Coach Jim stories and a drunken coach
I mentioned in a baseball column that one of my favorite coaches was Jim VanParis.
To remind you, we coached football against each other way back in 1962 and 1963 in tiny towns down near where Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana meet.
My team beat his team for the only win in my short coaching career.
As I mentioned before, he later was inducted into the Michigan High School Coaches Hall of Fame.
At our first meeting after his Hall of Fame induction, my greeting was, “I was the world’s worst football coach. I won one game in my career, and I beat you. How did you ever get in the Hall of Fame?”
I might add that, when he retired from teaching, he moved to Cheboygan and helped coach their football team.
But on to this story.
I was working the line judge position, which put me on Jim’s sideline. There was a running play by Reese’s opponent to my side of the field. I looked away from the lead blockers toward the running back, briefly, and “obviously” missed a holding penalty.
Coach Jim was screaming at me.
“Les, how could you miss that? It was right in front of you.”
Later in the same game, I found a pair of gloves on the field that had been dropped by a player. I picked them up and, since I had no idea which player dropped them, I took them to my sideline and gave them to Coach Jim.
He still remembered the missed holding call and quickly said, “How could you possibly see these black gloves on the field when you couldn’t see that obvious holding penalty?”
Knowing Coach Jim, I had to chuckle at his comment. Most of us officials appreciate “creative” criticism.
Post-game, a Reese player ran past me on the way to the locker room, stopped, and said, “Coach VanParis told me to tell you that you aren’t really blind.”
Another Coach Jim football story:
It was the end of the halftime period. Reese was leading its opponent about 40-0. Even Reese’s bench players were dominating. I walked toward the Reese team, meaning to get the captain’s choice for the second half.
I was almost to the team when they all stopped their stretching and ran to their sidelines. I was now left in the middle of the field with Coach Jim.
I said, “Gee, Jim, I can’t remember seeing a team as bad as your opponents are tonight.”
He quickly responded, “The heck you haven’t. You’ve seen two teams that were much worse than they are. They were both on the same field at the same time, and we were both there, too, as their coaches.”
He was referring, of course, to the games we coached against each other many years before.
Oh, and he was correct. Both his team and my team were worse.
To give you some idea of what he meant, when I met my team in my first year of coaching football, 23 players showed up from grades nine through 12. They ranged in size from a 5-foot, 10-inch, 235-pound tackle to a 5-foot, 1-inch, 85-pound defensive back.
When we played our first game, only four of my players had ever played football on a field with goal posts and referees.
This is not a Coach Jim story, but happened at Reese, where Coach Jim coached.
It was the only game in my career in which I had a mother run onto the field at the end of a play and start beating on a player who had injured her son. It was a mom from the visiting team, not Coach Jim’s team.
I did, however, have a coach run on the field during a long run by the opposing team. The run ended at about the 10-yard line, and there was the coach arriving in the middle of the field at the 15-yard line. He was yelling something, but I couldn’t understand him.
I threw my flag, told him to leave my field, and penalized his team. It would have been a 15-yard penalty, but, since the run ended at the 10-yard line, the penalty could only be half the distance to the goal.
I am sure alcohol was a factor in the coach’s behavior, as he reeked of booze as he was yelling at me.
Les Miller, of Hubbard Lake, has retired after 53 years officiating multiple sports around Michigan. He can be reached at theoldref@yahoo.com.