Читать книгу A Legacy Unrivaled - Boz Bostrom - Страница 10

I arrived ten minutes early for the second day of class, and a couple dozen students were already present, sitting guy-gal as instructed and interviewing each other. Taking the spot next to me was Kristin, a senior nursing major. Like most of her peers, Kristin didn’t need the one credit in order to graduate; she was taking this elective class because of John’s reputation.

Students generally are fascinated to see professors outside of their own classroom or office, but Kristin did a good job of not talking to me like I was an alien. “Are you auditing the class or just sitting in on it?” she inquired.

I told her I was actually enrolled in the class.

“How does a prof enroll in a class?” she asked, somewhat incredulously.

I explained that I had to fill out a few forms, and then John had to e-mail the registrar.

“He did that for you?” she questioned.

I told her how I had been in John’s office after the previous class and explained to him what he needed to do. He looked confused, so I just asked if I could use his computer and send the e-mail from his account. “He agreed, and here I am.”

Kristin laughed, and then I introduced myself to the student behind me. “I’m Joey,” he said. Joey was a physics major and an offensive lineman on the football team. He had a special interest in taking the course: John was his grandfather. Joey had always dreamed of attending Saint John’s and playing football for his grandpa. When it came time to apply for colleges, Joey filled out only one application. Saint John’s accepted it, and Joey’s dream came true.

We looked up to see John slowly pacing back and forth at the front of the room. He again had on tan slacks, but this time he wore a long-sleeved, black collared shirt with a red Saint John’s emblem. John had been in fantastic shape in his younger years, and although his body had softened, he had aged gracefully. His movements were more deliberate, but his spirits and handshake were as strong as they had been decades earlier.

John waved his hands in the air and sixty-three sets of lips stopped flapping. “I hope everyone has visited.” He looked at a Johnnie in the back row and asked, “What’s her name?” Lucy. “Where is she from?” Salt Lake City, Utah. “Pretty good.”

After peppering a few more students to make sure they were doing their jobs, John said, “Okay, here is a lesson for today.” He pointed to the chalkboard, where the words WIN and LOSE were written in capital letters. He moved closer to the board and pointed at the letters as he spoke. “The W stands for Work. The N is for Now, not some convenient time later.”

“But the key is the I: you have to work Intelligently. Like not beating yourself with penalties. You have to play smart. The same goes for studying. You have to figure out the best way to study. You have to play smart, work smart, and study smart.”

John pointed to the board and asked, “Who knows what LOSE means?” Nick, a fiery and stocky linebacker, raised his hand. “Come on up and show us, then,” John invited.

“Lack …Of …Sustained …Effort,” said Nick, pointing at each letter along the way.

“That’s right. But you didn’t say it the way I would.”

John pointed at the letters, purposely skipping the S. “Lack …Of …Effort. But everyone can give some effort,” he explained. “The effort has to be sustained. Sustain the effort,” he said with emotion as he made a fist with his right hand. “Never, never, never quit.”

John asked the class if they wanted to hear one of his theories on women, and, predictably, sixty-three hands went up in the air.

While this seemed like a simple question, there was a purpose behind it. John has always believed in empowering those around him, and he did this by including people in the decision-making. As the class all indicated they wanted to hear his theory on women, they became more focused on what he was about to say.

“My theory is that women can multitask and think of a hundred things. A guy gets home and can’t do anything except sit in the chair and ask his wife for the remote and a beer. I think women came from a galaxy far away, drug us out of our caves with that stupid apple, and made us what we are.” John’s allusion to the Bible was not lost on this group of predominantly Catholic students, who got a chuckle out of the reference.

“They must be superior. They live longer, they are smarter, are better looking, have nicer smiles, they become mothers, and their kids like them better than the dads.” Once again, there was a point to his “theorizing” beyond just getting a laugh. John knew that the male students would readily accept him—he is a football coach, the type of person many guys look to as a role model. But he knew he had to find a way to win over the females in the class as well.

