Before Gov. Tim Walz became the most famous person in America to coach high school football, there was Eric Taylor.
Coach Taylor was sensitive. Coach Taylor put his players first. Coach Taylor could motivate without screaming and denigrating. Coach Taylor took a back seat to the career of his wife. Coach Taylor was cool and handsome. He’s what we think of when we think of the ideal high school coach: empathetic, humane, with a drive to win but compassion after a loss. He was the embodiment of masculinity without the obnoxious edge. If coaching experience was the only criterion in running for vice president — and it feels hard to forget that it’s not, given the media frenzy around Mr. Walz — Coach Taylor would be the hands-down choice.
But Coach Taylor is a fictional device, a character of calculated Hollywood imagination, played by Kyle Chandler in the television show “Friday Night Lights.” Vice President Kamala Harris sprinkled her running mate with a little Coach Taylor fairy dust when she introduced Mr. Walz at a rally in Philadelphia. “Under those Friday night lights,” she said, “Coach Walz motivated his players to believe they could achieve anything.” I have to admit, as the originator of that phrase with the title of my book, I was flattered, and the crowd definitely responded.
Along with a pastor and a potbellied sheriff with a dog on the porch, the high school coach has come to occupy a central role in the lifeblood of an idealized small town. Everybody knows who he is and everybody wants a piece of him: backslapping when he wins, starting a whisper campaign to get rid of him when he loses. He is in charge of a precious resource — teenage boys — and his job is to push those kids to realize their potential. He can be responsible for the way a town feels about itself, bringing pride and excitement to a place that has little of either.
In the television show “The Bear,” the word “chef” has taken on a special connotation, like a secret handshake that you have to earn. In American life, the word “coach” is the same, becoming almost a sacred form of address.
But fiction rarely meets fact. The image of Coach Taylor is embedded in popular culture — but it is just that, a Hollywood image, in which every great quality was accentuated. My experience with the real Friday night lights culture was markedly different, a cautionary tale about high school football in Odessa, Texas, and the shocking excesses that took place.
I have been around plenty of high school coaches. I have researched them. I have noticed their increased professionalism, the high salaries they are paid and the multimillion dollar stadiums that have been built for their teams. This goes beyond a football-obsessed state like Texas: We are a win-obsessed society, and your life as a high school coach depends on winning. When winning is the only goal, corners will be cut and abuse is all too common.
Much as we romanticize the vanishing college athlete, who plays for an amateur’s love of the sport, we romanticize the football coach as an inspirational motivator who pats babies and small children on the head. The best high school coaches, and there are some out there, believe in their players as more than just puzzle parts. They want to win, but much like Gary Gaines, the real coach featured in my book who inspired the character of Coach Taylor, they show qualities of grace when losing. They understand kids and approach them as mentors, as the kids struggle with adolescence and maturity and moodiness.
When we talk about Coach Walz, we should hope for that kind of coach: One who understands how coaching can maybe carry over into politics, not just as an approach to winning, or to motivating people, but in excelling at the details and responsibilities that go beyond merely Xs and Os. Those are responsibilities like dealing with parents and boosters, faculty and the media, and they can require a diplomat’s grace. Politics is often a glorified form of horse trading: listening, cajoling, knowing when to push and when to recede, knowing your opponent beforehand with the equivalent of scouting reports to find little holes of weakness, through the discipline of complete preparedness. A great coach can do all that, in the locker room and beyond.
Mr. Walz wasn’t the head coach at Mankato West High School when the school defied all odds to win a state championship in 1999 — that was Rick Sutton, who did the work of negotiating the different constituencies and leading the team. He was the one who gave quotes to The Star Tribune after the win. But Mr. Walz was by many accounts a passionate and compassionate assistant coach. “We knew all the coaches had confidence in us and our abilities, but Coach Walz was like the one where you knew it, you felt it,” one of his players said recently.
Those qualities can be useful in the locker room but in terms of politics, I’m more impressed by Mr. Walz’s résumé as a member of the Army National Guard for 24 years; as a public school teacher for two decades; as a member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota for 12 years; and as the governor of Minnesota, where his down-home and authentic style has connected him to the Midwest.
If Mr. Walz wants to channel Coach Taylor under the glow of the Friday night lights, I say go for it. Coach Taylor’s most cited line in the television show occurred in a fictional speech in a fictional locker room in front of actors playing fictional roles when he said, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
It is a beautiful phrase, crafted by professional Hollywood screenwriters. But I’m not so sure it will work if Mr. Walz reaches the White House and tries to use it to persuade certain members of Congress to act like sensible human beings. For that task, he might be better to draw on his experience in a high-school lunchroom, monitoring disruptive brats.
Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights” and, most recently, “The Mosquito Bowl,” about a group of football-playing Marines and World War II. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
