The Dutchman
From 7-16-14
Each year I always tried to meet the families of any new players. If a player was in our program for four years, we had figured out that he would be under our direction for about 2000 hours. When you work with a youngster in competitive sports, there is going to be a lot of emotion--a lot of "highs" & "lows", & sometimes there's not much time in between them. With the amount of thought, effort, & time I would spend with their child, we would be like "Branch Kin" (as the "old saying" goes). One of the first days at GWA I found myself visiting a family who had a beautiful home in the middle of a pecan orchard. This was the place that I had read about that the famous coach, Norm VanBrocklin, built when the Atlanta Falcons told him he would be their coach for life and he built his dream home in the middle of the most expensive piece of land in Walton County. I knocked on the door & met Coach & his wife, who was an artist, and I told him I would be coaching their son, Allen, & daughter, Shelley. I told him I would be coaching football and I would like to have any suggestions or help from him that he wanted to give. Now, here was a famous man who was a Hall of Fame player & NFL coach, who had been fired several months earlier, had lost his income, had no hospitalization, & knew nothing about farming--& he knew that, for a man of his stature, there was no job suitable for him in downtown Social Circle. (I could tell that his concerns were bigger than conversing with some little old high school coach.). I never spoke with him again for the next year, but I noticed that he usually sat way off by himself watching his son (& later, his daughter) play. Then one day about a year later, he came by & said, "Let's talk!"
I could tell that he was still hurting & he wanted someone he could trust that didn't want to take advantage of him, and he let me into his very private world. On subsequent visits, he would tell me stories about his playing days with the LA Rams & the sharing QB duties with Hall of Famer Bob Waterfield, who was married to actress, Jane Russell. He told me many stories about being with Jane, and an upcoming young star, Marilyn Monroe. One day Coach VanBrocklin told me the story about Waterfield being injured and he (Norm) played the whole game & threw for a record 554 yards passing vs. the New York Giants-- and that record still stands today! As time passed, he became a real "part of the GWA family", helping cook, washing dishes, etc., at school functions. The only time he ever came into our dressing room was the night our son, Bill, with fluid on his knee, broke the school basketball scoring record with 48 points. He grabbed Bill by the neck & said "Bill, the swelling on your knee went down, didn't it?" One day I received a call to inform me that Coach VanBrocklin was in the hospital with a brain tumor and not expected to survive. After surgery, he reportedly said, "I received a brain transplant & it had never been used. It belonged to an Atlanta sportswriter." I went by the hospital & Coach VanBrocklin was very emotional. With a tear-stained face he told me that Georgia Tech's Pepper Rogers had come by the hospital that morning and signed him to a football coaching contract at Tech. Pepper said to him, "I heard you don't have any hospitalization insurance to pay the bills, & you've done a lot for football---& now football is going to do something for you!" I find it ironic that Bob Waterfield died & less than 2 months later, in May of 1983, Norm VanBrocklin died. Coach VanBrocklin had always said he wanted a happy funeral. Almost everybody that was "anybody" in professional football, came to pay their respects to one of the all-time greats!
There was a jazz band barbecue, all the adult beverages one can think of, and also on display was his memorabilia, including his Hall of Fame rings. The part that I will always remember about his funeral was when Mrs. VanBrocklin told that his body was cremated and his ashes were going to be spread in his favorite Oregon fishing hole, the Rogue River. Immediately after her statement, former Georgia Tech basketball player Josh Powell, in his deep bass voice sang "Ol' Man River"!
