De La Salle's win-streak secret -- Never give anything less than your best

By Tom Barnidge Contra Costa Times Columnist
August 16, 2014



(Center L-R) Michael Chiklis as Terry Eidson and Jim Caviezel as Bob Ladouceur in 'When the Game Stands Tall.' (Tracy Bennett/Sony Pictures)

The story of the De La Salle High School football program that will flash across movie screens this week -- "When the Game Stands Tall" -- is wrapped around an unprecedented 151-game winning streak that the Catholic boys school in Concord assembled from 1992 to 2004.

The streak was built across 12 perfect seasons, including 32 playoff games, during which De La Salle outscored opponents 7,092-1,323 (average score: 47-9) and was five times ranked the No. 1 high school team in the nation by USA Today.

The program has barely blinked in the 10 years since -- a 126-12-2 record, with 10 North Coast Section titles and five state championships. Last season, the Spartans' first in 35 years without coach Bob Ladouceur at the helm, they were 14-1 and state runners-up under Justin Alumbaugh, who once played for Ladouceur.

How does this happen -- in the East Bay, of all places -- at a private school with barely 1,000 students?

Let's begin at the beginning, with the basics any football fan will recognize -- grueling practices and endless repetition of fundamentals.

"It's basic, it's the minutiae, and it's very boring," said quarterbacks/running backs coach Mark Panella. "It's the mechanics and fundamentals. We go over and over and over and over them, day in and day out. It's monotonous."

Panella played on Ladouceur's first two North Coast Section champions, and he said the fundamentals have always been pounded into players.

Then there's the unrelenting emphasis on conditioning, from the weight room to the torturous drills, in which sweat-soaked players are expected to run full out while dragging car tires across practice fields when they're not pounding on blocking sleds. Players put in anywhere from 16 to 17 hours a week in practice, film sessions and conditioning.

Retired coach Bob Ladouceur at home on the sidelines during practice at De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., on Monday, Aug. 11, 2014. Ladouceur had a 151-game streak among his 399 wins while coaching. "When The Game Stands Tall", a movie based on former Contra Costa Times reporter Neil Hayes book on the DLS streak, will be opening soon. (Susan Tripp Pollard/Bay Area News Group)

"There have been times when we've been successful against them for a half," said George Zuber, who's faced the Spartans twice while coaching at James Logan High in Union City and five times when he was at San Leandro. "But they'll wear you down in the second half, and that's where they excel with their conditioning and strength."

And always there are the players. De La Salle seems so loaded with talent each year -- 12 players have gone on to become NFL draft choices since 1994 -- that opponents regularly tar the school with charges of illegally recruiting talent, a claim that school officials have learned to laugh off.

"I was at a meeting years ago," said Brother Robert Wickman, the school's principal, "when a principal from another school said to me, 'I hear that every time one of your football players scores a touchdown, he gets a tuition reduction.' I told him, 'No, you've got it all wrong. When they score touchdowns, we give them cars.'"

Annual tuition at De La Salle is more than $15,000. The fact the school provides scholarships to low-income students -- some of whom are athletes from well outside Concord -- inevitably is linked to the recruiting assertions. School President Mark DeMarco tackled that one head-on.

"Out of 50 kids on scholarship, maybe three or four are on the varsity," he said, "and some others are on the J.V. team -- maybe 10 or 12 total out of the 50. The financial aid and tuition packets are handled in a blind process."

Defensive coordinator Terry Eidson, who has been at Ladouceur's side for 34 seasons (Ladouceur now is an assistant coach), said there's a simpler explanation for why the school attracts students from far and wide.

"We're a private Catholic boys school, and we're the only one in Contra Costa -- 75 percent of our (school's) population is Catholic," he said. "Most of our kids come from a 10- or 12-mile radius, like Maurice Jones-Drew. He came from Holy Rosary Parish in Antioch. If you're a Catholic, where else do you go?"

Give the final word to Zuber, who has gone 0-7 against De La Salle: "De La Salle doesn't recruit. They don't have to. Their winning recruits for them."

But not even highly trained, talented athletes can fully explain the stunning run of excellence for a small school like De La Salle. That traces to the way-back years and the vision for the football program shared by Ladouceur and Eidson.

"We knew it could be about a lot more than just winning and losing," Eidson said. "It could be a vehicle to get to kids and share lessons about growing up and maturing. A lot of coaches give lip service to it, but it really starts with the fact that our coaches see themselves as educators. The football field just becomes an extension of our classroom.

"Our plan wasn't domination of the area. We started out just trying to get De La Salle into the playoffs."

