An Appreciation

I needed to write this.  I hope you’ll enjoy, whether you knew Coach Phelps or just somebody like him.  But was there anyone like him?

Tom Phelps died the other day. 

Inyang Udo-ema posted it on Facebook, along with a nice reflection of what Coach Phelps meant to him. That surprised me a little since, nearly 30 years later, I can still hear how badly Coach Phelps would butcher Inyang’s African name, as we ran plays under the hot, dry West Texas sun. But, then again, it made sense because everybody pretty much loved crazy Coach Phelps.

When I say crazy, it needs to be put into context. There were a lot of crazy coaches out in Lubbock circa 1991.  Many of them grew up in small, West Texas towns, and were the sons and scions of the kinds of ornery and abusive coaches the late Larry McMurtry wrote about in The Last Picture Show, and the competition — usually the losing completion — for coaches we read about in Buzz Bissinger’s Texas high school football classic Friday Night Lights.  They were the kinds of coaches who let me and Gary Coates borrow a pickup one day and cruise around the neighborhood. I was 14.  Gary may have been all of 15. These were different times, and our coaches were of a different era and outlook. 

Coach Phelps was from Quitaque, Texas and spent the first part of his coaching career in a school called Springlake-Earth, the combined high school of two communities, Springlake and Earth.  He continued coaching high track and football at Monterey High in Lubbock, before ending up at Ed Irons Jr. High School near the end of his career. That’s where Coach Phelps took his turn with me, and Inyang, and Gary the rest of our Cougar class. 

It may have been the fact that Coach Phelps had already tried his hand in high school and was now nearing his final years as a coach, but whatever it was I can say without doubt, he had a reputation. He was a chain smoker, a known drinker, and was rumored to have been a Vietnam soldier. That was never fully confirmed, but not knowing only added to the mystery and mystique of the man who was Coach Phelps. 

There is an old joke down here that asks, “What do you call a history teacher in Texas?” The answer: “Coach.”  True to Texas form, Coach Phelps did teach history, along with government, and economics. Sometimes his coaching and his teaching bled into each other, like the time he called a teammate, Shawn Hereford, a “communist” for having let someone behind him in the backfield as a safety. I didn’t at the time know what a communist was, and probably neither did Shawn.  And Coach’s example didn’t exactly help — except to tell us that so far as communists went, we wouldn’t want to be one. 

Coach Phelps was funny. Though his humor, like his life, was never PC.  I am sure all those times he fumbled Inyang’s name he was acting. When he got angry, he also acted as if he could only speak gibberish which sounded a whole lot like cussing.  Coach Phelps was always acting, always and forever playing himself, in the hallways, or on the sidelines, or out back of the field house where he liked to sneak his smokes. We all watched with delight. 

My dad, who ran a liquor store and sold Coach Phelps beer — always Miller Lite — and once event went to Vegas with him (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas), told me about reading some of the anecdotes former players posted on Coach Phelps’ online obituary.  One said that after a particularly bad call in a JV football game, Coach Phelps summoned the head official over to the sideline, took off his glasses and handed them to the referee and said, “Here, you need these; you’re missing a hell of game out there.”  Like I said, delight. 

My favorite Coach Phelps story comes from the week we were getting ready to play the Hutchinson Rangers my 9th grade year. Jim McCulley was out for a passing and staring back into the bright, West Texas sun.  When the ball hit Jim right in the face mask, Coach Phelps went ballistic, beginning his untranslatable yet clearly-communicating gibberish. 

“But Coach,” Jim protested, “the sun was in my eyes.”  

“The sun was in your eyes?” Coach Phelps said.  “That’s no excuse. Do you think the sun is not shining at Hutchinson Jr. High?  Do you think they are practicing in an eclipse?”

I had many coaches over the years, a lot of them the FCA types who were always wanting to give us little sermons and moral messages. That was never Coach Phelps. Coach Phelps, or “Tomcat” as his friends called him, was definitely not an FCA kind of guy. But in all my life, and in 20 years of ministry myself, I have never heard a better illustration of Jesus’ words, “God maketh the sun to rise on the evil and the good.”

Coach Phelps never talked in terms of good or evil, righteous or unrighteous, blessing or curse. Football was football, and track was track; and regardless of whether you said the Lord’s Prayer before the game or not, you still had to suit up and play. In the end only one team would win, and all the rest would lose; and there wasn’t much to suggest that God preferred faith over speed and luck.

Sports are heralded with teaching young people how to deal with adversity. The way Coach coached made that true for me. When I blew out my knee in the City semifinal my 9th grade year, my dad called the school and told Coach Phelps that I was headed for surgery.  Coach Phelps jotted a quick note to another coach, and sent it by way of a student. “#22 is out for the season” is all it said.

The book of Ecclesiastes says:

“The race is not to the swift,

Nor the battle to the strong,

Nor riches to men of understanding,

But time and chance happen to them all.”

That’s about as close to a theology of sport as Coach Phelps ever expressed. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. And sometimes your knee blows out. Everyone has to deal.  There is no decipherable rhyme or reason to it all at the time. It’s just the breaks. Sometimes they fall your way; and a lot of times they don’t.  That is life. That is the lesson.

In his preface to Friday Night Lights Bissinger wrote:

“Athletics lasts for such a short period of time. It ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don’t apply. We build this false atmosphere. When it’s over and the harsh reality sets in, that’s the real joke we play on people. . . . Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It’s Camelot for them. But there’s even life after it.”

Coach Phelps never seemed to believe in Camelot, and he didn’t try to trick us into believing in it either. That’s why I think we all liked him so much. He had lived, and won, and lost, and gotten lucky, and gotten robbed, and been promoted and demoted, and basically lived long enough to know he wasn’t any better or worse or more blessed than anybody else trying to make a living coaching kids to find pay dirt on God’s earth, beneath God’s sun. His whole life wasn’t in whether we won or lost, or even how we played the game. I mean, after all, who wants their reputation based on how well teenage boys play games? Not Coach Phelps.

He had a reputation. But it wasn’t based upon what anybody thought of him — whether the FCA crowd, or the administrators, or for God’s sake, the parents.  Coach Phelps was his own man, with his own views, and his own ways. And that was all fine; you could either love him or not. I think that’s why we all did. 

There was no Camelot for Coach. There was just earth, and sun at both Ed Irons Jr. High and across town at Hutchinson too, and everywhere else also. 

And when you finally learn that, then you know you’ve been taught something you can bet on your whole life after.