Pat Summerall: The Voice of the Season

By Chuck Culpepper
Sports on Earth
April 17, 2013

Pat Summerall, seen here giving a radio interview prior to Super Bowl XLVI, passed away on Tuesday. (USA Today Sports Images)

I hear the voice, still, and I just know it's Sunday in the United States. Not only is it Sunday, but the Sunday has begun to wane. It has started to give way to last-ditch homework, to procrastinated worry, to Monday morning, to the school week, to the college week, to the work week. The NFL late game plays, and Sunday remains vibrant, but Sunday will die soon.

I still hear Pat Summerall saying something spare -- "Third and ten . . ." -- and I know the light has been fading outdoors. I know just as sure as any clockwork that Daylight Saving Time might be on its way, or that Daylight Saving Time has crashed in and blackened 5:30 already. I do not need to move from this seat. I do not need to look through a window. I know.

The deep, economized sound of the voice tells me the weather without telling me the weather. Of course it does. I know it's quite probably crisp outside. I know the trees have taken on some mighty colors even if I'm not really looking at them during this game. I know there's a plausible chance the sky has grayed, the birds mostly have left. I know that if I went outside and walked along the sidewalk to the driveway, the leaves might make that great sound when they crunch under my sneakers. I might look down the street to a distant front yard, see some kids playing, some hopeless bomb flying incomplete.

I know what I'm wearing. I'm wearing a sweatshirt. I do not have to look down to tell you.

And if I do happen to hear the voice in early September, I know that summer will cut its meanness soon. I know this in all 206 bones. The voice brings relief.

In the den where the voice resonates, or in living rooms otherwise silent, or at the neighbors' where you enter the house and can hear it from the other room, or in those houses where it maybe even comes from two places, the voice signals the momentous. It comes from on high in Irving, Texas, or from the Meadowlands of New Jersey, or from out by the bay in San Francisco, or Lambeau Field in later years, from the weighty games of the then-dominant NFC. It means the game matters, might sway the conference race, might determine home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.

For 28 seasons and 16 Super Bowls the voice implies gravitas, for a time alongside Tom Brookshier, then 22 seasons mingled with John Madden in the two-man NFL symphony, the voice giving way to the tick-tock of "60 Minutes," or sounding kind of funny giving the Fox evening lineup.

I hear the voice, and I know the wall calendar has just about run out of pages. I can taste my mother's Thanksgiving dressing, picture the grandparents driving in. The Christmas tree stands right over there; it seems so familiar with the voice. Friends will be over. May I get you a drink? Can't wait for the playoffs. There goes Madden, explaining some contour of the game you did not know.

Now, here's Summerall: "Third and 10 . . ."

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The voice lets the game supply the drama, as all its admirers acknowledge and commend. It's reliable, egoless and a bit clumsy on occasion. You might root for it through its unexpected pauses. There it goes all low and minimalist without a hint of a shout, as Adam Vinatieri's field goal sails through to beat the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI: "And it's right down the pipe." Here it rises just a bit on the word "good" as Matt Bahr's field goal at Candlestickstaves off the 49ers dynasty in the 1991 NFC Championship Game: "The kick . . . (pause) . . . is good . . . (pause) . . . There will be no three-peat." Here it lets Marcus Allen's amazing 74-yard run against Washington do the goose-bumping: "Here's Marcus Allen . . . (pause) . . . cutting back up the field and Marcus Allen could be gone."

Allen runs the last half of the field sans narration.

All you hear is the roar.

It makes your neck hairs salute.

That's the thing about the voice of Pat Summerall, who died in Dallas on Tuesday at 82. It became more than an unobtrusive guide to a football game. It became the voice you wanted to hear underlying the utmost sporting drama. Good, true, modest, soothing, maybe even dulcet in the non-ironic sense, it spoke over various sports but foremost as the soundtrack of the American Sunday. Without trying so hard, it came to convey the day of the week, the time of the day, the feeling in the air, the season of the year, the bigness of the game. For Sunday after Sunday, doubleheader game after doubleheader game, dusk after dusk, autumn after autumn, year after year it pleased the ear and built a lasting home in the mind.

The Perverse Logic of the Left

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The Perverse Logic of the Left

By George Neumayr on 4.17.13 @ 6:09AM

It wants to protect children from infanticide by exposing them to more abortions.

