Autumn's man

The last time I saw Chris Svarczkopf on a football field, he was sitting in a lawn chair on the 20-yard line.

It was early in the season two autumns ago, maybe still August yet. Bishop Dwenger was playing Concordia in Zollner Stadium. Up in the stands behind us, the usual gaggle of boys had their shirts off and S-A-I-N-T-S painted in blue on their chests; out there on the field, the kids in the gold Dwenger helmets were grinding inexorably toward the goal line, moving closer and closer to where Svarczkopf was sitting.

"So how hard is this going to be for you?" I asked him.

Svarczkopf smiled. He was thinner than I'd ever seen him, wan, floating inside his windbreaker. The trademark moustache was gone. I almost hadn't recognized him at first.

"Well, we'll find out," he said in his customary understated way.

Well, we did.

We found out that Svarckopf was not going to let lymphoma beat him, even if it had temporarily sentenced him to this damnable chair deliberately positioned well away from the Dwenger players. And we learned the Saints would use that dogged stubbornness as inspiration, beating the Cadets this night and then everyone thereafter on the way to a state championship, Dwenger's first since Andy Johns coached the Saints to back-to-back titles in 1990 and '91.

Svarczkopf was on the sideline that night, too, wrapping his arms jubilantly around interim coach Ernie Bojrab, who stepped in to guide the Saints in Svarczkopf's absence that was not entirely an absence.

He still coached up the defensive backs in practice, after all. And he was still around on game nights, if not in the middle of everything. I couldn't imagine how hard that must have been for him, because he was one of the most intense people I've ever known, even if it was never more than a background smolder to the unfailingly polite, even mild, public face he showed the world.

 And so suffice it to say I wasn't remotely surprised when Svarckopf, 62, said yesterday he was stepping down after 15 years as Dwenger's football coach because he could no longer bring the correct level of energy and intensity to the job.

And I use the word "correct" deliberately.

"Correct," because that was Svarczkopf to a fare-the-well, everything else about him flowing from that. Svarczkopf preached correctness, and the way his football teams played and presented themselves reflected that. Whether it was blocking or tackling or setting up in the pocket or dealing with the media, there was a correct way of doing things and an incorrect way. Almost without exception, both Svarczkopf and his teams chose the former.

The popular term for that is "class act." Svarczkopf has always been that. But, mostly, he's been correct.

If there's a better legacy for any man's life, I can't think of it.