The Open Road

After spending the last three years on the great open road of America, randomness, I have learned, is the inherent beauty of vagabonding. Forget the map, turn off the GPS and just be. What I found was bit of Keourec, a dash of Kuralt with just the right pinch of Least Heat-Moon; a dream road trip for the lover of backroad America and the true aficionado of what is unique Americana.

Here is a small sample of my wandering encounters:

I discussed the meaning of life with a young man dying of colon cancer, engaging in an intense four-hour dialogue with an amazing human being who had taken the worse news anyone can receive and turned it into a personal crusade to live life to the fullest, while exploring his own mortality; a display of personal courage and faith that shook my own belief system to its core. Like most I met on the open road, he was with me for a few hours, then gone forever. Later, to fulfill a promise, I visited his Kentucky grave site.

I shared several beers with a former small town high school football star that had lost his path in life, desperately searching for the fleeting fame that he had known one special Autumn now years gone by.

I spent a brutally hot South Texas September Sunday afternoon in the company of an 80-year-old desert rat with the charm of a rattlesnake and the wisdom of a cloistered monk, reliving the sometime gloried past of a now near ghost town he had all of his life called home.

I broke bread in the home of a third generation North Dakota extended farm family who were struggling to find their niche in a fast spinning world-wide agricultural economy they did not understand. 

I settled into an economy class seat on a red eye flight out of Minneapolis, next to a spiritually unfulfilled but financially ultra-successful and wealthy business executive; lamenting the perfect curve ball that had evaded him as a school boy.

I discussed the state of American politics with an aging stripper (I met her in an all-night diner, so perish the salacious thoughts) who was losing her personal battle with the demons of addiction.

I fell into a time warp in the San Juan Mountains of south central Wyoming, experiencing the hard scrabble life of an 19^th century snow bound high country rancher.

I heard the heart-warming but melancholy saga of a small town loser, still suspended Peter Pan style in the perpetual end zone of his youth, clinging to the only success he had ever known in life, the celebratory memory of an obscure high school football touchdown of 40 years gone by. 

I debated with a friendly elderly but fanatical couple of Tea Partiers in a timeless café on the banks of the Texas Hill Country South Fork of the Brazos River, the role of government and the future of America over a piece of the best cherry pie I have ever tasted.

I was humbled by a “marvelous” night desk clerk with a gold front tooth, laboring in a seedy Gulf of Mexico port side motel; the history teacher taught a history lesson. 

Over a late night high mountain camp fire, I shared with an aging hippy - a renaissance man with a charming addiction to wandering the land but an acrimonious distaste for work - a pot of hot coffee while a Rocky Mountain blizzard bore down upon us.

Characters and caricatures, like the endless byways I traveled, on and on the stories rolled.

Take The High Road

Akin to a no hitter jinx in baseball, don’t mention it until it is done. As of today I have a contract with Covington Publishing of Kanas City to print my third book titled Take the High Road: dispatches from the

(heart)land. Barnes and Noble picked up my first two and I have indications they will this one as well. I spent parts of the years 2012 to 2015 on the open road listening to Americans. We are today a divided nation. I wanted to know why? This book is about what I heard. To my pleased amazement, my long and winding road inexplicably and constantly led me to cross paths with the type of characters found in a Mark

Twain novel or portrayed in a Norman Rockwell painting. Those flawed with the bittersweet memories of good times long gone became my new “on the road” friends. If this books sells, great. If not, then I had a hell of a lot of fun writing a nice tax deduction. Expected release date is February 1, 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shut Up, Its Working

 

Yesterday, I had to travel from Rolla, MO to Crystal City, MO, south of St. Louis, MO.  I took a short cut by exiting Interstate Highway 44 onto Highway 30. The route took me past St. Clair, MO High School. It brought back memories of my first year, 1980-81, as an assistant boys’ basketball coach at Sullivan, MO High School.

In 1981, Marshall  Schaefferkoetter was our head coach and led the Eagles that March to the school’s first ever state final four. But, before getting to state, we had to defeat a very good Union team in the District tournament, held  that year at St. Clair High School. We had beaten Union three times over the course of the regular season, but all three had been close, one in OT.  

On the 15 minute ride north up Interstate 44 from Sullivan to St. Clair, Marshall was like a whore in church. He was always jittery and high strung for a game, but I had never seen him this nervous. Every couple of miles he would say to me, “we got to do something different.” I told him, “Marshall, we have beaten them three times; they have to do something different. Relax. We will be fine.”

When we arrived at St. Clair High School it was pitch dark. Instead of pulling up to the front of the gym Marshall ordered the bus driver to take us to the back of the parking lot and unload under a street light. “Oh, no,” I thought.

Marshall takes the team off the bus and into the parking lot. He says, “Now say that is the basket,” as he points to the street light, “here is what we are going to do.”   He proceeds to put in a whole new defense in the parking lot one hour before a district game!

And it was the damn strangest thing I had ever seen. Marshall was firing like a machine gun and the players all had a WTF look on their faces. “If we hit a free throw we will pick up in ¾ court pressure and then fall back into a 2-3 zone. If they steal the ball on the right side we are box and 1 on Arand.  If we shoot and miss then straight man to man. If we score in the paint”……… and on and on he went.

Predictably, when the game started we were manic on defense, totally confused. We had two guys playing zone, two guys playing MTM, one guy just chasing the ball and all five yelling at each other. The next time down the floor it would be some other discombobulated combination, a total mess.  In short, it was a Chinese fire drill on steroids. Marshall just sat on the bench nodding his head.

Half way through the first quarter, incredibly,  we are winning 8-0. Union had yet to even gotten a shot off at the basket. I told Marshall, “we got to get out of this defense; we don’t know what we are doing.” Out of the side of his mouth –on the bench he always spoke out of the side of his mouth – Marshall told me to, “shut up its working.”

And it was!

In basketball the defense dictates to the offense what type of offense to run. Union did not know what offense to run because they did not know what defense we were in because we didn’t know what defense we were in!

 

For years later, when I would bump into one of the Union coaches, they would bring up Marshall’s “UFO” defense, as they had so aptly labeled it.

For the entire course of my career as a head boys’ basketball coach our defensive philosophy was based on what I learned from Marshall that night.  We were known as a team that was hard to prepare for because we employed a number of different defenses and we were constantly changing up our scheme, almost on every possession, to keep the offense off balance and out of a rhythm. “On defense, to be successful” I would say, “you must play fast, play hard and create chaos” - exactly what Marshall’s UFO defense did.

I have told the story of the UFO defense in coaches’ clinics and player development camps I have run with Jackie Stiles from Portland to Miami, from San Diego to Philadelphia. I share that in my early years as a coach I thought Marshall was crazy. The longer I was in coaching the more clearly I realized he indeed was crazy; crazy like a fox – there always being a method in his madness. It just took us mere mortals a while to figure out what it was.  

 

I have never felt Marshall has gotten the credit he deserved as a coach. I don’t know if he is in the Missouri Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame or not, but if he is not, he should be.

It is now way past time for me to give my mentor his due. I have made a good living for a lot of years on a system that sprang from a seed planted 34 years ago by a “crazy” coach under a street light in a dark parking lot, one hour before a crucial district game. Belated much thanks, Marshall.