The reluctance of journalists to cover the crimes of abortionist Kermit Gosnell predates his trial. His indictment in January 2011 received minor and evasive coverage, as it inconveniently coincided with the Roe v. Wade anniversary. Pro-abortion journalists didn’t want the grand jury’s horror at seven acts of infanticide and the killing of one woman to spoil their nostalgic ruminations over the glorious emergence of abortion rights.

After all, they had promised a post-Roe world of “safe, legal, and rare” abortion. No more ghastly “back-alley” procedures, they said. Gosnell’s indictment exploded their myth of progress, revealing a culture in which abortion is unsafe, illegal, and frequent, with the butchery merely changing location, from the back alley to Main Street.

Undaunted, they now revive the same pitiful logic as the conversation moves to infanticide. Preferring screams that are silent, they claim to want to protect children from the Kermit Gosnells by exposing them to late-term abortionists. What leads to infanticide, according to their logic, is not abortion but the circumscribing of abortion. “There’s certainly been a campaign on the right, to make it — to in lieu of being able to actually ban abortions, just to make it incredibly difficult to get. And this is obviously the downside of that, right? That people wind up going outside the law,” said Beltway journalist Ben Smith on MSNBC.

Whether the child is killed at Gosnell’s shop or at a Planned Parenthood clinic, the “downside” for the child is the same. Only the left would consider advocacy for easier access to late-term abortion a convincing proof of its concern for infants. What Gosnell did to them is “unthinkable,” a few liberals have gasped, even as they maintain their call for wider abortion rights.

Gosnell didn’t depart from the culture of Roe but embodied it. For years its advocates have grown less and less fussy about the timing of the “choice” and have blasted some abortionists for acting as if some abortions are better than others. “Women have no obligation to make a decision as soon as they possibly can. The only obligation women have is to take the time they need to make the decision that is right for them,” wrote Steph Herold and Susan Yanow. Marge Berer, editor of Reproductive Health Matters, wrote that “an abortion provider must never pass judgement on the validity of a woman’s need for an abortion,” but “should act as technicians with a clinical skill to offer,” adding that “anyone who thinks they have the right to refuse even one woman an abortion can’t continue to claim they are pro-choice.”

Out of this abortion absolutism came the opposition to George W. Bush’s ban on late-term abortion, Obama’s resistance as a state senator to infanticide laws, and a media that either lionizes or overlooks late-term abortionists. Had Gosnell kept a cleaner shop and killed the children a few minutes earlier, he could have retired with the Margaret Sanger award.

At his bail hearing, Gosnell asked why he had even been indicted for the seven dead babies, implying that the line between a late-term abortion and an attempted late-term abortion that turns into infanticide is meaningless. “This is a targeted, elitist and racist prosecution of a doctor who’s done nothing but give [back] to the poor and the people of West Philadelphia,” says his lawyer.

Abortion advocates knew all about Gosnell. He has been operating since the early 1970s, not obscurely but in plain sight. This, of course, hasn’t stopped them from resorting to the topic-shifting rhetoric of back-alley abortions. “This is exactly what happens when you place undue restrictions and you try to shame women to keep them from exercising their constitutional right to safe and legal abortions,” NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue said to theHuffington Post. “You make them victims to people like Gosnell, because in their desperation they’ll turn anywhere.”

Never mind that it was the total absence of restrictions, as the grand jury noted, that made it possible for Gosnell to operate in the first place. Out of a culture of abortion absolutism came a deference to abortionists and their clinics, lest any regulation encroach upon their sacred space and impede their heroic work. Said the report: “[T]he Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety.”

NARAL and Planned Parenthood call for the monitoring of crisis pregnancy centers, not abortion clinics. Gosnell’s trade didn’t happen in spite of them but because of them. His disregard for life holds up a mirror to their own, capturing a callousness that is not lessened but only revealed by this week’s advocacy for more abortions as the answer to infanticide.

