I saw Coach McClain last on January 21st, the evening he was given the big award.  As I turned the corner into the room where his reception was being held, he looked up, recognized me, and smiled, "Hello, Steve!"  Then, as if to correct himself, "Professor!"  As we chatted he remembered me, first as a pretty ordinary football player, but secondly as HIS player.  He was generous on both points.

    I must have been the worst football player Coach McClain ever coached.  I know that.  About 20 years ago he reminded me that I was a beneficiary of his policy of never cutting a player.  I have to believe that whenever he thought of me he suffered that little stinging feeling that a teacher feels when thinking of the worst student in the class.  But Coach got over it quickly. I began to understand that Coach McClain was bigger than football. In his own way he made me believe I was important to him in spite of my play on the field. Like every other one of his players, I craved any hint of Coach's approval.  A number of years ago I attended the ceremony at which they inducted Coach into the Hall of Fame.  He identified several of his former players in the audience and offered some remarks about each.  No former player of his will be at all surprised to hear that these remarks were laced with salt and wit, translated into the code that Coach and his players all knew.  When he came to me, he confessed with bewilderment that I had gone off the deep end.  "He's into all that poetry," he reported with deep sadness.  If you know the code, you know what Coach was saying.

      If Coach had cut me from his team I would never have realized how big he was, how he was way bigger than football.  He was a life-lesson in a certain kind of bigness.  I know many share that sentiment.  I'll borrow a phrase from an Auden poem to say of him, that when MY Coach died, "he became his admirers."