Can you sense when someone has made an impact on you?

The Florida School for the Deaf and Blind's reaction after
being told they are the 2013 Deaf National Champions. (Photo by Will Brown.)

By Will Brown

I received a text Saturday morning asking whether I was interested in covering a football game. 

My first thought was to say no. I was tired and the fact I was asked to cover the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind unnerved me. I had nothing against the players or the fans, my concern was my ignorance would lead me to accidentally offending someone.

Thankfully, I didn’t turn down the assignment. A win for the FSDB over California School for the Deaf-Fremont meant the home team would be the deaf national champions for the third time in school history.

It was a spectacular game, one that was decided on the final play from scrimmage.

When the home team intercepted a pass with no time remaining to seal the win, the crowd was just as loud, rowdy, raucous and celebratory as any other that I’ve witnessed in my life. Someone had the spectacular idea to bring confetti so that was flying through the air long with the cheers when it was all over.

In the four hours I spent observing and reporting the game, I learned more about the deaf community than I had in my life.

The first thing was not every player is completely deaf. Some are deaf, but others are hearing-impaired.

There was also a visually impaired player on the field for the Dragons. With a smile the FSDB president told me they keep it pretty simple for the offensive lineman who is visually impaired. They tell him who to block, and that person remains blocked — no questions asked.

I was the one with a lot of questions during the game.  Most of them were answered by the affable public address announcer.

When the PA announcer was not calling the game, giving shout outs to the families of players who traveled to St. Augustine for the game and playing music he was giving me the low down on the school, certain players, and why a win on Alumni Weekend would mean so much. It turns out the PA announcer is the boys basketball coach. He didn’t say how long he’s been on the microphone, but the ease in which he kept things going indicated he was no novice.

FSDB ended the 2013 season, its 100^th playing varsity football, with an 8-1 record. The California school finished the season 5-5.

Players and coaches at the Florida School for the
Deaf and Blind pause to take a post game picture
after a 44-31 win to claim the Deaf National
Championship. (Photo by Will Brown.)

Both teams had good athletes. They just didn’t have a lot of them, which is to be expected at small schools. Would some of the boys I saw on the field star at your local powerhouse? No. Would they have played at most schools? Definitely.

About 90 percent of high schools could use a kid who runs great routes at wide receiver and doubles as a reliable placekicker, as the California school had. Most high school coaches would salivate if they had a 6-foot-3-inch quarterback, with good speed, who knows how to run the option, as the Florida school did.

As the day wore on, I began to appreciate the smaller things.

• On most assignments I quickly search the colors of the schools I’m covering and look to wear something that clashes—lest I be accused of favoritism. Saturday, I didn’t bother to do the research. It turned out the red polo shirt and royal blue T-shirt I wore to the game are FSDB’s colors. And not a single person cared. If anything it made people less defensive when I asked my many questions.
•    When I went to walk across the track, onto the field after the game, I tripped over a rail on the inside line. At first I thought why was that rail there? Then I remembered that there is probably a young boy or girl who is visually impaired who runs track. The rail keeps them from running off the inside lane and into the grass.
• After the game I wanted to speak to players and coaches. My usual method of walking up to them and asking for an interview likely wasn’t going to work since I didn’t know a lick of sign language. After one player put his hand to his ear to explain he couldn’t hear me, a woman named Sue Hall was kind enough to translate for me.
• During the biggest plays of the game, the FSDB supporters were blaring drums, standing on their feet and recording the moment on their smartphones and tablets just like any other fans in Northeast Florida.
• The school has televised every home football game via a live stream. By the end of the game, more than 200 different computers were logged on to watch the thrilling conclusion.
• When students were trying to cuddle up during the game they left a little more space between them than their peers. (The extra space was used so both the boy and the girl could sign with each other.)

Every boy I interviewed was so happy afterward he gave me a hug. The combination of the ecstasy of victory and the thrill of having their name in the newspaper was enough to cue the spontaneous embrace.

