RON WEIGLEB: Memory of coach lives on after death

By MATT CRESS
Matthew.Cress@newsandtribune.com

June 06, 2009 01:23 am

— FLOYDS KNOBS — It’s the question that haunts us, drives us. It can make us fight wars, spill blood, pick sides. The specter of the end exerts control on the beginning and middle.
We fear it, lay awake at night thinking about it, worry. Always the worry.
What happens when we die?
You’ll find no comfort here, but sometimes, on mornings bright and warm in June, perhaps those magical cool and clear evenings in late August, you feel like maybe, for a fleeting moment, that the answer is there, waiting to be snatched out of the air, floating there like a well-timed pass on a crisply-run fly pattern.
You realize it’s foolish, but you think you’ve got it.
I’m not really the person who should be writing this. But that’s how it is sometimes when you’re a writer. You go ahead and write and figure it out as you go.
That’s how I ended up filing into Floyd Central’s new football stadium, the most public piece of a $58 million renovation to the campus, along with a lot of other people taking time out on a Friday. The bleachers weren’t exactly full, but considering the field is still just a smooth sheet of brown dirt, it’d be safe to call it the first sell-out crowd in the facility’s history.
It was exactly the place you would have expected to find Ron Weigleb in life, yet there he was still in death. If you hadn’t known, hadn’t seen his family come in, hadn’t seen them roll the casket slowly down the unpainted track, you might not have known it was a funeral. With legendary Providence coach Gene Sartini there with his staff, clad in the familiar dark blue and white of the Pioneers, with the other coaches, wearing Highlander green or Jeffersonville red, gazing out onto where the turf will be by summer’s end, you might have wondered why they weren’t wearing their headsets. The speeches told you that Ron would have wanted that, too.
I didn’t know the man, never met him. He was in retirement by the time I came aboard this publication as a freelancer and started learning about the world that exists somewhere beyond my little sphere.
But Ron’s influence ran deep. I knew who he was and what he had accomplished during his 20-year tenure. In a different county from the one in which he made his name, at our office on Spring Street in Jeff, we even had an official Ron Weigleb bobblehead doll, complete with his glasses and a set of free weights. No, I didn’t know him, couldn’t have picked him out of a crowd, but he even got to me, nodding his little plaster head when he approved of my work, shaking it in disgust when he didn’t.
So you wonder about this man, how he could have had an impact on someone he never met, and just how much he did for those he actually coached with and against, the never-ending roll call of the kids in his program and in his classes. So I let them tell me.
The stories, many already shared with the big crowds at his wake and circulated for years amongst those who knew him, painted my portrait. One after another, they came in waves, kept moving the chains.
“Coach would turn into a big kid with every hit,” said a former player. “He was a football idol.”
And the hits kept coming.
One of them told us about his first varsity play, a fumble recovery. “What do I do now, coach?” the player asked. “Go play offense,” came the reply. That’s a first down if I’ve ever heard one.
They told about how he got so excited once that he jumped in the pile after the last play of practice. Emerging from the grass, he dismissed the players, wiped his bloody head and simply said, “That was stupid.” That’s converting a crucial third down.
After his 50th victory, Ron’s staff and players presented him with a sheet cake. So the coach took off his glasses, a gesture that likely meant there would be a tear or two. Instead, he slammed his face into the cake and set off a food fight. Touchdown.
You get the sense that he was pure in that way, with the joy that comes from doing something you love to do and finding a way to get paid for it. It’s why I write, it’s why coaches coach. And he was a damn good coach, running up a 133-81 record and beginning a tradition at a school that sometimes struggles with its football. He was 3-15 in his first two seasons. That became 7-3 the very next year. His final team was 10-2 and nearly a sectional champion, and it would take five seasons for a Floyd Central team to have a winning record after his departure.
They told me he was always looking for an opportunity to coach, to teach. He managed to do it again with the way he handled the opportunity that death provided.
Knowing the end was near, he jumped into the planning the way a coach prepares for an opponent. Instead of watching game film, he ran the tape of his life back in his mind and found a way to thank just about everyone, from the first time he fell in love with the game at Hazelwood up to the present, fitting in just all those that came in between. He didn’t prepare a playbook, but rather thanked God for the ability to reach the young, to have fun and for having the chance to use his gifts. He didn’t choose a starting lineup, but went with the core group that included Jan, to whom he was married for 39 years and his three children.
A banner had been hung from the press box, hastily it seemed since it couldn’t have been there long. Little more than a week ago, the new stadium in Floyds Knobs had been named after Ron Weigleb.
This fall, when the bleachers are full again and the Highlanders take the field, I’ll be there, too. At the beginning as at the end, armed with the knowledge of the man that all his friends have given me. All the things that he had given to everyone around him. I know him now, and all crowds that come after, long after the banner is gone and something more official is put in its place, will have no choice but to learn about him as well. They’ll be glad they did.
You knew it was out there, at least for a sliver of time. A feeling, an epiphany, whatever you want to call it. The question burning, rolling around in everyone’s gut.
What happens when you die?
We make things too complicated. The answer depends on who you were.
In Rob Weigleb’s case, we know. Sometimes when you die, you live.
Contact Matthew Cress at matthew.cress@newsandtribune.com

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