Photo: UPI

About the Author

George Neumayr, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is co-author, with Phyllis Schlafly, of the new book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/17/the-perverse-logic-of-the-left

Boston Blame Game

Posted By Matthew Vadum On April 17, 2013 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 8 Comments

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As speculation continues to rage over who bombed the Boston Marathon, the Left has been doing its best to paint its enemies in the Tea Party as the likely perpetrators without any evidence whatsoever.
Some left-wing commentators hedged in their statements, acknowledging that nobody knows for sure who was behind the attack, the first bombing of a U.S. target since 9/11, but those pundits tended to receive little media attention.
Obama senior advisor David Axelrod refused to let this crisis go to waste. He acknowledged there was very little hard evidence at the moment but went on to suggest on TV that the deadly bombing at the marathon’s finish line Monday had something to do with people who are upset about taxes.
“And I’m sure what was going through the president’s mind is — we really don’t know who did this,” Axelrod said. “It was Tax Day.”
MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews blamed those on the Right, stating incorrectly that, “Normally, domestic terrorists, people tend to be on the far right.” Rep. William Keating (D-Mass.) played along on the TV show, also suggesting the bombing could have something to do with Tax Day.
“Now, we have an international event, the marathon, the oldest marathon,” Keating said. “And we also have Tax Day, April 15, so we don’t know if that’s the kind of symbol a domestic terrorist might use as well.”
While former Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), architect of laws and financial regulations that are contributing to the downfall of America, didn’t speculate about the identity of the bomber or bombers, he did use the bombing as an opportunity to argue in favor of big government.
He praised the “seamless cooperation” by authorities in Boston as they deal with the aftermath of the attack. The retired socialist demagogue smeared those on the Right by intimating that conservatives want to abolish first-responder services — or something.
“Again, I never was as a member of Congress one of the cheerleaders for less government, lower taxes. No tax cut would have helped us deal with this or will help us recover. This is very expensive. At a time like this, no one thinks about saving pennies.”
Frank did not point out that no matter how big the government gets, Americans will never be completely safe from terrorism.
While it’s possible the bombing is the fruit of a right-wing terrorist plot, this seems unlikely.
Right-wing terrorist attacks have been rare in the U.S. in recent years while Islamic and left-wing terrorist activity (including animal rights and eco-terrorists) have been on the upswing.
Anarchists tried to blow up the GOP national convention in Minnesota in 2008.
The violent “Occupy” movement has inspired waves of violence in the U.S. and worldwide. Last year Occupy Wall Street-affiliated activists tried to bomb a bridge in Cleveland and two Greenwich Village OWS supporters were arrested after being found in possession of high explosives.
Which brings us to Timothy McVeigh, a bogeyman who is frequently raised in discussions of domestic terrorism. Executed in 2001 for bombing the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, he was not right-wing, despite relentless media propaganda to the contrary.
McVeigh didn’t say much about his personal beliefs but he was an agnostic who described science as his religion and an animal rights supporter. He attempted to join the militia movement but was rejected. He said he planted bombs because he was outraged by the federal government’s grotesque mishandling of the 1993 Waco siege. Although the Left paints McVeigh as a racist, most of the 76 dead in Waco were minorities so it doesn’t seem like an atrocity a racist would be incensed by.
In any event, a Heritage Foundation report from a year and a half ago found that 40 terrorist plots in or aimed at the U.S. had been foiled since Sept. 11, 2001. Almost all of the 40 were instances of would-be Islamic terrorism.
“While all categories of terrorist attacks against U.S. targets at home and overseas have been declining steadily since 2005, thwarted plots have more than doubled during the same period, showing that terrorists continue to plan to harm the United States and its people.”
Of course the Heritage report does not include the 2009 jihadist massacre at Fort Hood reportedly perpetrated by self-described “soldier of Allah,” Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The Obama administration continues to dishonestly label the Islamist killing spree “workplace violence.”
Much to the chagrin of Islamist apologists and Tea Party haters, there is at least some reasonable evidence that the attack could have been jihad-related, the much more realistic threat America faces.
Counter-terrorism expert Larry C. Johnson said that the bombs, reportedly pressure cookers containing ball bearings, were about “a six” on a scale of zero to 10 in terms of quality.
“This means somebody did the prior planning. They knew how to develop the devices. They were able to set the timers in such a way they didn’t detonate beforehand and detonated close enough to each other. This has been a hallmark of al-Qaeda.”
There may also be a Saudi connection to the bombing in Boston.
Saudi visa student Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi was hospitalized after being injured in the blast on Monday. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most significant terrorist-producing nations and was home to 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. According to the often-conflicting media reports accumulating, first Alharbi was a “suspect,” then he was downgraded to “person of interest,” and finally to “witness.” But in the circumstances this doesn’t mean Alharbi is cleared of all wrongdoing.
Investigators reportedly hauled away bags of his possessions after searching his apartment. Witnesses don’t normally have their homes searched or their personal belongings far from the crime scene seized by police. No matter what words they use, investigators appear to still be interested in Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi. Time will tell if he has any connection to the events in Boston.
And it is important to note that even if the Boston bombing ends up having nothing to do with jihad, it’s clear from the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, last September 11 that Islamists still seek to do great harm to innocent Americans. We can’t afford to let our guard down.
Meanwhile, officials intercepted an envelope yesterday that tested positive for the super-lethal poison ricin at the U.S. Capitol’s off-site mail-processing center in Washington, D.C., CNN reports.
The letter was addressed to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).
As Congress deals with highly contentious gun control and immigration bills, the Left, which is always anxious to blame its enemies for everything bad that happens in America, will undoubtedly admonish any jumping to conclusions about this attempt on a Republican lawmaker’s life.
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Margaret Thatcher biography heralds new chapter for former editor

