Joseph Epstein looks at the coaches in today’s SuperBowl game and believes that the press coverage should look beyond the fact that both are African-American. An excerpt:
As someone who lives in Chicago, I have watched Lovie Smith over the past three years that he has been the Bears head coach and find myself much taken by his quiet authority. Being a coach in the NFL entails being able to command an often out-of-control bunch of too-young multimillionaire jocks, the executive gifts to handle several sub-coaches (offense, defense, special teams and more) and orchestrate their combined efforts on the field at game day, and to deal with a low-grade sports press always on the qui vive for stirring up troublesome controversy.
As someone who lives in Chicago, I have watched Lovie Smith over the past three years that he has been the Bears head coach and find myself much taken by his quiet authority. Being a coach in the NFL entails being able to command an often out-of-control bunch of too-young multimillionaire jocks, the executive gifts to handle several sub-coaches (offense, defense, special teams and more) and orchestrate their combined efforts on the field at game day, and to deal with a low-grade sports press always on the qui vive for stirring up troublesome controversy.
Mr. Smith has handled all this with calm mastery, never losing his cool, never compromising his dignity. He came to the Bears following a coach who, standing on the sidelines, showed such stress that it seemed advisable to have him strapped to an EKG machine; and a coach before that who specialized in humiliating his players by screaming at them on the sidelines when they made mistakes. Lovie Smith, the emotional antithesis of both these predecessors, is a gent.
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