Cruel erasing

 You wonder, as always, how much of him remained when death finally took him. Was there still a scrap of some cold gray sideline afternoon, and the passion that warmed it? Were there still dimly connected dots, faces to which he could attach a name?

Bernie or Earnest or Kevin or Ozzie. Marcus or Derrick or Neil or Lake.

LaDainian. Drew. Philip. Junior. On and on.

Were all of them gone, when Alzeimer's finally claimed Marty Schottenheimer the other day after seven eroding years? Was even Marty Schottenheimer lost to him?

Dementia killed my father two years ago, and it is a mean, filthy bastard that isn't content with just ending a man's life. It erases it first, shard by shard and crumb by crumb. And that is especially cruel when the life you lived was as public and accomplished as Schottenheimer's.

The numbers say his teams won 200 games in 21 seasons as an NFL head coach, and that his teams reached the AFC championship game twice, and that the 200 wins place him seventh on the alltime list. But the numbers are not what fueled the tributes that flooded social media at his passing, from former players and colleagues and rival coaches and media who covered him.

What the tributes said was that Marty Schottenheimer was not a mere won-loss ledger, but a human being with perspective, a rare breed in as consuming a profession as professional football. What they said was Schottenheimer saw the forest for the trees, and that if he was tough and pushed the way football coaches do, he did so because he saw things in players that players sometimes never do. 

It's what separates great coaches from the merely good, and the good from the bad. It's what makes a coach beloved instead of just respected. 

You hope Schottenheimer somehow still knew that, at the end, even if the particulars were lost to him. You hope, somehow, he knew he wasn't alone in all that emptiness.

"There's a gleam, men," he said to his Cleveland Browns once, in a clip that's now famous. "There's a gleam. Let's get the gleam."

God willing he did.