My brother Scott recently visited with some of my Dad’s former assistant coaches. One is apparently the ultimate football encyclopedia with clippings and journals of games going back decades. He gave Scott this clipping marked “Hal Mitchell coaches son Scott during practice.” Scott immediately recognized that Dad didn’t coach the offense (and Scott was the quarterback) and further that his helmet never had the center forehead bar. It’s actually my Dad, Hal Mitchell, coaching my second brother Mark. This picture was taken in 1973 at Cabrillo College.
Dad was 43 and Mark was 18. It would have been two years until Dad had his first coronary bypass surgery. Two years before he left coaching forever, and went to work for Rawlings Sporting Goods in their Research and Development dept in Missouri. Eventually he would be introduced as the foremost expert on sports injuries in the nation.
This picture was printed in the newspaper 20 years before his obituary announcing that he had lost his final battle with prostate cancer.
There’s an empty jar of peanuts under the seat of his truck.
Mark would leave on an LDS mission to Japan a year after this picture was taken. A little more than two years after that, he and Velinda Gay would be married and a year after that, little Emily would make him a daddy.
What is he saying to him in this moment of unconcerned football bliss? Perhaps the coach reminds him how to read a quarterback’s eyes, or how to fake out an O-lineman?
I wonder if deep in the memory of each of these two men is nestled the sound of their voices that day, the smell of grass and sweat and the nearby ocean, the sensation of the father’s hand on his son’s shoulder.
What would they each give to relive that moment from the perspective of here and now?
Would they speak of something different?
Oh remember my son. . .
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