Grantland:Tom Osborne Goes for Two

[Frida's Boss]

nothing new here but still a painful but proud read.

 

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9439562/college-football-games-century-nebraska-miami-1984-orange-bowl

 

In 1985, in the aftermath of the boldest single decision any college football coach has ever made, Tom Osborne published an autobiography titled More Than Winning. It is a book that somehow manages to be both brief and tedious, short on telling detail about his career as the head coach at Nebraska and long on religious platitudes and recountings of post-heart-surgery hospital enemas.¹ It is dedicated in part to the Creator and thanks the Lord in the acknowledgements, in case He didn't get the message the first time; in the opening paragraph of the foreword, Osborne admits that the publishing company contacted him about a project, and that he "had many reservations" about writing a book at all.

This is no one's fault, really, since Tom Osborne is a proudly undynamic guy whose long-term success has come to embody the spirit of one of the most proudly undynamic states in the union.² The penultimate chapter in the book, "A Difficult Road to Walk," is an in-depth exploration of Osborne's Christianity — he notes that he never infringes on Sundays during the season, so his players can attend services, "Protestant, Catholic or Jewish"³ — and this chapter is far longer than his description of the thrilling Orange Bowl game played the year before, which is pretty much the only reason an autobiography of a midcareer college football coach from a sparsely populated state who had not yet won a national championship would be desired by a major publisher in the first place.

[I am I]

The fact that people remember this so clearly and still talk w such reverence about it proves Ara Parsegian dead wrong. I'm proud of watching us go for two even though we missed it.

I was only 8 yrs old and I cried like crazy but I was proud.