Author Neil Hayes, the former Contra Costa Times columnist who wrote the book upon which the movie is based, said what has always set the football program apart are values that Ladouceur drilled into his players: Never give anything less than your best and always be accountable to your teammates. No half-efforts are tolerated; no excuses accepted.

It's no coincidence that Ladouceur and Eidson both were teachers before they were coaches. From the outset, they viewed football as a tool to impart life lessons. Victories are a byproduct of fulfilling responsibilities, as is success in life.

"The football program isn't about winning," Hayes said. "It's about maximizing your potential. I've seen 'Lad' furious after a 44-0 victory and pleased after a loss when his players gave full effort."

Said Panella: "He has an innate ability to know what each individual kid needs to motivate him to become not just a better player but a better person."

One of Hayes' favorite passages in the book comes from Ladouceur:

"Kids respect true humility and that you stand for something more than winning. They'll fight for you and your program if you stand for more than that. It boils down to what you believe in as a person, and I'm talking about how life should be lived and people should be treated. Kids see all that. It's a whole package of things that have nothing do with standing in front of a team with a piece of chalk."

Make no mistake, though. Ladouceur knows his way around x's and o's.

The veer offense he installed -- a run-first attack powered by quick, disciplined offensive linemen -- dares opponents to stop it from chewing up yards between the tackles. If perimeter defenders pinch in to help, the quarterback fakes an inside handoff and squirts around end, or pitches to a trailing running back for a free run down the sideline. De La Salle runs these plays to the right and runs them to the left, always probing for weaknesses that can be exploited later.

About the time opponents believe they're committed to the run, the Spartans rev up the passing game or unveil a gadget play. Halfback options and reverses are a staple of the playbook. Even the special teams have gimmicks -- fake punts and onside kicks -- in their arsenal.

Zuber remembers a game in which the Spartans offense came off the field on fourth down, so he sent in his punt-return unit. Then De La Salle sent its offense back onto the field, and he had to call timeout so his defense could return.

Then De La Salle jumped into punt formation and began calling signals. Flummoxed defenders, unaccustomed to special teams duties and anxious for the snap, jumped offside, and De La Salle had a new set of downs.

Through it all -- the perfect seasons, the state championships, the unfathomable streak -- the school has never posted a sign or hung a banner on campus celebrating its success. ("That's one thing the movie gets wrong," DeMarco said. "They have a banner hanging from the front of the school. There's no way we'd put a banner up.")

That's a reflection of Ladouceur, Wickman said. "Bob says let your performance on the field speak for itself."

Obviously, it did. It spoke loudly enough to capture Hollywood's attention.

Contact Tom Barnidge at tbarnidge@bayareanewsgroup.com.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/barnidge/ci_26350965/barnidge-de-la-salles-win-streak-secret-never

'When the Game Stands Tall': How De La Salle football team's story became a movie

By Angela Hill, Oakland Tribune

http://www.mercurynews.com/

August 1, 2014

Now and then, Hollywood magic results from something decidedly non-glamorous -- like a guy reading a book on a pile of smelly football shoulder pads.

It helps, of course, if the guy is David Zelon, a producer and executive vice president at Mandalay Entertainment Group. Back in 2009, the devoted football dad was straightening up the equipment room at his son's high school in Santa Monica when he came across a copy of "When the Game Stands Tall," the famed story of Concord's De La Salle High School Spartans and their 151-game winning streak under the guidance of coach Bob Ladouceur.

It was the first Zelon had heard the tale, though the book -- written by former Contra Costa Times columnist Neil Hayes -- was originally published in 2003. But once Zelon cracked it open, he caught the whiff of a potential film.

"I settled right in on that pile of sweaty shoulder pads and started reading -- I was hooked," he said in a recent phone interview. "The thing was, I'd never seen this kind of approach to a team anywhere. Ladouceur wasn't about winning. No yelling and slamming clipboards down. He was about developing these boys into great young men. So I thought, let's show everybody how they did it."

We'll all be hearing a lot about "When the Game Stands Tall" in the coming weeks before the movie adaptation opens nationwide Aug. 22, preceded by red-carpet fanfare not just in Hollywood on Aug. 4, but also in the Blackhawk Theaters in Danville on Aug. 17. And while the production is Hollywood all the way -- and filmed in New Orleans of all places, thanks to financial incentives -- its roots run deep in the East Bay. Not only with the team itself and the book's author, but also with former Times photographer Bob Larson, whose photos in the book were used as the inspiration for key scenes. Even the film's director, Thomas Carter, has an East Bay link, having also directed "Coach Carter" about a Richmond high school basketball team in 2005.

And just as the stars aligned in the making of De La Salle's record-breaking team, kismet also played a part in the story's path from real life to feature film -- an effort which at times felt futile.

