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Fictionalized story inspired by real events
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In 1966 my parents sent me to study in the small town of Deer Park, in the state of Washington, in the United States. A town of 3,000 people whose high school had the worst “American football” team in the northeast of that state. It hadn’t won a single game for a decade.
Then moved to Deer Park a gentleman, already older and retired, with a lot of money and lover of “American football”. He visited the region and decided that it was there where he wanted to spend the last years of his life.
As he was a man of fortune, he set out to make the football team a successful one and for that he hired, with his own money, Coach Max Sánchez, of Hispanic origin, who – now retired – had been a football coach at a small university in the state of Illinois, in the center of the country.
Mr. Sanchez came to Deer Park High School in 1966, where he was greeted by the people as a hero. All the guys wanted to sign up for the football team, including me.
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The new “coach” introduced techniques never seen by the old footballers of the school. In those days we all wore long hair and dressed like hippies. He made us shave our hair in the military style and forced us to go to classes in a sack and tie, because we had to differentiate ourselves from that batch of “losers”, as he called the rest of the student population.
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Crew cut required by Coach Sanchez
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Of course, the workouts were terrible, with new and tremendously demanding exercises. He sent to buy a 16mm camera (with black and white rolls) and filmed us on the practice field. He never took a single boy out of the team, no matter how bad he played, but he forced us to find mistakes in each of us, while watching, every Thursday after school, the movies that were filmed in training.
Max said that it was more important to look at our mistakes than at our virtues, as athletes… as players of “American football”, a game that requires a military strategy.
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With Max Sanchez & wife – Deer Park 2004
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Coach Sanchez despised both optimism and pessimism. He taught us to seek victory within realism. Very soon he showed us that THE REALITY was that we had become a great team. By not winning a single game, we started winning them all, within our league, which was the poorest of all, where the smallest schools in the state were measured.
At “halftime” of the “American football” games, both teams retire to the locker room to listen to the recommendations of the coach. When we were winning in the first half, Max fell on us in a brutal way. To those who had scored touchdowns in favor of our team, a scandal formed, asking them if they felt like “prima donnas“. Mr. Sánchez did not like “triumphalism” and less, when there was still the other half of the game to finish playing.
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My most precious medal
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On the other hand, if we were losing, he gave us encouragement. He reminded us that we were the best team in the region. He asked us to check ourselves internally and look within ourselves for that strength that he knew existed in each of us, “his boys.”
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For many years, one of the village pastors, Mr. Lowell Kelly, took us by bus from school to the playing field. Before we got off the bus, he asked us to lower our heads respectfully, to ask God to give us victory. God never listened to us… it must be because the Almighty deals with more important things than giving victory to a certain team in a football game, in the distant state of Washington, of the United States of America.
One of the first decisions Mr. Sanchez made was to eliminate that religious practice, before each game. He told us that God had made us a machine of competition, both mental and physical, and that the least we could do for Him, in deep gratitude, was to show Him that we had taken advantage of that combative capacity that He gave us. God, according to Max, expected the maximum effort from us and, according to Mr. Sánchez, he felt very displeased every time we asked him to give us the victory, without us striving to obtain it: “Help you and I will help you!”
The victory had to be obtained with the COLLECTIVE EFFORT of the team, as a monolithic entity. Mr. Sanchez hated individualism and protagonism. He said there was no way to beat a united team, working in perfect physical and mental coordination.
There were many experiences that we lived around Mr. Sánchez. That knowledge that I gathered during my three years as a football player at Deer Park High School, under the wise and expert tutelage of Mr. Max Sánchez, our coach, I applied later in my adult life, in all areas of my existence.
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With Mr. Fisher – Deer Park 2004
To finish this long story, I will tell you that in the year of 1967, after a first season in which we never lost a game, we arrived at the state tournament, where we had to measure ourselves with schools that had more students than our small town of Deer Park. We finish “co-champions“, that is: we were drawn. Max sent us to make some beautiful jackets of footballers, which had embroidered on the back the following words. “Deer Park Football Team – 1967 Co-Champs – Washington State.”
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We return to the village as heroes return after winning a war. Incredibly, after our victory on the football field, Deer Park experienced an unimaginable boom. Everyone wanted to live in it and put their kids on the team. Even those who only had daughters wanted them to be part of the cheerleader’s team. Land sales soared; employment soared to levels never seen before. Mr. Hyde, the gentleman who had made Max’s hiring possible, invested in the town, building a New York-style supermarket.
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The example was followed by the director of the school band, Mr. Fisher (who just passed away in February 2009) who was invited, in 1976, to open the parade of the 200 years of the United States as a nation, a great event that took place in Philadelphia, at the other end of the country.
Mr. Max Sanchez knew what he was doing, we didn’t. He managed to get us into his hands and took us to the top.
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Miami, March 23rd, 2020
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