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He Turns Boys Into Men

By Jeffrey Marx
August 29, 2004

http://archive.parade.com/2004/0829/0829_coach.html 

Young faces usually filled with warmth and wonder are now taut with
anticipation and purpose. Eyes are lasers. Hearts are pounding. This is
nothing unusual for the final minutes before a high school football game.
But a coach and his players are about to share an exchange that is
downright foreign to the tough-guy culture of football.

The coach, Joe Ehrmann, is a former NFL star, now 55 and hobbled, with
white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Still, he is a mountain of a man.
Standing before the Greyhounds of Gilman School in Baltimore, Ehrmann does
not need a whistle.

“What is our job as coaches?” Ehrmann asks.

“To love us!” the Gilman boys yell back in unison.

“What is your job?” Ehrmann shouts back.

“To love each other!” the boys respond.

“Masculinity ought to be defined in terms of relationships,” says Joe
Ehrmann, “and taught in terms of the capacity to love and be loved.”

The words are spoken with the commitment of an oath, the enthusiasm of a
pep rally.

This is football?

It is with Ehrmann. It is when the whole purpose of being here is to
totally redefine what it means to be a man.

This is lofty work for a volunteer coach on a high school football field.
It is work that makes Ehrmann the most important coach in America.

In his eighth season at Gilman, Ehrmann’s résumé is anything but ordinary
for a defensive coordinator. After 13 years in professional football, most
of them as a defensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts, he retired in 1985
and began tackling much more significant challenges. As an inner-city
minister and founder of a community center known as The Door, Ehrmann
worked the hard streets of East Baltimore. He also co-founded a Ronald
McDonald House for sick children and launched a racial-reconciliation
project called Mission Baltimore. Now he’s a pastor at the 4000-member
Grace Fellowship Church and president of a national organization that
supports abused children.

“He’s a lot of things to a lot of people,” says Maryland Gov. Robert L.
Ehrlich Jr. “He’s really an opinion leader. And what I love about Joe—it’s
not just the messages. It’s the messenger. He’s a very unique man. Gentle.
Principled. Committed. And effective.”

The Challenge for Men

Aside from the X’s and O’s of football, everything Ehrmann teaches at
Gilman stems from his belief that our society does a horrible job of
teaching boys how to be men and that virtually every problem we face can
somehow be traced back to this failure. That is why he developed a program
called Building Men for Others, which has become the signature philosophy
of Gilman football.

The first step is to tear down what Ehrmann says are the standard
criteria—athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success—that are
constantly held up in our culture as measurements of manhood.

“Those are the three lies that make up what I call ‘false masculinity,’”
Ehrmann says. “The problem is that it sets men up for tremendous failures
in our lives. Because it gives us this concept that what we need to do as
men is compare what we have and compete with others for what they have.

“As a young boy, I’m going to compare my athletic ability to yours and
compete for whatever attention that brings. 
When I get older, I’m going to compare my girlfriend to yours and compete for whatever status I can acquire by being with the prettiest or the coolest or the 
best girl I can get. 
Ultimately, as adults, we compare bank accounts and job titles,
houses and cars, and we compete for the amount of security and power that
those represent.

“We compare, we compete. That’s all we ever do. It leaves most men feeling
isolated and alone. And it destroys any concept of community.”

The Solution

Ehrmann offers a simple but powerful solution. His own definition of what
it means to be a man—he calls it “strategic masculinity”—is based on only
two things: 

relationships and 
having a cause beyond yourself.

“Masculinity, first and foremost, ought to be defined in terms of
relationships,” Ehrmann says. “It ought to be taught in terms of the
capacity to love and to be loved. It comes down to this: 

What kind of father are you? 
What kind of husband are you? 
What kind of coach or teammate are you? 
What kind of son are you? 
What kind of friend are you? 

Success comes in terms of relationships.

“And then all of us ought to have some kind of cause, some kind of purpose
in our lives that’s bigger than our own individual hopes, dreams, wants
and desires. At the end of our life, we ought to be able to look back over
it from our deathbed and know that somehow the world is a better place
because we lived, we loved, we were other-centered, other-focused.”