When everything was over, and I was walking toward the track — this time more careful to avoid the rail — I left with a new perspective. As happy as the players were to see their accomplishment highlighted in the paper, I was just as appreciative they taught me a lesson in life.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

What is your calling in the happy valley of life?

Paul William Bryant died the year before I was born. But he apparently was a legend in his occupation, one who was so revered that those who didn’t call him “Sir” simply called him “Bear.”

He was not a perfect man, but one who was an excellent molder and motivator of young men.

Joseph Vincent Paterno was like Bryant in that respect. Neither man was perfect, but there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people that were inspired by the lessons both men taught.

Paterno died Sunday after complications from lung cancer at 85. Until November 9, 2011 Paterno coached at Pennsylvania State University since 1950. For context, the man who coldly told him of his termination over the telephone was born in 1954.

Paterno spent 31,442 days on this Earth. For all but a quarter of one percent of those days he was known as an honorable man who tried to do things the right way.

There will be some who say he died because of a guilty conscience in a child sex abuse scandal that has rocked his former employer. Others will claim he died of a broken heart because of how his career ended.

I would argue he died because his time on Earth was complete because Paterno, like Bryant, was put here to use athletics to mold boys into men. Both were humble men, yet idealistic about their legacies because of their unprecedented success. Sadly, both died within 90 days of coaching their final game.

Everyone has a coach or a teacher in their life that has genuinely touched them. If you do not, all I can do is pity you for missing your blessing. The lessons may not be evident immediately, but with reflection they will become apparent. While you are at it, thank those teachers, professors and coaches that have helped you along the way. Many of them are monetarily underpaid, so reimburse them with compliments.

Mike Shannon was the parent of a teammate. But to me, he was my first coach, back when I was a 4 year-old playing in a soccer league in Sarasota where the home field has been converted to a Par-3 golf course. I will never forget Larry Laskowski and Charles Stockton telling me to not wallow in self-pity, but celebrate with my teammates, after missing three extra points in a football game we won 47-6

But the most important coach in my life was a man named Bob Rowe. He is a small man in stature, but his lessons in kicking a football 50 yards and using football as a means to an education cast a larger shadow.

When I had a mental block that was preventing me from reaching my on-field potential, Coach Rowe told me “If you have done it once, you can do it a thousand times.”  To this day, I remind myself of that comment when an obstacle appears too conspicuous to overcome.

No one would deny Jim Tressel, Barry Switzer. Bobby Bowden and Jimmy Johnson are great football coaches. What separates those national championship winners from people like Jake Gaither, Eddie Robinson, Tom Osborne, Paterno and Bryant is that the latter group were highly successful AND used education to mold men.

"If you're not a man when you get there, you'll be a man before you leave," former NFL linebacker LaVar Arrington said of his Penn State experience. "Joe has his system so that you're prepared for life. Joe trains you more mentally than physically so that nothing will rattle you."

Ten days before Paterno’s career unceremoniously ended, I wrote a blog congratulating the champion and for taking some of the sheen off of himself to recognize others. Few people read it, which doesn’t bother me, but while people in my business were eviscerating the coach for all that he could and should have done a week later they were ignoring his humility in the limelight.

A family spokesperson told Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post one of Paterno’s final lucid thoughts to anyone outside his immediate family were used to think about others, a constant characteristic throughout his life.

“I’m happy in one sense that we called attention, throughout this state, and throughout the country probably, that this is going on,” Paterno said of the scandal that indirectly cost him his job. “It’s kind of been like a hidden thing. So maybe that’s good.”

Paterno’s life, legacy and death is another reminder that we must all find out why we were placed here on this earth. Through prayer, thinking, actions and occasionally failure our calling will come to us. There is as much honor as being a maid as there is in being the president if that is our calling.

Put more bluntly, without sanitation workers our lives would stink.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb