writing about a coach's death

This is how it's done...

http://www.thepostgame.com/homepage/201101/big-coach-little-gym

 

We had a local football/softball coach killed in an accident last February. Our news editor was on maternity leave, so I ran point on the coverage. We;re a weekly and print on Thursday; accident happened on a Friday. We went to the wake where there was a line down the block for four hours.
I designed the news and sports sections that week. For news our main art was a great file photo of the coach hugging a player after winning a football title two years earlier; the story was on the death and the community's reaction with photos of the crowd at the wake. It was packaged with a story by the paper's lone reporter on the accident itself.
In sports, there was another two-story package; one dealing with how the athletes were reacting (there was a boys hoops game the night after his death that they didn't postpone) and I wrote a column on the coach (later receiving an e-mail from a reader who said it reminded her of reading Posnanski when she lived in KC).
As the spring season started, we had stories about the softball team dealing with his death. In April, their field was deidcated in his name and we ran a story in news, which got me a third-place NEPA award. When they won the state title, my co-worker did a great job of covering the game and wrote a column that just got him a second place NEPA award (as an aside, I asked Mrs. Rhody if I could cover the final; it was two days after our wedding and the day before we were leaving for our honeymoon; she said no way in hell).
I showed up the first day of football practice to see how things were going and it was a running theme most of the season. When the team fell in the state final, the piece was about how the toughest part of the night wasn't losing the game; it was feeling like they let down their coach.
It may seem like a lot for one coach, but he was a coach at a small school and worked at another and had ties to the community that made him a very well-known person. Covering it was tough at times, but it was worth it every time we got an e-mail complimenting us on our coverage.

 

I can top all of you. We had a boys basketball coach at one of the private schools here who walked into the locker room at the school's gym one morning right before school started, laid some towels down on a bench, took a pistol and blew his brains out. Absolutely unbelievable. He was actually the ex-coach, as he had resigned/been pushed out (take your pick) a month or so earlier. I did the 1A story on it, and it was as tough as anything I've ever had to do.

 

That wins. Or loses.

 

I worked on the desk for a few months at a paper outside of the area where I lived, grew up and worked for most of my career. I knew very little about the local preps and knew nobody associated with them.
On a Saturday morning I get a call at home from a friend at my previous paper who attended a high school in the area where I was now working. He kept in touch with his journalism advisor. The advisor had called him that morning to say that the boys basketball coach did not show up for the game Friday night. There were rumors the coach, who was in his early 30s, had died. To make it a little more confusing, he didn't leave in the area where his school was located.
So I called the city desk and gave them that information.
I showed up at the office at 5 p.m. for my regular shift. When I walked in, the night editor said, "You know more about this than anybody else, you write the story."
Thinking "this is bullshit" I said, "OK."
The coach had died on his couch at his apartment in another county. He hadn't been feeling well, but there was nothing to indicate his life was in danger.
It was an awful night, but I managed to track down the assistant principal and a couple of others. It was a passable story, all things considered. It was my first and last byline in that paper.

 

I wrote a coach's obit and one for a former colleague on the same day. The process was good and both stories were decent. But that's nothing I want to do again. I'm sure I will. But I won't look forward to it.

 

May I ask, has anyone written a "negative" obit? By "negative," I don't mean condescending or mean. I mean an honest obit about a man who wasn't particularly a good person.

Let's say Bobby Knight died. I think we all know the obits would focus on his legacy as a coach, and his unwillingness to bend to rule-breakers. But they would also focus on his bitterness and his temper, some more lovingly than others.

My question is: Would a Bobby Knight-figure in a local scene, instead of a national scene, who coached girls' soccer or something, ever be written about postmortem as an angry old man who was hard on kids?

 

At one point, I was a police reporter. I've had to do too many stories on people who died violently. The line that always worked for me (which I shamelessly stole from a co-worker) was something to the effect of, "We don't want to write about just his death. We want to write about his life."
That's served me well when I've had to write the stories about people I knew who died. I figure I'm there to tell the story.