The Way We Learn

How is all of this taught within the context of football?

From the first day of practice through the last day of the season, Ehrmann
and his best friend, Head Coach Biff Poggi, bombard their players with
stories and lessons about being a man built for others.

They stress that Gilman football is all about living in a community. It is
about fostering relationships. It is about learning the importance of
serving others. While coaches elsewhere scream endlessly about being
tough, Ehrmann and Poggi teach concepts such as empathy, inclusion and
integrity. They emphasize Ehrmann’s code of conduct for manhood: 

accepting responsibility, 
leading courageously, 
enacting justice on behalf of others.

“I was blown away at first,” says Sean Price, who joined the varsity as a
freshman and is now a junior. “All the stuff about love and
relationships—I didn’t really understand why it was part of football.
After a while, though, getting to know some of the older guys on the team,
it was the first time I’ve ever been around friends who really cared about
me.”

Helping Others

Four hours before each game, the Gilman players file into a meeting room
for bagels, orange juice and Building Men for Others 101. Ehrmann and
Poggi tell their players they expect greatness out of them. But the only
way they will measure greatness is by the impact the boys make on other
people’s lives.

Ultimately, the boys are told, they will make the greatest impact on the
world—will bring the most love and grace and healing to people—by
constantly basing their actions and thoughts on one simple question: What
can I do for you?

That explains the rule that no Gilman football player should ever let
another student—football player or not—sit by himself in the school
lunchroom. “How do you think that boy feels if he’s eating all alone?”
Ehrmann asks his players. “Go get him and bring him over to your table.”

There are other rules that many coaches would consider ludicrous. No boy
is cut from the Gilman team based on athletic ability. Every senior
plays—and not only late in lopsided games. Coaches must always teach by
building up instead of tearing down. As Ehrmann puts it in a staff
notebook: “Let us be mindful never to shame a boy but to correct him in an
uplifting and loving way.”

Whenever Ehrmann speaks publicly about Building Men for Others—usually at
a coaching clinic, a men’s workshop or a forum for parents—someone
inevitably asks about winning and losing: “All this touchy-feely stuff
sounds great, but kids still want to win, right?”

“Well, we’ve had pretty good success,” Ehrmann says. “But winning is only
a byproduct of everything else we do—and it’s certainly not the way we
evaluate ourselves.”

“I was blown away at first,” says Sean Price, now a junior. “It was the
first time I’ve ever been around friends who really cared about me.”

Win for Life

Unless pressed for specifics, Ehrmann does not even mention that Gilman
finished three of the last six seasons undefeated and No. 1 in Baltimore.
In 2002, the Greyhounds ranked No. 1 in Maryland and climbed to No. 14 in
the national rankings.

Much more important to Ehrmann is the way that his team ends each season
when nobody else is watching. Before the last game, each senior stands
before his teammates and coaches to read an essay titled “How I Want To Be
Remembered When I Die.”

Here is something linebacker David Caperna—reading from his own
“obituary”—said last year: “David was a man who fought for justice and
accepted the consequences of his actions. He was not a man who would allow
poverty, abuse, racism or any sort of oppression to take place in his
presence. David carried with him the knowledge and pride of being a man
built for others.”

The most important coach in America sat back and smiled. Win or lose on
the field of play, Joe Ehrmann had already scored the kind of victory that
would last a lifetime.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Marx is the author of “Season of Life,” a
book about Joe Ehrmann, just published by Simon & Schuster.

To Be A Better Man:

Recognize the “three lies of false masculinity.”
Athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success are not the best
measurements of manhood.
Allow yourself to love and be loved.
Build and value relationships.
Accept responsibility, lead courageously and enact justice on behalf of
others. Practice the concepts of empathy, inclusion and integrity.
Learn the importance of serving others.
Base your thoughts and actions on “What can I do for you?”
Develop a cause beyond yourself.
Try to leave the world a better place because you were here.

 

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