BUMP AND RUN

It goes back to Hayes' and Larson's days at the Times in the mid-'90s covering De La Salle, a private Catholic school for boys known for its powerhouse football program, which draws talented athletes from around the East Bay. The team, coaches and players alike, had no interest in excessive publicity early on, and it took some serious coaxing -- first from Larson, and later from Hayes -- to get behind the scenes midway through the 151-gamer that ran from 1992 to 2004.

"Even though I'd gone on to cover other sports and NFL and stuff, I kept going back to De La Salle. My instincts were screaming, 'This is a great story,'" said Hayes. "I finally pestered (Ladouceur) enough where he told me the only way I could find out what goes on is if I showed up every day for a year. I took that as an opening, and I did it. I had unbelievable access."

In a matter of months, Hayes had written the manuscript, accompanied by Larson's striking photos, but then he hit a wall -- getting it published. "The bigger publishing houses all said the same thing: too regional," Hayes said. He had nearly given up when North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, a tiny press better known for fitness guides and cookbooks, took it on.

The book sold well enough for its niche, but soon there would be more to the story. This first edition followed the team only through the still-undefeated 2002 season.

"Then the 2004 season started, and all the tragedies happened -- the coach's heart attack, (star linebacker and University of Oregon-bound) Terrance Kelly was shot and killed in Richmond," Hayes said. "And the streak finally ended that September. The Spartans finally lost."

He updated the story with an epilogue for a paperback version, with both editions selling in total about 60,000 copies. Hayes was approached by a few independent movie producers, but nothing panned out -- until the day Zelon sat down to read.

"He called me, and we met at the Rose Café in Venice," Hayes remembered. "He said he loved the book but didn't know what would drive the dramatic arc. I looked at him funny and said, 'Um, did you read the hard copy or the paperback?'"

Indeed, once Zelon -- producer of "Soul Surfer" and "Never Back Down" -- learned of the epilogue, "trumpets started playing in the background and the sun came up," Zelon said, laughing.

ALL IN THE DETAILS

Hayes would go on to work closely on the first draft of the script with the studio's creative team, through dozens of revisions. And Larson, who is now a freelance photographer in the Bay Area, began getting calls from the studio to send them photos so they could study the details.

"I'd get calls almost daily, 'Can you send us these pics, we want to look at them for sets and helmets and background and costumes,'" Larson said. "They were very specific. 'The coach is wearing a gold lanyard in this photo. Was it always gold, or sometimes green?' It really tells you how detailed they got."

Several of Larson's images are used in the movie during the end credits, he said, notably a poignant shot of two players reassuring each other by holding hands during a crucial point in a game, with Terrance Kelly seen in the background. "It's the last image you'll see before the screen goes black," he said.

Hayes was on the set every day during the April-June 2013 filming in New Orleans -- a location chosen strictly for budgetary reasons, he said. "I didn't have a clue what to expect," he said. "It was surreal. Kind of a blur to be honest with you, to see these big actors playing people I know."

Jim Caviezel stars as Ladouceur, Laura Dern plays his wife, Bev, and Michael Chiklis portrays assistant coach Terry Eidson.

Hayes says the movie holds pretty true to the book, though some key games were placed in a different time frame for dramatic purposes and not every student in the film is based on an actual player. "But everything is really true to the spirit of the school and what they believe in," he said.

Larson is still pinching himself that this will finally hit the big screen. "I never thought in my lifetime I'd be involved with something like this," he said. "I'm used to being behind the camera, not involved in what's going on."

Larson has not seen the film yet, but instead has relished the anticipation of experiencing it at its Hollywood premiere.

Hayes will be there, too, and notes he's not getting a tux.

"People will roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, he's a writer, he doesn't know any better.'"

He just hopes the movie will be well received.

"I'm waiting to see how it plays out."

Follow Angela Hill at Twitter.com/giveemhill.

RED CARPET PREMIERE

What: A fundraising premiere of "When the Game Stands Tall" to benefit the Terrance Kelly '04 Endowed Memorial Fund for Financial Aid.
Where: Century Blackhawk Plaza in Danville
When: Aug. 17, with the film shown at staggered intervals on seven screens with 1 p.m, 1:20 and 1:40 start times, followed by a "5th Quarter" reception onsite.
Tickets: $50 for the movie; $45 for the reception (sold separately). They may be purchased online only at www.dlshs.org
Note: The film opens nationwide on Aug. 22

http://www.mercurynews.com/de-la-salle/ci_26253231/when-game-stands-tall-how-bay-area-high

Postscript: Robin Williams, 1951-2014

BY ANTHONY LANE
http://www.newyorker.com/
August 14, 2014





The snuffing out of a life, especially when the flame was still strong, is never less than a shock, and admirers of Robin Williams, who died on August 11th, will feel that they have been left in the dark. He had made no secret of his long wrestle with drugs and alcohol, nor, typically, had he hesitated to use that fight as a comic resource, beating himself up with his own jokes. To watch him in full spate, onstage or on a talk show, where he would shift and bounce in his seat like a young boy who wants to play outside, was to be nagged by a question, however naïve: Why in heaven’s name did this man, of all men, need extra stimulants? Wasn’t the simple fact of being Robin Williams, high on his own inventiveness, enough of a rush? What exhilarated us must have exhausted him, and no friends or fans, praying that he now rest in peace, would deny that the peace was hard earned.

