The best of us

 Sometimes you forget, when the headlines commence their screaming. You forget the bad actors out there are the exception and not the rule. You forget, momentarily that the worst among us will always lose to the best among us if you line 'em up head-to-head. 

I'm thinking now of football coaches, and all the years I spent around them.

I'm thinking of the ones who never lost their perspective; who never forgot they were dealing with works in progress and not young men and women in full; who overwhelmingly displayed what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature when it would have been easy not to.

I'm thinking of all those aforementioned years -- just shy of 40 of them -- and how rarely, if ever, I saw what I see in those screaming headlines.

Like, for instance, the knucklehead youth football coach in California (again with the youth coaches!) who was arrested for punching a 14-year-old on the opposing team in the middle of yet another brawl by alleged grownups. 

The coach was 50 years old. It happened in a game between the Perris Panthers and Murrieta Broncos, who were playing for a berth in the Super Bowl.

OK, so they weren't. I just threw that in there because apparently Coach Knucklehead and his fellow knuckleheads thought that's what they were playing for.

And then there's the high school football coach in Brooklyn, Ohio who's no longer a high school football coach, on account of he apparently thought it would be cute to send the Hitler Youth out there instead of a football team.

This brainiac, and his players, repeatedly used "Nazi" as a play-call in a game against Beachwood High School. Beachwood is a suburb of Cleveland that's 90 percent Jewish. Coach Goebbels and his Hitler Youth only stopped using the term when Beachwood threatened to pull its team off the field if they didn't. This did not stop some Brooklyn players from continuing to use the slur, according to a statement about the incident from Beachwood Schools Superintendent Robert Hardis.

Coach Goebbels -- whose legit handle is Tim McFarland -- promptly resigned. And now I'm trying to think of any high school football coach I covered who would have pulled a similar stunt.

Nope. Sorry. Got nothin'.

Instead I'm thinking of Russ Isaacs and Kurt Tippman at Snider High School, and Andy Johns and Chris Svarczkopf out at Bishop Dwenger, and Rick Minnich down at Adams Central. I'm thinking of Leland Etzler at Woodlan and his son, Lee, at Churubusco, and Chris Depew at Garrett and Luke Amstutz at East Noble and Brock Rohrbacher at Leo and the Lindsays at Bishop Luers, and, oh, shoot, all of them, really.

I'm thinking of Lapel High School down by Anderson, and a big man with a gentle soul and a splendidly pastoral name: Woody Fields. We're standing on Lapel's football field, one day at practice. Woody is grinning, a bit sheepishly. This is because he's sporting a freshly coiffed Mohawk.

It seems he and his players had a bet, and Woody lost. The players told him he had to get his head shaved into a Mohawk if Lapel made the playoffs, this being the era of the IHSAA's benighted cluster system. And then the players went out and did it.

Now Woody is grinning, and I'm asking him how he likes his new 'do.

The grin gets wider.

"I wear it with pride," he said.

The best of us wins again.