Former Telegraph editor Charles Moore to publish authorised Thatcher biography, Not For Turning, immediately after funeral

• Maev Kennedy
• The Guardian, Tuesday 9 April 2013 11.38 EDT

Thatcher biographer Charles Moore, ex-editor of the Sunday and Daily Telegraph, in his former office in London. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Lady Thatcher's funeral next Wednesday will coincide with the publication date of a book expected to become an instant bestseller.

Not For Turning, the first volume of Charles Moore's authorised biography, is likely to fly off the shelves within hours of the ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral.

Moore, who told the Guardian with some embarrassment that he had been contractually forbidden to speak to newspapers, is a former editor of the Sunday and Daily Telegraph, who resigned from the latter position in 2003 to focus on the biography.

The book was commissioned in 1997 and Moore had been granted unprecedented access to Thatcher's private papers, including her extensive correspondence with a shadowy figure in previous biographies, her older sister, Muriel, who died in 2004.

He also conducted hours of interviews with the former premier and received her blessing for further extensive interviews with friends and colleagues, staff and her family.

Stuart Profitt, a director at the publisher Allen Lane, said the book would supersede previous efforts. He admitted he was astonished at how much information on Thatcher had not been made public before. "At the moment when she becomes a historical figure, this book also makes her into a three-dimensional one for the first time," he said.

 Margaret Thatcher in 1979. She faced the daunting task of reviving the UK's economy. Photograph: Chris Capstick/Rex Features

"Moore is clearly an admirer of his subject, but he does not shy away from criticising her or identifying weaknesses and mistakes where he feels it is justified."

The contract for the biography provided that nothing would be published until after Thatcher's death.

Within hours of the official announcement from her family on Monday, Allen Lane, the imprint of Penguin Books, said the first volume, which ends with the dinner party to celebrate victory in the Falklands war, would be published immediately after the funeral. Moore is working on the second volume, Herself Alone.

In a series of interviews 18 months ago, posted on the Conservative Home website, when he still had no idea when his work would be published, Moore said he had a particularly sharp view of Thatcher's career, as her election as prime minister coincided with his arrival in Fleet Street in 1979.

He said during the years he has devoted to the project, he had seen a steady rise in Thatcher's reputation. "You often get people who say – not necessarily people who agree with her – 'we need a Maggie Thatcher'," he said.

Although at 56, he is too old to count as a young fogey, the Eton- and Cambridge-educated Moore has always appeared to revel in his archconservative image.

His column in the Spectator magazine frequently includes vignettes from his home village of Etchingham in East Sussex (it was raining heavily there in January) and he was recently affronted by a waitress who had never encountered a cork – as opposed to a screw cap – in a wine bottle. He listed "hunting" as his only hobby in a recent Who's Who.

In 2010, Moore was convicted at Hastings magistrates court and fined £262, plus £530 costs, for an unpaid television licence.

 The write stuff – Thatcher books. Photograph: Amazon/Fever PR

His refusal to pay the fee was a protest against the BBC's decision not to sack Jonathan Ross over the prank phonecalls the presenter and the comedian Russell Brand made to the actor Andrew Sachs. "It was against my conscience," he told the court.

His book, 16 years in the making, will be beaten to the shops by the Iron Lady's own offering. HarperCollins has announced the imminent publication of the first single volume edition of Thatcher's autobiography, originally published in 1993 and 1995, which has sold more than 1m copies.