Williams had the blessed knack—wholly unfakeable, and envied, no doubt, by grander stars—of giving those fans the impression that they were his friends. There are funny guys who seem naturally sparing, even miserly, with their wit, waiting for the curtain to rise or the cameras to roll before they can bring themselves to uncork. Williams, by contrast, was helplessly generous, popping open and spraying his audience with riffs and raps as though it had been painful to bottle them up—as though he were thanking us for giving him the chance to release. I remember, with undiminished joy, putting on a video of Williams performing live at the Met, in 1986, and seeing this stocky figure, in a deafening shirt, skip and leap onto the cavernous stage, in the footsteps of ballet dancers—“Men wearing pants so tight you can tell what religion they are.” He admitted to nerves, in that august setting, yet it was the same nerves, plucked like strings, that were making his brand of verbal music, in all its profanity and zeal.

There was a side of Williams that most Americans, secure in their homeland, never got to witness except on tremulous video clips, grabbed from the fringes of a crowd. Not since Bob Hope, I would guess, has a star proved so indefatigable in his mission to amuse American servicemen and women, who tend to need little persuading that the world is, taken all in all, nuts. (According to U.S.O. estimates, he entertained more than eighty-nine thousand of them.) Williams, newly arrived at Kandahar Airfield, in Afghanistan, in 2007, pointed out the weirdness of the environment in which the troops existed: “There’s snow there, there’s a desert, and there’s a fucking hockey rink. I don’t need drugs.” If only. Like any sane person, he drew a clear distinction between government policy and the folks up at the sharp and messy end who have to put it into effect, and, to judge by the whoop level that greeted him in 2010, when he returned to Kandahar, military personnel bore him no grudge for having called their former Commander-in-Chief “a comedy piñata.” In truth, political invective was hardly his forte; what tickled him and ignited his gibes (this, again, is a very soldierly habit) was the prospect of the stiff and the stuck-up, especially when they were lofted into positions of power. Think of poor J. T. Walsh, as Sergeant Major Dickerson, in “Good Morning, Vietnam,” whom Williams addresses thus: “You’re in more dire need of a blow job than any white man in history.” (The killer there is “white.” Williams never shied away from color or creed, with their plethora of niceties and traps. He sprinted toward them.)

To be honest, though, is that a film to which one returns, with glee, in its entirety? Might it more often be cherished piecemeal, on YouTube, where you can follow Williams, the ultimate disk jockey, in his galloping turns at the mike? Not to speak ungratefully, let alone ill, of the dead, but one has to ask whether American film, as it unrolled through Williams’s career, offered either the shape or the scope for the play of his singular talents. Many leading directors—Barry Levinson, Gus Van Sant, Terry Gilliam, Christopher Nolan, Peter Weir—entrusted him with meaty roles, and such faith is hard to quibble with, just as the warmth with which his admirers clung to films like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Dead Poets Society” was lasting and unfeigned. (The climactic scene from the latter—students standing on their classroom desks in worshipful tribute to Williams’s character, their departing English teacher—has been acted out afresh, and posted online, since the news of his death.) Yet something about the emotional curve on which so many films rely, as it dips into distress and then rises toward resolution and redemption, feels altogether too easy and too organized for the crazy sine waves that Williams instinctively traced in body, brain, and tongue. How many personas does he adopt in “Mrs. Doubtfire”? Two: a kindly, harassed dad and a kindly, slightly less harassed Scottish nanny. Two! In the throes of an improv routine, he could race through two in ten seconds.