Shifting to a new topic, John said, “They were supposed to limit this class to the standard twenty or thirty students, but I said if I can coach 180, I can teach more than thirty. So they said I could have as many students as there are seats.” John paused for a moment and with a sly grin added, “I outsmarted them—and pulled in some extra chairs.”

I looked around the classroom. There were twenty-four wooden desks that each seated two students. And, sure enough, there were about fifteen extra folding chairs in use, with more stacked along the near wall if needed.

John continued. “I used to give all As, but they called me in and said I couldn’t do it. I asked, ‘Why not? They are all smart as heck, and I am a great teacher. What else can I do?’

“Giving someone a low grade would be breaking their heart. That is one part I don’t like about coaching football.” He went on to explain that he has nearly two hundred players on the team, most of whom were starters on their high school teams, many of them as stars. But he could start only eleven players on offense and eleven on defense, and take only fifty-five to away games. The majority of players were getting their hearts broken.

“I could never give an F to anyone. Once, a kid died during the semester. I didn’t know about it, so I still gave him an A. That is why they don’t allow me to give any grades except pass/fail.”

Students looked at each other in bewilderment, and a woman in the front row gasped. John asked her, “Is that a true story?”

“I don’t know,” was her tentative reply.

“No, it is not true,” he cackled as he released the tension. “But I have told it so many times it could be true.”

When the laughter ceased, John turned to the next order of business. “Let’s watch some film.”

John’s dedication to breaking down game films is legendary. When he was first coaching at Saint John’s in the early 1950s, John noticed that some monks would peek in on the film sessions he was holding for his players, so he asked the monks if they would like their own film session. The sessions’ popularity grew, and ultimately what seemed like the whole monastery would attend. The men in black robes would puff on cigars and listen to John as he walked them through the previous game, play by play. When I asked John why he did it, he said, “Because the monks were interested in football and I enjoyed their company.” John was living on campus in the dorms at the time. Halfway through his first season, when he defeated rivals Gustavus Adolphus and Saint Thomas in back-to-back games, the monks rewarded him by putting a television in his room—the first television on campus. They would join him periodically in watching the Jackie Gleason Show.

Even in his eighties, after more than six decades of coaching, John had not lost his passion for studying film. My former teammate Derek Stanley recalled how, long after graduating, he once went to visit John on a Friday afternoon in June. While most Minnesotans would have been on their way to a cabin on one of our ten thousand–plus lakes, John was in his office watching film—during the offseason. On that occasion, he was trying to figure out if lining up his players slightly differently would allow them to gain an extra three feet on one of his favorite plays.

For this class period, John had selected a series of successful passing plays from the previous season. The first play he showed was a long pass, and John called out to the class, “What happened on that play?”

The monks gave John the first television set on campus in 1953 after he led the Johnnies to victories over archrivals Gustavus Adolphus and Saint Thomas in back-to-back games. Courtesy of Gagliardi family.

“A touchdown,” came the reply from the darkness of the classroom.

“And what did the linemen do?” The whole class was silent; even the Johnnie football players among us had been solely focused on the players with the ball.

“I have to watch each play about ten times, at least, to see what happened,” John explained. “Let’s go to the next play and see how I would watch it.” Before he showed that next play, he asked Kevin to stand. Kevin was a reserve quarterback and also a student of mine. John asked Kevin to call out the cadence to start the play, and Kevin got one final chance to call a play for John.

John paused the video of that next play about every half second and commented on what each of the eleven players was doing at the time, and how each player contributed to the play. As the quarterback prepared to throw, John decided to involve the audience again.

He pointed at a woman in the front row and asked the Johnnie next to her, “What is her name?”

“Elissa.”

“Elissa, come up here.” Pointing at the video screen, he asked, “Who should the quarterback throw to?”

A guy in the back row whispered, “Number seventeen,” and Elissa repeated it. Being hard of hearing, John likely hadn’t heard the whisper and believed that Elissa made the good choice all on her own. He nodded in approval. He let the tape roll and we saw that the quarterback did indeed complete a long touchdown pass to number seventeen.