Thatcher tomes

There are already enough Margaret Thatcher books – biographies, hagiographies, compilations of speeches, commentaries and the Iron Lady's own two hefty volumes oftwo-volume autobiography – to fill a small library, with many more on the way, two with the same title, Not For Turning.

• Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice (1989) A politician's psycho-biography by Leo Abse, former Labour MP, who deduced much from Thatcher's failure to refer to her mother.

• One of Us (1989) Bestselling biography by Guardian columnist Hugo Young.

• Kill the Messenger (1991) Press officer Bernard Ingham's account of the Thatcher years.

• The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995) The two-volume autobiography.

• Margaret Thatcher (2005) A tribute in words and pictures by journalist Iain Dale, also author of The Margaret Thatcher Book of Quotations.

• The Real Iron Lady, Working with Margaret Thatcher (March 2013) By former cabinet member Gillian Shepherd, once tipped as a potential successor. "Are we really that desperate?" Thatcher is reported to have said about that.

• Margaret Thatcher, The Autobiography (April 2013) The autobiography for the first time as a single-volume ebook, due out this week, to be followed by hardback and paperback editions and an audiobook read by Thatcher herself.

• The Grocer's Daughter (2000) and The Iron Lady (2003) Two-volume biography by John Campbell, who became a consultant on the 2011 Academy Award-winning film, The Iron Lady. It was abridged in a single volume in 2009, which is heading Amazon's Thatcher bestseller list.

• Not For Turning (17 April 2013) Volume one of Charles Moore's authorised biography.

• Not For Turning (25 April 2013) Biography by Robin Harris, her scriptwriter who also helped with her autobiography.

• This article was amended on 11 April 2013. The original gave the title of Hugo Young's biography of Margaret Thatcher as The Iron Lady and said it was published in 1990. It was given that title in the US, but it was first published in 1989, and in Britain its title was One of Us.

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Jihad in Boston?

By Robert Spencer
http://frontpagemag.com
April 16, 2013

The Boston terror bombings may be jihad. It is also possible that they may not be. As of this writing on Monday evening, those who know – the perpetrators and their accomplices, and possibly law enforcement officials — aren’t saying anything. Whatever the truth may be, the reactions to the initial reports from various quarters were telling.

An early report from the New York Post stated that “investigators have a suspect — a Saudi Arabian national — in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings.” However, Boston police denied that they had a suspect in custody, and Leftists and Islamic supremacists rushed to spread that news: Talking Points Memo ran a fairly straightforward piece, but at Salon, Alex Seitz-Wald headlined his report “Pamela Geller blames a ‘Jihadi,’” excoriating Geller for “seizing on a thinly sourced New York Post report.” Islamic supremacist writer Reza Aslan tweeted: “Boston Police: No Arrests Have Been Made In Marathon Bombing so Enough with the Saudi National BS.”

The implication was that if there was no Saudi national in custody, then the bombings were not jihad. The egg was on their faces, however, when it turned out that the New York Post had been right, and that authorities really did have a Saudi national in custody. According to CBS News, “Law enforcement sources told Miller a witness saw a person acting suspiciously when the explosions happened along the marathon route.” Miller explained:

They see him running away from the device. Now, a reasonable person would be running away. But this person had noticed him before. This is a civilian — chases him down, tackles him, turns him over to the Boston police. The individual is being looked at [and] was suffering from burn injury. That means this person was pretty close to wherever this blast went off, but not so close as to suffer the serious injuries that other people did.

There are other indications that this was a jihad attack: the timed and coordinated bombings were of a kind we have seen previously in the Mumbai jihad attacks, as well as in numerous jihad bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also like Mumbai, the bombs seem to have been set off remotely by cell phone. Yet characteristically, some in the mainstream media rushed to blame “right-wingers”: according to Victor Medina in the Examiner, “Esquire Magazine’s Charles P. Pierce attempted to link the bombings to right wing extremists similar to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In another, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen speculated that the type of bomb device could link it to right wing extremist groups.”