The essence of Williams, in short, was the enemy of plot. So was the essence of Groucho, and, when Williams picked up the Best Supporting Actor award, for “Good Will Hunting,” at the 1998 Oscars, nothing was more apt than the low-slung, questing, Grouchian lope with which he finally left the stage and walked off into the wings: Bad Boy Hunting. But Groucho and his kin were crammed into their films to bursting point, as if into the cabin of an ocean liner; anything more elegant would have insulted their capacity for chaos, and, harp solos aside, all plangency and reverie were banned. Conversely, there came a moment in almost every Williams film when his voice would sink low, toward gentleness, and that Mr. Punch face would crumple and crease into a soft smile; you find it not just in the sappy work, like “Patch Adams,” but also in more sober scenes—the park-bench talk, for instance, in “Good Will Hunting,” where Williams handed worldly wisdom to Matt Damon, like a bearded magus. Even as he reflected on the Sistine Chapel, however (“You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling”), I found it impossible to suppress heretical thoughts, musing on what Williams the standup would have done with God, Adam, and their nearly touching fingers. The Pope would have made an entrance, too, you can bet on it. Indeed, it is hard to remember any of Williams’s more solemn roles—in “Awakenings,” or “What Dreams May Come”—that he would not, on a different day, before a live throng, have hastened to make sport of and whip into a routine.

To argue the case for frivolity, or the need to lampoon, is not always a cynical request. Might it not be the case that pathos—even, or especially, at its most sincere, tugged directly from the heart—is in fact a fairly common currency, whereas the gift bestowed on Williams, with his relentless coining of bright new characters and sounds, is the rarest of riches? We speak of cheap jokes, but not all tears are costly or precious, as an evening of talent shows will confirm, whereas the best jokes are priceless; that is why we hoard them, for years, and bequeath them to the next generation. Not that Williams was just a minter of gags. He could rattle off one-liners, to be sure, and many of them were stinging and smart, but what we treasured him for was the rattle itself—the jolting sensation that he alone, and sometimes not even he, knew exactly where his mind would send him next. How could Hollywood, home of the safe bet and the sure thing, be expected to cope? Was there ever a time when he was captured on film, yet set free?

Well, yes. But only once, for a whole movie. And Williams himself didn’t appear in it—not in the flesh, that is, although he was conjured up as his own avatar, with an immeasurable grin, and the flesh was bulbous and blue. I second everything that my colleague Ian Crouch wrote here about Disney’s “Aladdin,” and about Williams’s storming performance as the Genie. The aftermath was unsavory, with contractual wrangles over pay and marketing; “You realize when you work for Disney why the mouse has only four fingers: because he can’t pick up a check,” Williams later said. Yet the fact remains that, under the aegis of Disney, in a legend retold and re-polished for kids, he found his ideal form—his “Duck Soup.” We have grown so used to the smoothness of cartoons, and to their customized rendering of every expression and texture, that to revisit the jerks and spasms of “Aladdin” is a kind of relief. It leaves you with a blissful vision of animators having to strain and strive, not unlike their forerunners in the early, experimental days of the art, just to keep up with Williams. He is a human radio, spinning the dial in his own head and spewing out all the voices into which he happens to tune, and they follow his remorseless lead. “Aladdin” makes an unlikely memorial, you might say, for a star of his standing, but then the world according to Williams was an unlikely place, wholly deserving of his shtick—headlong, half desperate, heavy on the accents, and mentally elastic to the very brink of madness. It was terrible to learn that he had taken his own life; ours not to reason why. But it will be reassuring, in the days and years to come, to remind ourselves that he gave so much of that life, and all of his liveliness, to the serious cause of fun.

Jim Caviezel Talks Faith and Football

Actor Stars in When the Game Stands Tall

BY DONNA-MARIE COOPER-O'BOYLE

http://www.ncregister.com/

August 17, 2014

What does the rough-and-tumble competitive sport of football have to do with love and humility? When the Game Stands Tall (Sony Pictures and Affirm Films) addresses all of these themes.

Opening Aug. 22, the movie is based on a true story, as told in Neil Hayes’ book of the same name. Set in Concord, Calif., it’s the story of the rise of the De La Salle High School football program under the direction of devout Catholic Coach Bob Ladouceur during the Spartans’ 2002 season at the all-boys secondary school in the Diocese of Oakland. 

Catholic actor Jim Caviezel — most famous for his portrayal of Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ — plays Coach Ladouceur.

He recently spoke to the Register about playing an inspiring person, faith, the power of film and his own sports background.

It’s wonderful to speak with you, Mr. Caviezel. You must be exhausted from all of the interviews.

Well, not when you’ve got a good script like this that you want to get out to people. You want to try to do something to make things better for young boys who are becoming men.

I saw myself at that point when I was 18 years old. I was playing basketball for Kennedy High School in Seattle, and we had just qualified to go to the next level and on our way to the state tournament.

We were out for pizza and celebrating after a victory, and we got selected to play the No. 1 team in the state. We believed we could beat them. And nobody believed we could beat them. It just so happened that they just released the movie Hoosiers (1986), which was about a small high-school team beating a big powerhouse. To make a long story short, we saw the movie as a team …

I imagine that watching Hoosiers as a team made a very positive impact on all of you.

