Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

A coach is a teacher of not only athletic skills but of fundamental character traits that serve as a foundation for a society with values. An NFL Hall-of-Famer looks back on one of his most formative coaches: Sid Gillman, one of the game’s all-time visionaries. The Duke of Wellington is said to have declared that it was on the playing fields of Eton that the battle of Waterloo was won. He recognized that it is on the athletic field we learn loyalty, discipline, the value of hard work, acceptance of responsibility, respect for oneself and others, and the mark of a mature person: the deferment of immediate gratification for long-term goals. I first learned of Sid Gillman when I needed him most. In 1955, he was named the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams, the team of my boyhood. At the time, I was a junior at Hawthorne High School and a not very successful substitute on the varsity football team. I had been born in Boyle Heights, at the time an East Los Angeles Russian-Jewish ghetto. “Ghetto” was a fair description of the place for it was peopled by primarily Jewish immigrants who were trying to figure out how to make a living in this strange land that did not particularly want them. My father had traveled to America by himself at age 13, sent by his family to be the first to leave the oppression in Russia, where Jews could neither be landowners nor obtain an education.

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