Such reactions were illustrative of the general mainstream media avidity to downplay and even deny outright that there really is a jihad threat at all. Ultimately, however, whether or not this Saudi (who has been identified as being in the U.S. on a student visa) was involved in the attack or not, and whether or not this Boston Marathon bombing was a jihad attack at all, the jihad against the U.S. still rages. ‪Jihadists worldwide have made their hatred for Americans, and determination to murder them in the name of Allah, abundantly clear on numerous occasions. If the Boston terror bombings turn out to have been perpetrated by someone else, this doesn’t mean that violent jihadists have disappeared. Jihad is already here in the United States, as we saw not only on 9/11, but in the Fort Hood jihad murders, the attempted Times Square bombing, the Portland Christmas tree bomb plot, and so many others. There have been over 20,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11; the denial that dominates the media and government response to those attacks only ensures that such jihad attacks will become ever more common stateside.

And so as the new coverage continued on Monday night, commentators speculated about whether the terror attack was “domestic” or “foreign.” While leftist analysts freely speculated about “right-wing” involvement, those who declared the attack jihad on the basis of the questioning of the Saudi national were excoriated as “Islamophobes.”  The media marches in lockstep, aided and abetted by a Greek chorus of activists and fellow travelers on Twitter and other social media. And the direction in which they are marching is rendering us all more unsafe.

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Filed Under: Daily Mailer, FrontPage Tagged With: bombing, Boston, extremist, Jihad, marathon, Media,right wing, Terrorism

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About Robert Spencer

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Did Muhammad Exist?, is now available.

Uniquely Memorable

By Chuck Culpepper
Sports On Earth
April 16, 2013

Pacific Lutheran football coach Frosty Westering in his office in Tacoma, Wash. in 2001. (AP Images)

His players implored him to belly-flop into a California hotel pool, and he complied -- at age 75. He once took a running plunge into the mud during a soppy game in Oregon. He adored when players pulled pranks on him, insisted players use his first name -- Frosty! -- and corrected them if they used "Coach."

He sometimes halted practice to have players spend five minutes gazing beyond the giant evergreens to Mount Rainier. He sometimes halted practice to have players go to other sporting fields and cheer on, say, the soccer team. He always halted two-a-day practices in August and instructed players to go help freshmen move into dormitories.

He believed deeply in singing. His players sang before games, after games. Sometimes they sang to the mock direction of the coach's cane. Always they learned to sing without embarrassment, for it had become uncool to refrain from the refrains. For his 300th win in September 2003, an offensive lineman led the team in James Taylor's "Steamroller." During warmups for the NCAA Division III national championship game in December 1999, right there on the field in Virginia, his players sang "The Twelve Days of Christmas," then proceeded to win 42-13.

Can you imagine warming up on the other side, then losing 42-13 to that?

During three of the best days of my career -- those in his company, in Tacoma, Wash., in 2003 -- he requested that I join his players for supper in their dining hall. Three of them drove me, in a pickup truck, back to my car. Along the way, they sang "Leaving on a Jet Plane."

"Why singing?" I asked the coach.

"When you sing," he said, "your consciousness is raised."

And lest you think this guy some Left Coast flake, let me hurl at you this biographical detail: former drill instructor, United States Marine Corps.

Did you know one of the most remarkable American coaches died on Friday? Did you know that Frosty Westering, who had 32 seasons at Pacific Lutheran without a losing record in any, who never mentioned playoffs or titles to his players but won four national championships and four runner-up finishes on two levels, died at 85 surrounded by his considerable family? Please know. Please, please know.

An airline pilot wrote to the university president. He wrote because the Pacific Lutheran presence on his airplane had taken a routine day and whipped it up into memorable. He wrote because Westering insisted his players respect other people's work. He wrote because that respect included rapt attention to the flight attendants, which in turn included a phenomenal sound that came when the players clicked their seat belts in unison.

He wrote because at the destination gate, the college football players had held back and lined up on two sides in a "go" tunnel so they could give high-fives to disembarking crew.

A janitor wrote to the university president. He wrote because when he came upon Pacific Lutheran's visiting locker room one postgame in Portland, he found the chairs lined up in impeccable order. He wrote because he found the floors and lockers completely free of the normal detritus. He found the place just about spotless.

He wrote because, when he arrived in the room, he found a note on the whiteboard suggesting he go home and join his wife by the Christmas tree.