As young boys, we really didn’t realize what was happening. But we went out and played that team — and we played them without fear, and we competed and eventually won that game.

Years later, I reflect on the power of film — what film can do. A film can change the course of a person’s life — no different from this movie or The Passion of the Christ.

How have you been influenced by film?

Jimmy Stewart did a movie that changed my life: It was It’s a Wonderful Life. How could a simple title like that affect someone so deeply? That movie affected me to a point where Jimmy Stewart had said to me [when I met him before I was an actor], “You make good movies, young man” — not knowing what I was going to do in my life. And, so, he was an actor, but he was also a teacher.

Bob Ladouceur is a coach, but he is still a teacher. The best teachers are very humble. Mother Teresa talked about humility. Humility comes through humiliation. Ladouceur had great players. Kids would come to him [who needed direction]. They were from broken homes: Kids who had no hope — and, all of a sudden, there was hope — bought into his system of selflessness, that “you can depend on me.” If you can depend on me, think of when one can depend on you in a team world — then that boy becomes a father, and that boy becomes a husband. He’s no longer a boy; he’s truly a man.

You studied this coach for the movie. Did you meet Bob Ladouceur?

I was with him on his last victory [in 2012]. He won 399 games. This [humility] was very clear about him. People said, “You’ll be the first coach in the history of California to win 400 games!” And he kind of looked around, and he said, “Well, I guess it’s time to retire.”

“What?!” [Caviezel implied that this was people’s response.]

You see, it was never about him. What a lot of people don’t understand is that he was at all of these detention centers, working with kids. When he saw the way that was going, he said, “This is not right. We have to change this.”

And he goes on to do something [about] that. …

What we’re really talking about [in reference to Coach Ladouceur] is: “Is this the coach that won 151 football games in a row, as no other sport in history, pro or amateur, has ever done?” Yes, that’s the coach.

That means he never lost a football game in 12 years! And he did it by playing the best teams in the nation. He didn’t avoid them. He never set out to create a winning football team — that’s what is so incredible about this!

How did the coach’s way of teaching the boys about virtues — being concerned about instilling virtues in his players and not just focusing on winning the game — help the boys in growing up?

That’s something to think about. When you think of the word “virtue,” what does that mean? [Morally good behavior or character, according to Merriam-Webster.] That, to me, is very powerful: Even though that is a powerful idea, what we are talking about are champions [made through virtue]. Champions are created from adversity. Champions are the guys who look adversity in the face and say, “Today is the day that I will not be defeated.” And it’s not how hard you hit — it’s how hard you can get hit and get back up.

What I learned as I got to know about him is that he really wanted to create good men. He wanted boys to become men of virtue and who can be depended on. It just so happens that the positive virtues that he instilled in his students and players — the tenacity, dedication, all those virtues — transferred onto the football field with incredible results.

Coach Ladouceur seems so incredibly humble.

This is a man who does not want attention on him, but he reminds me of us at our best form: when we are like Christ.

I think everything that comes back to me in my faith comes back to what “catholic” means. It means “universal” — a universal way for everyone’s life — a reality that everyone in some way or another can relate to. That is what our faith is. It is the universal message.

People, because they are human, because they love, understand why love is important and why they should know where love comes from [from God himself].

And that’s what Ladouceur teaches. And that comes from [the Catholic tradition of St. John] De La Salle. And that’s why it was there before him. That’s why he is a man who says, “I don’t want credit for this.”

And that’s what makes him beautiful.

Donna-Marie Cooper O’Boyle is an author, speaker and EWTN TV host.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/jim-caviezel-talks-faith-and-football/#ixzz3AkEWeo1A

Today's Tune: Steve Earle - Copperhead Road

Cigars, But Not Close

By Mark Steyn

http://www.steynonline.com/

August 15, 2014

"Evening, Constable!"

The "narrative" of Ferguson, Missouri changed somewhat today. But, amid the confusion, the blundering stupidity of the city's police department remains consistent.

This morning the Police Chief, Thomas Jackson, released security-camera shots of the late Michael Brown apparently stealing a five-dollar box of cigarillos from a convenience store. So the 18-year old shot dead by Chief Jackson's officer was no longer a "gentle giant" en route to college but just another crappy third-rate violent teen n'er-do-well.

This afternoon, the chief gave a second press conference. Why would he do that? Well, he'd somehow managed to create the impression in his first press conference that the officer who killed Mr Brown was responding to the robbery. In fact, that was not the case. The Ferguson policeman was unaware that Brown was a robbery suspect at the time he encountered him and shot him dead. Which is presumably why Chief Jackson was leaned on to give his second press conference and tidy up the mess from the first. So we have an officer who sees two young men, unwanted for any crime, walking down the middle of the street and stops his cruiser. Three minutes later one of them is dead.

