Sunday, May 17, 1998

Coach's wife remains fan of basketball

By Sharon Randall

People often assume the reason I'm a basketball fan is because my husband was a coach. It's a fair assumption, but only partly right.

I liked the game long before I met the coach. But I admit, I learned to love it because of him. He coached high school basketball for nearly 30 years, including three of the last four when he was battling cancer.

His coaching gave me as many reasons to hate the game as to love it. It wasn't just the long hours or low pay or the endless excuses ("We'll do Christmas next year, kids, Dad has a game tonight.")

Someone once asked him if his wife ever had "problems" with his coaching. "She likes basketball more than I do," he said, grinning at me. "Her only problem is having to put up with the coach."

The season before he died four months ago, he gave up coaching to save energy for his other loves, teaching physics and being with family and friends. I didn't think he could do that, but cancer is full of surprises. He walked off the court and never looked back. And at the next game and a few precious games after, we sat together in the bleachers, no longer the coach and his wife, just a couple of fans.

Do you know what it's like to love something or someone freely, without expectation or obligation, without having to change it or control it or be responsible for its outcome?

That's not to say we no longer cared about winning. True fans love to win, almost as much as they hate to lose. If they say otherwise, you don't want them on your side. But win or lose, it was not on our heads. If we won, we went home happy. But if we lost, my husband didn't take the loss home with him. And I didn't have to put up with the coach.

It was a good feeling. We liked it a lot. But what we loved most about basketball were the people it brought into our lives -- the young men and their families who called my husband "Coach."

I want to be clear about this. We paid a price as a family for my husband's coaching. But our lives were by far the richer for it.

I was reminded of that last week when, for the first time since my husband's memorial service, I walked into a gym.

Rob had phoned to check up on me, as he often has in the months since my husband died, and mentioned he had a city league game. He played basketball for my husband some years ago. He was so fine a point guard he won a full ride to college; and he was so fine a fine young man we wanted to claim him as our own.

"What time's your game?" I said, "I'll come watch."

I sat in the bleachers with his wife, held their daughter, my goddaughter, in my lap, and watched Rob light up the gym, like old times. Three of his teammates -- C.J., Lamont and Squeaky, the fastest human I ever saw -- were also coached by my husband years ago. They won. I was happy. Then I saw a team play with three more of my husband's old players -- Francis, Harold and Jonathan.

Between games, they came over to give me sweaty hugs and say, "Good to see you, Mrs. R., how you doing?"

My husband often insisted basketball was one sport you could play forever. "You never hear anybody say, 'Hey, let's call up some guys and go wrestle,' " he'd say, "but you can play hoops on some level all your life."

He would be proud to know that Rob and the other guys are still playing. He'd be glad to know I'm still a fan.

Scripps Howard News Service