A man in a wheelchair came to the "Afterglow," a Westering postgame concoction where a few hundred players, coaches and fans would gather in the bleachers. They might discuss the game. Players might thank the fans for support. Fans might thank the players for inspiration. Everyone would sing "Happy Birthday" to anyone with a birthday nigh. The "Afterglow" would happen after wins, but -- oh yes -- the "Afterglow" would happen also after losses, because in Westering's mind, losing meant you had just completed the privilege of playing.

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On a weekday after the "Afterglow," Westering happened upon the man in the wheelchair and invited him to practice. Soon after that, he made the man an assistant coach, and so John Nelson, a quadriplegic Singaporean-American born with a debilitating condition and spinal-cord problems, came to head up the freshmen players. And they, in turn, had to take on responsibilities for his care: dressing him, helping him eat, helping him go to the bathroom. Do you suppose that taught them anything?

By 2003, Nelson had lost count of the times he had appeared as a groomsman in the weddings of former players, reckoning the number beyond 10. He told of a road trip stop at Disneyland when the players determined he should take a ride, so one player hugged him all the way through. During those three days I spent with the team in 2003 Nelson said to me, "There's a reason for this, a reason for the guys coming out to this program, to see somebody who's different. Hopefully, it inspires them. If someone in public needs help, I'm sure they will be comfortable with helping them."

Doctors thought Nelson would have trouble making 30. By 2003, he had made 38. By his death in 2009, he had made 44. At his memorial service, Frosty placed a jersey on his wheelchair.

Westering had such stern rules. His players had to help up opponents during games on the premise that the privilege of playing could not occur without opponents. Troublemakers didn't have to run sprints; no, they were denied the "honor" of running. He knew fear could motivate but thought love could motivate for longer, so players badly in need of upbraiding -- of putdowns -- would receive what Frosty called "put-ups," and he mandated six put-ups per day.

One put-up, "Attaway" -- a configuration of "That a way" -- became a staple. He had players use it prolifically, including toward hotel clerks, short-order cooks, fast-food clerks, custodial staffs, flight crews. They used it one day at practice after Frosty had some women's volleyball players address the team about their recent and difficult victory over Puget Sound.

In a football world chockablock with practices planned to the minute if not the second, Frosty's practices carried a decided imprecision. His son and coaching successor Scott said that, to his knowledge, his father had never written a practice plan. One day he had meaddress the team, impromptu. Sometimes he'd serve popsicles, with root beer one flavor during my visit. Wet days might enable frolicsome sliding contests. Meetings never started on time, and Frosty's penchant for hazy punctuality proved so entrenched that Donna, his wife and the mother of their five children, found an "ish" clock with the suffix "ish" beside each number and placed it on their kitchen wall.

Said Donna, one day on the phone, "In fact, it's five after 2-ish right now."

Players never wore full gear until game days, then would suit up on Saturdays, sing (of course), maybe even listen to some music professor Frosty had invited to play drums for them on an upside-down bowl and plastic pitcher. Then the whistle would blow, the kickoff would go up, and players would tell of this astonishing transformation into hard, hard hitting -- replete with helping up the people they'd hit.

Then again, one day in September 2003 the quarterback came to the sideline on fourth-and-12 and said, "Let's go for it," whereupon Frosty said, "You're kidding," whereupon a small gaggle of players agreed with the quarterback, whereupon Frosty said, "Let's do it, then," whereupon Pacific Lutheran converted the first.

Seasons would begin with a three-day getaway in which players bonded, played games but not football, apologized for any insufficient effort the prior season and sang, sang, sang, the freshmen standing on chairs and singing their high school fight songs unless they could not remember them, in which case they got stuck with "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Seasons would end the way almost all seasons everywhere end, with a loss, but with a way almost no seasons end, with an "Afterglow." Or they ended with a win and an "Afterglow."

And when PLU careers ended, the graduates sprinkled over much of the Northwest, some in coaching. One helped run a car dealership where they took time to behold Mount Rainier and they declined an applicant after a job interview in which the applicant told of being a No. 1 salesman, because they thought he had missed the point of it all.

Their former coach always bought used cars, so he drove me to the dining hall in his 1993 blue Oldsmobile. When he left one day for a speaking engagement, he offered me the use of his small office, which surely meant he wasn't cheating. And when I returned to New York, a dear friend who does not follow college football but who read my story said something simple, but said it with an inflection that made it ring in my head for good.

"He's a great man," my friend said. A great man died on Friday. A great man also lived from 1927 until Friday, and while he lived, oh boy, was he alive.