On the other hand, Jackson further confused matters by suggesting that he noticed Brown had cigars in his hand and might be the suspect.

It's important, when something goes wrong, to be clear about what it is that's at issue. Talking up Michael Brown as this season's Trayvonesque angel of peace and scholarship was foolish, and looting stores in his saintly memory even worse. But this week's pictures from Ferguson, such as the one above, ought to be profoundly disquieting to those Americans of a non-looting bent.

The most basic problem is that we will never know for certain what happened. Why? Because the Ferguson cruiser did not have a camera recording the incident. That's simply not credible. "Law" "enforcement" in Ferguson apparently has at its disposal tear gas, riot gear, armored vehicles and machine guns ...but not a dashcam. That's ridiculous. I remember a few years ago when my one-man police department in New Hampshire purchased a camera for its cruiser. It's about as cheap and basic a police expense as there is.

Last year, my meek mild-mannered mumsy office manager was pulled over by an angry small-town cop in breach of her Fourth Amendment rights. The state lost in court because the officer's artful narrative and the usual faked-up-after-the-fact incident report did not match the dashcam footage. Three years ago, I was pulled over by an unmarked vehicle in Vermont and (to put it mildly) erroneously ticketed. In court, I was withering about the department's policy of no dashcams for unmarked cars, and traffic cops driving around pretending to be James Bond but without the super-secret spy camera. The judge loathed me (as judges tend to), but I won that case. In 2014, when a police cruiser doesn't have a camera, it's a conscious choice. And it should be regarded as such.

And, if we have to have federal subsidy programs for municipal police departments, we should scrap the one that gives them the second-hand military hardware from Tikrit and Kandahar and replace it with one that ensures every patrol car has a camera.

As for what's happened in the days since the shooting, I've written a lot in recent months about the appalling militarization of the police in America, and I don't have much to add. But I did get a mordant chuckle out of this line from Kathy Shaidle on the green-camouflaged officers pictured above:

Shouldn't a 'Ferguson' camo pattern be, like, 7/11 & Kool-Aid logos?

Indeed. To camouflage oneself in the jungles of suburban America, one should be clothed in Dunkin' Donuts and Taco Bell packaging. A soldier wears green camo in Vietnam to blend in. A policeman wears green camo in Ferguson to stand out - to let you guys know: We're here, we're severe, get used to it.

This is not a small thing. The point about "the thin blue line" is that it's blue for a reason. As I wrote a couple of months ago:

"The police" is a phenomenon of the modern world. It would be wholly alien, for example, to America's Founders. In the sense we use the term today, it dates back no further than Sir Robert Peel's founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. Because Londoners associated the concept with French-style political policing and state control, they were very resistant to the idea of a domestic soldiery keeping them in line. So Peel dressed his policemen in blue instead of infantry red, and instead of guns they had wooden truncheons.

Read the rest of the article:

http://www.steynonline.com/6524/cigars-but-not-close

This Is the End: James Gray on 'Apocalypse Now'

By James Gray
http://www.rollingstone.com
August 11, 2014





August is upon us, which invariably means withering heat and a hell of a lot of bad cinema. Worn out by the time the dog days hit, the studios enter hibernation mode, concerned mostly with counting their early summer blockbuster returns (or licking their wounds). There's hope around the corner — the fall festivals loom — but that moment isn't here yet. The last month of summer is usually barren. 

Except when it isn't.

It certainly wasn't 35 years ago — August 15, 1979, to be exact, when Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now premiered for American audiences. I was quite young at the time, but I still remember how high the stakes seemed. It had been five long years since Mr. Coppola had directed three monumental triumphs in a row: The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather: Part II.  He had made himself the King of the New Hollywood, and his talent and ambition appeared limitless. Naturally, many in the press couldn't wait for him to crash: "Apocalypse Never" repeatedly crowed one gossip columnist, and you can bet Coppola and his team at American Zoetrope heard all the snickering, loud and clear. It's easy for us now to forget the amount of shit Coppola had to take, but it was brutal. Rumors flew about how calamitously wrong the production had gone, and the unending editing process more than hinted at the possibility of artistic disaster. So when the lights came down inside the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York that August day, it's fair to say the moment was fraught.

And let's be honest here: The pre-release reviews were mixed. A slightly different version had screened the previous May at the Cannes Film Festival, and it had won the prestigious Palme d'Or prize. But controversy and doubt remained. Maybe it was the war — or should I say The War?  Vietnam gave the movie a political charge, and people had their expectations. They hoped, perhaps, for some kind of explanation. They hoped for pat condemnations. They hoped for answers.

