Football 67

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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 inhabitants whose high school had the worst football team in the northeast of that state. It had been a decade since it had won a single game.

Then a man, already older and retired, with a lot of money and a football lover, moved to Deer Park. 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 winning team and for that he hired, with his own money, Coach Max Sánchez, of Hispanic origin, who – now retired – had been a soccer coach at a small university of the state of Illinois, in the center of the country.

Mr. Sánchez arrived at Deer Park High School in 1967, where he was greeted by the town as a hero.  All the boys wanted to sign up for the football team, including me.

The new coach introduced techniques never seen by the former footballers of the school. In those days we all had long hair and dressed like hippies. He made us shave our hair military-style and forced us to go to class in a coat and tie, because we had to differentiate ourselves from that lot of “losers”, as he called the rest of the student population.

Of course, the training sessions were terrible, with new and tremendously demanding exercises. He bought a 16mm camera (with black and white film) and filmed us on the practice field.  He never cut a single boy from the team, no matter how badly he played, but he forced us to find mistakes in each one of us, while we watched, every Thursday after school, the movies that were filmed in training.

Max said that it was more important to look at our mistakes than our virtues, as athletes…as football players, a game that requires a military strategy.

Coach Sánchez despised both optimism and pessimism. He taught us to seek victory within realism. Very quickly he showed us that THE REALITY was that we had become a great team. From not winning a single game, we began to win them all within our league, which was the poorest of all, where the smallest schools in the state were measured.

At half time, both teams retire to the locker room to listen to the coach’s recommendations. When we were winning in the first half, Max fell on us in a brutal way. To those who had scored touchdowns, he made a fuss, asking them if they felt like “princesses.” Mr. Sánchez did not like “triumphalism” and less when there was still the other half of the game to play.

On the other hand, if we were losing, he would encourage us. He reminded us that we were the best team in the region. He asked us to review ourselves internally and search within ourselves for that force that he knew existed in each one of us, “his kids.”

For many years one of the town’s preachers, Mr. Harold, would take us by bus from school to the playing field. Before we got off the bus, he would ask us to bow our heads respectfully, to ask God for victory. God never listened to us… it must be because the Almighty was too busy with more important things than giving victory to a certain team in a football game, in the distant state of Washington, in the United States of America.

One of the first decisions that Mr. Sánchez made was to eliminate this religious practice before each game. He told us that God had made us a competition machine, both mentally and physically, and that the least we could do for Him, in deep gratitude, was to show Him that we had taken advantage of that fighting capacity that He gave us, to win the victory.  God, according to Max, expected from us the maximum effort and, according to Mr. Sánchez, He felt very upset every time we asked Him to be the one to give us the victory, without us making an effort to obtain it: “help yourself, and I I’ll help you!”

We had to obtain the victory with the team’s COLLECTIVE EFFORT, as a monolithic entity. Mr. Sánchez hated individualism and leadership. He said that there was no way to beat a united team, working in perfect physical and mental coordination.

There were many experiences that we had around Mr. Sánchez. The 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 later applied in my adult life, in all areas of my life.

To end this long story, I will tell you that in 1967, after a first season in which we never lost a game, we reached the state tournament, where we had to measure ourselves against schools that had more students than our little town of Deer Park.   We ended up “co-champions“, that is to say: we were drawn. Max sent us to make some beautiful football jackets, which had the following words embroidered on the back. “Deer Park Football Team – 1967 Co-Champs – Washington State.”

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We return to the town as heroes return after winning a war. Unbelievably, after our victory on the football field, Deer Park experienced an unimaginable boom. Everybody 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 cheer leader team. Land sales skyrocketed; employment skyrocketed to levels never seen before. Mr. Hyde, the man who had made Max’s hiring possible, invested in the town, building a New York-style supermarket.

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 for the 200th anniversary of the United States as a nation, a great event that took place in Philadelphia, at the other end of the country.

Mr. Max Sánchez knew what he was doing, we didn’t. He got us to put ourselves in his hands and he took us to the top.