RIGHT OF CENTER: A FOOTBALL COACH AND LESSONS OF LIFE

Now that it's August, I can resume my enthusiasm for sports. The June and July lull of baseball game after dreary baseball game seemed endless.

It's not that I dislike baseball. It's just that I never really thought of it as much of a spectator sport. With each big league team playing 300 games in a season -- give or take 100 -- I can't get excited over games until September and October. The few games I watch seem always to be decided with two out in the bottom of the ninth. Why not save the time, not to mention the beer and chips, and simply tune in the last inning?

But August is different. It is the month of two-a-days, gassers and undershirts so sopped with sweat they reek of ammonia. Instead of the crack of the bat that sends a baseball over the fence, there is the crack of helmets and shoulder pads as blockers, tacklers and ball carriers try to devastate one another.

To me, August means football. More than that, August means the start of high school football. There are no press clippings yet, just young warriors competing for a spot. Sure there are returning starters who seem to have their position sewn up. But there also are the kids who spent their summer training -- wind sprints and weights -- instead of chasing pretty girls at the beach. They're hungry, and they don't give a damn if they're competing for the spot held by last year's all conference honoree. That was last year.

It was on a badly sloped, poorly seeded field in the northwestern Illinois community of Stockton where one man drew me into a lifelong love affair with high school football.

But John O'Boyle is more than a man. He's a legend. Look up the record books in Illinois under the category of most wins, career, and you'll read: "John O'Boyle, Stockton, 1961-1994 (267-59-1)." The winningest football coach in Illinois High School history was my coach.

Year after year, the Blackhawks are winners. Try to get O'Boyle to explain his formula for success, and he's apt to respond wryly, "We try to score more points than our opponents."

But how does a coach get his teams to outscore opponents more times than has any coach in a state's history? His formula is simple, if difficult to attain: Get 100 percent from every player, regardless of his skill. That means every player approaches each game as his first and last.

It's not that Stockton is never overmatched. They just never play like they are. And it isn't that O'Boyle-coached players never make mistakes. But mental mistakes are few. O'Boyle allows for his players occasionally to miss tackles or fail to shed a blocker. But they should never be off side. A running back isn't expected to run for 100 yards a game. But he should never fumble.

Don't commit penalties. Don't turn over the ball. Always be prepared for your opponent. That will account for a lot of wins for any football team. But it won't account for 267 wins out of 327 games.

I remember, in 1980, Stockton taking on a much larger and more skilled Rockton Hononegah team in the first round of the playoffs. In a game that a gambling man might have bet the house against Stockton plus 20 points, the Blackhawks prevailed in three overtimes. What inspires a team to play beyond its skills? Why, a few years later, would Kirk Staver, a two-way star lineman and linebacker, so lust to play that he refused to disclose his season-long sickness until a playoff quarterfinal game, when he collapsed on the field only hours before a diabetic coma?

The difference in those games, and myriad others like them, was a will in each player wearing the maroon and gold to win, not only for themselves, their school and town, but for tradition's sake. Whether they're willing to admit it or not, they also shared a will to win for their coach.

That John O'Boyle year after year has been able to instill that will in his players confounds opposing coaches and newspaper sportswriters in northern Illinois. But it shouldn't.

High school athletes already possess the desire to win. Why else would they compete? Most possess enough physical skills to play the game, if not always skillfully, at least with intensity. But it takes a special person to inspire athletes to exceed their limitations and play beyond their ability.

John O'Boyle is such a person. He transformed a determined but undersized and slow fullback and linebacker into a winner by instilling in him the knowledge that hard work and determination, proper preparation and playing by the rules breeds success on the football field. That athlete has since learned those lessons apply to life, to success as a newspaper editor, a husband and a father.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.