There were none. For Apocalypse Now poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic. In fact, the very sensuousness of the movie, its immersive and visceral impact, seduced me before I could recoil from its horrors. Think, for a moment, of that majestic opening: Initially, there is nothing but that strange, frabjous, now-famous, noise.  Thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk…  Next, the shot: palm trees, blue sky, orange smoke — and a helicopter, in slow motion, drifting wasp-like across the frame. Cue the music.; when Jim Morrison pronounced this to be "The End," an enormous explosion (bigger than any we'd seen before) lit up the theater. By the time the flames had settled, that shot had declared itself one of the greatest opening images in cinema history. Amazingly, the film that followed proved no less remarkable.



We went upriver with Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) as he pursued Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), and somehow, we felt as if we were going along with him, deeper and deeper, so far that turning back would be impossible. The images were crepuscular, lush — IMAX before there was IMAX. Verdant greens, ferocious oranges, scum-bled blues, the darkest of blacks, all captured by the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro with surpassing brilliance. How frightening it all was, how invigorating!   

Yet the film is more than a visceral experience. Its core narrative idea, based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, provided Coppola and co-screenwriter John Milius with a true dramatic spine. And setting the adaptation amidst the terrors of the Vietnam War allowed them to explore the idea that our civilization had pursued its own catastrophe. The film introduces us to American might in all its mechanized glory, then methodically reduces that power to nothing. Our violence had rebounded against us. Apocalypse Now, like so many national myths, showcases the intimate connection between the establishment of order and the violence upon which that order is founded.

The film is indeed self-consciously mythic, and with its transcendent imagery, it enters the cosmic realm. Captain Willard is an enigmatic hero, and we need the narration (written by Dispatches author Michael Herr) to help us know him. Surely the man has his dark side: he kills a wounded Vietnamese woman and hacks Colonel Kurtz to death. But by the end, Willard retains enough of his soul to protect the innocent, childlike Lance (Sam Bottoms), and here we see that the human connection endures. The film's experience expands in this moment, becoming vast and uncanny — yet familiar. Apocalypse Now does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in. We all but participate in the strange water skiing and surfing obsessions and the hallucinatory Playboy Bunny show.  We take macabre pleasure at witnessing the chaos at Do Long bridge. And of course, we are utterly thrilled by Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) and his amoral attack on the village — a justly famous set-piece, scored to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," that compels us even as we shrink from it. We become complicit in darkness, and this is perhaps the film's greatest coup.  

The epic scale of the picture (pre-CGI, of course) does not cease to astound. That much, at least, was celebrated back in 1979, but to me this is damning with faint praise. Too often a logistical achievement is confused with artistic excellence. Great art doesn't demand great scale (A Woman Under the Influence, anyone?), but there's no denying that Apocalypse Now dreams big, and it matters. So when the last act came, some considered it a letdown.

Critics called the final 30 minutes, dedicated almost exclusively to Marlon Brando's improvised ruminations, pretentious and muddled. I don't agree. Coppola chose to show Kurtz as a god who has cast himself into the underworld, wrestling with the gravest of ethical dilemmas. Once again, we're in Willard's shoes, bearing witness to the Colonel's disintegration in the face of the tragic choices his country has made. Our torturous passage through Kurtz's struggle is precisely what makes us aware of our own complicity. True, the sequence risks exceeding the boundaries of traditional formal neatness, but I don't care. "Perfection" can be its own limitation, and sometimes a "flaw" may contribute mightily to a work's ultimate power. (A work without flaws is a work without ambition.) The Roman poet Horace often inserted lines in his poetry that stuck out like a sore thumbs, forcing the reader to confront the established pattern; Horace's aims were different, and more profound, than the reader initially thought they were. Apocalypse Now functions in the same way, its makers committed to a rare and glorious vision. 

Take a look at the landscape since this film was released: How many have even tried something this monumental? It may well be the last of its breed, and for this reason, among many others, I regard Francis Ford Coppola as a national treasure. "There is no art without risk," he has said, and it's all we can do to hope that we follow this courageous ideal. I might well go to the jungle to make a movie soon, and I've often joked that given the difficulties of such an enterprise, any advice from Mr. Coppola likely would be a simple "don't go." But in truth, this is a dumb joke, because no one is more inspiring and encouraging in both word and deed. There are many pretenders. Francis Ford Coppola went out and did it. He gave us a work that lives and breathes still, its vitality an enduring force. And whenever we question our own reach, we need only look to this magnificent movie, in all its untidy and coruscating beauty, as the ultimate example.






Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/this-is-the-end-james-gray-on-apocalypse-now-20140811#ixzz3AYaptbZh
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