I’ve had the chance to do some writing recently, and I decided to start cataloging it here. A brief tribute to my now-deceased high school basketball coach:
My high school basketball coach died this week. I’m ashamed to admit that his life and career haven’t recently crossed my mind much other than in the generic ways most people think of past coaches and mentors: memories of punishments meted out, the time I was elbowed in the forehead during a district playoff game (requiring sutures after the game), the pre-game we all stifled laughter at his diarrhea in the locker room, his use of corny phrases like “sucking eggs” and “confounded” in place of actual curse words. But like most people who’ve come and gone in my time on Earth, real reflection on his contribution to my life has received depressingly short shrift. Until now, when it is too late for him to hear it.
Coach, circa 1992: “How badly do you want to be on a team, to be part of something bigger than yourself?” Bad enough to trim your Chris Cornell hair and tuck in your Eddie Vedder flannel? Bad enough to wear a tucked-in, collared shirt on gameday? Bad enough to keep your hair above your ears to hear, above your eyes to see, and off your collar so that people will take you seriously? Fine. These were difficult standards to meet for a style-conscious kid, even in pre-internet rural Kansas, during the grunge era. But if you cared, these weren’t a big deal, and he knew it.
Medical school professor, circa 2001: “How badly do you want to be a doctor, to be part of something bigger than yourself?” Bad enough to wear flimsy scrubs that are two sizes too big or small because the residents have hoarded all the ones that fit? Bad enough to wear a short, bulky, grungy, awkward white coat over your shirt, tie, and slacks on days hot and cold? Bad enough to wear a bouffant cap over your fly-away hair, inviting comparisons to the lunch lady? Bad enough to sacrifice your weekends (your twenties!) to the fluorescent lights of the hospital? Fine. If you care enough, it’s not a big deal.
In spite of my astonishing mediocrity as a basketball player, Coach cared about my performance, or more accurately, my improvement. I have a white-hot memory of being congratulated for making an extra pass during a fast break drill (this was the early 1990s, the dawn of attention to “secondary breaks” and transition defense). “It’s nice to have somebody follow directions,” said Coach in passing. It was one of the first times I remember being exposed to the importance of attention to detail. Sure, my upbringing on a corn farm had instilled some gnawing anxiety around any delay or interruption of the inevitable, slow advance of mother nature: seasonal awareness of crop germination, insect metamorphoses, and the like. Things that Coach--a farmer who also coached and taught, or vice-versa--knew intimately. But mostly farming taught me a work ethic, or more accurately the consequences of resistance to delayed gratification. Make a mistake now, and four months from now you’ll suffer. Basketball, on the other hand, unveiled the immediate consequences of small, almost imperceptible mistakes or wrong decisions. What happens when you use the wrong foot to drop step near the basket? Your shot gets blocked. Set a screen on the block instead of at the elbow, a mere 10 feet away? Prepare to watch the person you’ve screened for get bottled up as the defender uses the baseline as a double team. Medicine requires both. Want to be respected by patients now? Dress like a doctor and treat them like humans. Want to see your patients live to see their kids’ weddings? Pay attention to the numbers. Pay attention to the little details in their stories. Pay attention.
Justin Moore, circa 1994: Airballs free-throw in league tournament game. A low point in a mediocre career. Coach tells him in private, not in public, to move his right foot two inches in front of his left at the line, and it won’t happen again.
Justin Moore, MD, circa 2004: Floats Swan-Ganz catheter in a patient he will later discover is chemically paralyzed, but not sedated. A low point in a mediocre internship. A thoughtful Chief resident privately, not publicly, introduces a checklist to avoid just such mistakes.
Competitive sports played by adolescents are inherently humiliating. But most college graduates don’t know the meaning of the word humiliation until they hit medical school. Coach was not above the use of gentle humiliation as a motivational tool. Once, after turning the ball over on two consecutive possessions in an intrasquad scrimmage, I was queried in front of my teammates if I was aware for which team I was playing. Having given an unsatisfactory answer, I was instructed to stand apart from my teammates to reflect on the question. This technique, in contrast to the harsh, high-volume discipline to which Kansas farm boys are more accustomed, introduced me to accountability to a group. There is not a more valuable lesson in to be learned in preparation for the practice of medicine in the modern era of team-based patient care. I, and virtually every other trainee I’ve ever encountered in medicine, has had a similar experience on the wards, in the clinic, or in the operating room. Lessons learned.
Skyline High School boys’ basketball win-loss record, circa 1993: ~0.500. Excuses be damned; get better.
Justin Moore’s aggregate achievement of appropriate lipid levels, hemoglobin A1c levels, and blood pressures the first year of endocrinology practice, circa 2008: 12%. Excuses be damned, I got better.
Not all Coach’s techniques were perfect in the medical sense. I was encouraged to play through the pain of an avulsion fracture of my right fibula, the defense being that ankle injuries responded poorly to rest. But he defended me too: That elbow to the head in a district playoff game? He ran onto the court and protested, nearly earning an ejection. And not all lessons are reflected in a win-loss record; sometimes the win-loss record is the lesson. We were generally a couple games over 0.500, even versus the decidedly low-stakes competition of small-town Kansas basketball. Kentucky had nothing to fear. But I would guess a survey of former players would reveal that, like mine, their lives were made better in the long run by having played under Coach. He’ll live on in the spirit, if not the exact methods or strategies or win-loss records, of thousands of other small-town coaches, teaching kids the value of paying attention to inches and seconds. And his loss makes me hope that upon my death, be it tomorrow or in 60 years, I leave some legacy. Not a legacy of fame or of wins and losses, at least not in the Krzyzewski or Knight or Osler sense, but a legacy of change. He molded young men and women, some of whom went on to medical school. What pliable, malleable part of planet Earth can I alter slightly to make the future world a shade better than the present one? My answer to that question will be my tribute.
Coach, you didn’t suck eggs. Darn the confounded cancer.
tangentwithtanner
titsay
2087
