humor and the positive spirit that should be at the core of every human find a way to glimmer at the edges of the bleakness. There are several inspired performances in Quest, in particular Lou Diamond Phillips as the stepfather of a mildly fictionalized version of Rizzo.
Tim Moellering would want you to know that there is a sad ending to this tale. Santiago Rizzo graduated from Stanford. However, hope abounds. Rizzo gave up a stock market job in order to create this film about his relationship with Tim Moellering. Right now Quest only appears to be making the rounds of film festivals. I don't even see it listed with Netflix, but however and whenever you have an opportunity to see it, please do.
And stay all the way through the credits to catch Tim Moellering's Ten Rules to Live By, which go something like this:
- Have empathy for everyone.
If you remember or read, “To Kill a Mockingbird” you’ll learn from Atticus Finch. “Crawl in someone else’s skin and walk around in it.”
- Tell the truth.
When you tell the truth you have less to remember. You know you never lied and eventually everyone will trust you.
- Be reliable.
Do what you say you are going to do, even if it means showing up on time. People will trust you.
- Assume positive intent.
Assume everything everyone does is with good intentions. If they are incompetent, so be it, but it doesn’t hurt you to assume they are doing their best. You will be able to understand their actions when you don’t judge.
- Be physically active.
It’s better than any drug. It’s fun; it can be a big boon in your social life. If you are running an errand, walk or ride a bike because you will feel better. It may not be obvious at first, but it adds up.
- Just do it.
If the choice is between sitting around and doing nothing or doing something, do something every single time.
- Don’t blame anyone.
This is key. No one is to blame for anything. Only you can change what you do. If you blame someone else then you can’t solve the problem… instead, you are telling someone else to solve the problem. If you don’t blame other people then you will be able to take control.
- Your possessions can be replaced.
People are obsessed with their possessions. It’s a terrible way of living by letting your possessions control you. When you let go of your possessions, you become free. There’s little relationship between wealth and happiness.
- Carpe Diem. “Seize the day.”
Accomplish something everyday, otherwise you are wasting time. There’s always something wonderful to experience, go do it.
- Solve your problems.
Some people like to have problems so that they have something to complain about. Don’t waste time. It also gives you something to do, something to strive for.
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