Father Pedro Arrupe was the leader of the Jesuit Order who instructed that the purpose of a Jesuit education was to form people who would live for, and with, others. Fifty years ago, it was revolutionary thinking. “To be just,” he said, “it is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self-interest as the driving force of society.”
Pretty heady stuff. Gerry Bellotti, who passed away last week, was my high school football coach at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, N.J., and over the course of his 79 years he substituted love for self-interest, and in the process made thousands of young men not only better football players, but better people.
“Be on time. Be prepared. Don’t embarrass the family.”
He drilled those words into us through three- or four-a-day practices at football camp when we were away from the watchful eyes of our parents. “The family” for Coach Bellotti extended beyond Mom and Dad and our brothers and sisters. It included the broader community and the school, especially the kids who did not play sports. Woe to the football player who Coach Bellotti found had bullied someone else.
When you graduated high school, you did not graduate the care of Coach Bellotti. He was the one who taught me that anyone can show up at a wedding. “It’s the people who show up for the wakes and funerals that matter.” Coach Bellotti never missed a wake or a funeral of a former classmate, player or friend.
Many former players will tell you after they lost a job or their marriage fell apart that they received “the call.”
“Hey, Jimmy, it’s Coach Bellotti. How ya doing?”
Two years ago, to the day I write this, Dad passed away. Coach Bellotti and his beloved Joan Marie of course came to the wake and funeral. What was less expected were the calls he would make to Mom on Dad’s birthday, or when he was driving somewhere. “Mary,” he would say, “I just wanted to see how you are doing.”
When I arrived at Saint Peter’s, the team had lost 20 games in a row. We practiced on what was basically a dirt field called Old Colony, which was about a one mile walk from school. Eventually Coach convinced the principal that a group of 60 kids walking in football pads through the heart of Jersey City was not a great idea, and we got a bus. Old Colony was an 80-yard field with a large metal drainage cap in the middle. We all learned to prefer plays to the outside.
My junior year, we went 2-7 and my senior year 6-3. Toward the end of the season, we lost to Saint Joe’s, a school where Coach Bellotti had been a star quarterback. (Later, he went on a scholarship to Villanova, where he was a three-year starter.) Had we beaten St. Joe’s, we would have made the state playoffs for the first time in nearly three decades. As we walked to the bus, I ran up to him and said, “I am sorry, Coach, we really wanted to win that one for you.” He put his arm around me and said, “You already did, Chris. You already did.”
Two years later, my brother Nick’s team would make it to the state championship at Giants Stadium and lose to Seton Hall Prep.
After college graduation, I came back to serve as an assistant coach to Coach Bellotti’s protégé, Rich Hansen—who went on to become one of the most successful coaches in the history of New Jersey high school football—and we won the state championship at Saint Peter’s, ending what had extended into a drought of more than 30 years. Coach Hansen would lead his teams to four more state championships.
Coach Bellotti came to visit when his travels took him to Washington, D.C. After our last lunch he said to me, “Chris, please call me Gerry, ok?”
I replied, “Okay Coach.”
One morning this week, I parked on the school side of the Church of Saint Mary in Rutherford, N.J., where Coach Bellotti’s Mass was held. I smiled listening to the sound of the kids in the gym playing hoops or some other sport before making my way to the church.
To my knowledge, Coach Bellotti was not a fisherman. But to the extent he heard the call to become a “fisher of men,” he may have been the best angler I ever knew.