A Warrior passes

They've put down a living room carpet out there, beyond the place where the semis used to moan through the gears toward Ohio in the old days. But the old days are gone.

U.S. 24 no longer skirts those Friday night lights behind a screen of trees at Woodlan High School; it runs south of Woodlan now, an easy run to Toledo that's four lanes wide these days. The field, too, is four lanes wide, in a sense: Pristine artificial turf from which the green never fades and maintenance -- like, yes, a living room carpet -- amounts to running a vacuum sweeper over it or some such thing.

Yet there are things that never change, out there at Woodlan. There are eternals every high school that's seen generations walk its halls contains, certain truths that remain self-evident.

Blocking and tackling.

August heat and sweat and the clatter of pads as rustling stands of summer corn bear witness.

The bark of a coach's voice, the scree of a whistle, names like Gerig and Ehle and Gerbers. And of course one other name who coached generations of the aforementioned, and which now proudly graces the front of the pressbox.

Etzler Field, it reads.

Because, yes, this is Leland Etzler's field. It is his field and his Friday nights and his school, you might say, in the way every school becomes synonymous with those who serve it long and faithfully and with a particular love that binds the two of them forever.

For an entire community on the eastern edge of Indiana, Leland Etzler was everything a high school football coach was supposed to be, and much more. He passed Sunday afternoon at the age of 78, but his example of how you coach young men and how you live your life will go on forever. All those Gerigs and Ehles and Gerbers -- everyone who's lived the last half-century or so in Woodburn -- carry it with them. They pass it along to the next generation; they find themselves repeating things Leland Etzler said to them decades ago in those electric minutes just before kickoff.

This will happen when a man clumps up and down one school's sideline for 43 years, which is what Etzler did at Woodlan. He broke in as an assistant junior high coach back in 1962, and he was the varsity head coach from 1965 to 2004. He came in with Kennedy and went out with Bush the Younger, clumped up and down that sideline through Vietnam and Watergate and the Gulf War and 9/11. The Beatles became the BeeGees became Pearl Jam became Jay-Z, and still he was there.

I got to know Leland fairly late in all that, and a finer man and educator and just plain by-God example I never met. Now when I hear the words "high school football coach," I think of Leland. When I hear "pillar of the community," I think of Leland. Long before it was a living room carpet, when it was just God's own grass that gleamed dew-wet beneath the lights on Friday nights, that field was Leland's field. He guarded it jealously, watching over it with the eye of an art critic inspecting a Monet or Gauguin.

He was doing that early one morning when I drove out to Woodlan for a first-day-of-football-practice column, some span of years ago. The sun had just cleared all that head-high corn to the east, bringing with it giants' shadows and the promise of thick August heat. Leland was keeping a close eye on the grounds crew as they groomed his field, fretting a little, maybe, hoping for some rain. The season, after all, was only a couple of weeks away.

Presently we made our way back to the blockhouse that comprised Woodlan's locker room, and stood outside talking as Leland's latest crop of Woodlan Warriors straggled in by ones and twos and sometimes threes and fours. This is where, on this day or another -- too many years have flown to pinpoint the exact date -- I noticed some sort of wooden contraption that looked homemade.

Turns out it was.

Turns out Leland had built it himself. I don't remember what it was for, but he'd seen a need and had gone home and committed some carpentry, cut the wood and fastened it together and brought it out here to serve Woodlan High School and the Woodlan High School football program.

That's what a guy did, after all, when Woodlan High School and Woodlan football had been his charge to keep for four decades. It's what made Leland Etzler synonymous with both, when the lessons he imparted and the example he set had become as much a part of it all as those100 yards of manicured grass and every brick in the place.

Because, see, Leland Etzler was not just a warrior, coaching all those young men in their navy jerseys and white helmets with the blue numbers on the sides to 287 wins and a state championship game appearance in 1981. Ultimately he was much more than that.

Ultimately, he was also a Warrior.