“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