Old football coach left a legacy of great athletes and at least one writer

State Police say little about bomb threat at Lake Luzerne library

By Ken Tingley

My old high school football coach died earlier this month.

He was 94.

He was a towering presence of a man with a booming voice who cast a long shadow. But of course, I was just 15 when I started playing for him and at 44, he was already a legend in our town.

I had some success as a running back playing Pop Warner youth ball, but I hadn’t grown much in high school. By the time I started practicing with the varsity team, neither my 130 pounds nor my speed matched up well with the older more powerful players. I was just a sophomore, but I was ready to quit. My father convinced me to talk to the coach.

The coach stood 6-5, wore dark sunglasses and ruled over practice with a frightening authority. If a player was dogging it, he would often drag them around the field by the face mask or give them a hard slap on the side of the helmet.

I was scared of him.

I think everyone was scared of him.

I remember walking into his office that fall morning to talk to him and shocked he knew my name.

I told him I had always been a running back and didn’t see much of a future on the line. He sat for a second, puffing on a pipe and said he would move me in with the running backs.

I was ecstatic. I would have run through a brick wall for the man. This was why he was such a great coach.

But I never did grow and my play was relegated almost entirely to the junior varsity. When the coach promoted a couple of younger players to the varsity my junior year, I decided to quit the team. It was a difficult decision because all I ever wanted to be was a football player on my high school team.

I played one final junior varsity game and never went back. I don’t think I ever talked to the coach again.

During my freshman year of college, I took a creative writing class. The professor challenged us to write a story of a pivotal moment in our young lives. I wrote my football career and my relationship with my coach.

That day in class, the teacher said he wanted to read the best essay.

He read mine.

It was eventually published in the school’s literary magazine and the professor said he would work with me to get it published in Sport magazine.

That was the beginning of my writing career.

The year after I wrote that story, I was commuting to school with another student from my town. His father occasionally helped the coach with practices and when he found out we were riding together, he told him a story about me.

My friend’s father was at a junior varsity game where I was playing and was talking to the coach. They were talking about the future talent. The coach stopped a second and pointed out one player to my friend’s father.

“You see that No. 37 out there,” the coach said. “Yeah, the little guy. He has more guts than any player on the team. If they all had that much guts we’d win the league title every year.”

I was stunned.

I had no idea that’s what the coach thought.

I have not told that story before.

Part of me wished I had never quit, but part of me felt vindicated. The story stayed with me over the years, buoyed me during hard times and gave me hope thought the tough times.

Sometimes, even now, I have dreams about returning to play high school football my senior year. I am bigger and stronger this time and can compete with the other varsity players.

I usually wake up with a smile wondering why that dream has stayed with me.

So while my football coach never helped realize my goals on the football field, his colorful persona and our shared story helped lead me to a career.

Over the years, I sometimes wondered what I would say to the old coach if I saw him again. I suppose I might have thanked him. He shaped me into the man I am today.

After all, he was the protagonist in my first real story.

His obituary spoke to all he had accomplished as an athlete, then a coach and eventually to the hundreds of young athletes he shaped over the years.

And at least one writer.

Luzerne bomb threat

The biggest local story this week was that the Rockwell Falls Library in Lake Luzerne received a bomb threat.

What makes it such a big story is that New York State Police seemed to be hiding the information. A sharp-eyed Post-Star editor saw a small mention of it in the State Police public information blotter and followed up. No press release was issued by the State Police.

Five days after the library canceled a drag queen reading hour for children, police responded to a bomb threat at the library, which was closed at the time, and a K-9 unit inspected the building, but did not find any explosive material or unusual activity.

State Police said they did not have any information about the type of threat or where it was posted online. No arrests were reported either.

I would think anyone who visits the Rockwell Falls Library would want to know that information. The State Police have left a lot of unanswered questions.

Springer death

“The Jerry Springer Show” ran from 1991 to 2018. More than 4,000 episodes aired.

It was probably the low point of television in the United States and Springer’s show was often referred to as “trash TV” for the repeated confrontations between people that often ended in fisticuffs.

Once while visiting my cousins in Ireland, one of them was highly critical of Americans and seemed to have the impression that we all were like the folks on “The Jerry Springer Show.”

Springer died this week of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79. His legacy is not a good one.

It appears the gun’s buyback program in Watervliet Saturday was a success.

Gun buyback

The state’s gun buyback seemed to be extremely popular Saturday with dozens of people turning in firearms of all types in Watervliet for cash gift cards.

We waited in a long line for about 45 minutes with a couple dozen other people.

As we were leaving, there was one woman leaving with a big stack of gift cards in one hands while pulling an enormous suitcase in the other. I assumed the suitcase had been filled with weapons.

There are a lot of guns out there.