“Look at the way the quarterback calculates and throws the ball. How can he do that? What do you attribute that to?”

Elissa first guessed, “Lots of practice?” When John said no, she suggested, “Hand-eye coordination?”

“You’re wrong,” John replied. “Great coaching. After all, I’m the one who put those guys in the game and told them to run that play.” And the class cracked up.

After a few minutes reviewing more plays, John dismissed Elissa and called up Kindra. Elissa scurried back to her chair, nearly knocking over Kindra on her way.

Following footage of another long pass for a touchdown, John called out, “Who are the unsung guys? The offensive linemen.”

John pointed at one woman in the class and asked, “Do you want a good guy?” Yeah. And to another, “How about you?” Yeah.

“Well, first, if you want a good guy, you should get a football player. I like to believe they are the nicest guys in school. I tell them I want to hear from the profs and custodians and everyone that they are the nicest guys on campus.” Indeed, John repeats this phrase regularly, and after hearing it often enough, players begin to take on that responsibility.

“And if you want a really good guy, you should get an offensive lineman. They do a lot of hard work and don’t get any credit. And never expect any credit. He will be a great husband. He will do as he is told and never expect a compliment. You don’t even have to throw him a crumb.”

John knew that Kindra was dating one of his offensive linemen, so he tossed a question her way. “But there is one hitch. What is it?”

Kindra evidently had heard this story before, and she correctly replied, “They won’t make the first move.”

“That’s right. Did he make the first move?” John asked, referring to her boyfriend, Andrew.

“No.”

“What did you do?”

“I texted him and complimented his playing. I told him he did a good job.”

John made an explosion noise and exclaimed, “Wow, a compliment! But don’t make your move too quickly, or they will run like deer. You have to use all your feminine wiles and kind of sneak up on them.”

After class ended and it was just John and me in the room, I asked him about his offensive lineman story, which I had heard so many times. “What is the point of it?” I asked.

“I just like to give those guys some credit,” he said. “It is one of the most difficult positions to play, and if they don’t do their job, the backs and receivers have no chance. I was a tailback on my high school team, and I guess it made sense to me that if our offensive line didn’t execute, I would be the victim. So I’ve always focused on having a good offensive line.”

He then walked back to the computer and said, “I found this website that has the answer to everything.” He pulled up a website called Peter Answers. “We can ask it anything.”

He typed, “Who is the best professor on campus?”

The website responded with the phrase, “Boz is the best.”

I admitted that was pretty neat and asked if he just preloaded it with a few answers.

“No. I’m serious. It knows everything,” he replied.

I told him, if the website was so smart, ask it what I was wearing.

John typed in the question, and, to my amazement, up came the reply, “Black shirt with blue jeans.”

Completely baffled, I stammered, “How …how did you do that?”

“It’s smart, I told you,” he said with a laugh. “Well, actually, I suppose there is a trick to it. I just wanted to practice it before I used it in class next time.” For the next fifteen minutes, John and I took turns perfecting the technique of using the website.

A main reason the trick works is that despite being in his eighties, John can still type quickly. I asked him how he had learned to type so well.

“After I got done coaching our football team my senior year of high school,” he replied, “I went on to basketball, and we beat the junior college basketball team pretty badly. After our basketball season ended, the junior college coach asked me to play with his team. I liked basketball, so I agreed. But he told me I had to be registered at the college in order to play. So I signed up for Typing 1, a night class.

“The next year, I was done with school and was working at my dad’s body shop. The coach asked me to play another season. I told him I couldn’t, as practice interfered with my work. So he held practices at five in the afternoon so I could make it. And I registered for Typing 2.

“I’d coached my high school football team again, and a guy said I’d make a good coach, but I’d need to go to college first. So I took Typing 3 and other courses. I think I am the only guy in history to letter four years in basketball at a junior college.”

The following afternoon, I kicked off my International Finance course with some Peter Answers. And wouldn’t you know it, even the least engaged students perked up and seemed more open to learning during the rest of the lesson.