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Every
autumn in Texas, residents from all over the state stop what they are doing,
fire up grills, ice down refreshments and put on their team colors in order to
flock to the sanctuaries of the south, better known as football stadiums. Every
Friday through Sunday – and even some Thursdays and Mondays, too – from Labor
Day to New Year’s Day, the masses gather to show support for their heroes of
the gridiron. We puff out our chests and revel in the victories. We become
sullen and agonize over defeats. It’s the
same for fans of every team; regardless what colors they wear or what hand
gesture accompanies the alma mater or fight song.
Football
is a way of life for many and it isn’t just happening on the weekends anymore.
The continuing rise of technologies along with the explosion of social media,
fantasy football and dedication of sports networks like ESPN and the NFL
Network have made football a 24/7/365 proposition for anyone who cares to
continuously and instantly be involved with the goings-on of their favorite
teams or players. Potentially millions of would-be coaches and football experts
just waiting for the stars to align so that they can get their shot at glory
fill the stands of thousands of stadiums across the state, from El Paso to
Texarkana, looking to impart their wisdom on anyone within earshot. It’s not
uncommon to hear sentences that begin, “I saw/heard this week that…” and finish
with a random stat, juicy tidbit on the star quarterback, or just something
interesting or unusual that had been discussed on radio stations, team message
boards, TV, or anywhere else one can find it.
More
than 60% of American adults own smartphones, close to double that of just a few
years ago. What does that mean? It means being constantly connected to the people, things,
and even teams you are most fervent about. It means never having to guess the
answer to a trivia question posed on a jumbotron during a TV timeout because
you essentially have a miniature computer in your pocket that contains all of
the answers. It allows anyone with the time and ability to wade through the
minutiae to appear to be the smartest person in the room.
While
new technologies and sources for news have arisen over the past few years, many
of them sometimes seem to do more harm than good. Teams have been forced to
impose rules on their players about what kinds of pictures and other content
can be displayed on their Facebook pages or Instagram accounts and even monitor
Twitter accounts of the players to make sure they are representing their school
or team in a proper fashion. The main downfall, in my opinion, of this immense
flood of information is that so many wonderful stories and tales have gone by
the wayside. The reason we know of such
things as Paul Revere’s midnight ride, or the Battle of the Alamo isn’t because
Davy Crockett got out his iPhone and snapped a photo of Santa Anna riding in
and “tagged” William Travis and James Bowie. We know of these things because
these stories were chronicled, either through first-hand accounts written by
those there, or through the tales being passed through the generations.
Sports
stories, tall tales and legacies are no different. Ever heard the one about
Babe Ruth calling his shot and hitting a home run during the World Series in
Chicago? Even with multiple videoed angles of this famed play, we still don’t
know if he was pointing to the centerfield stands, the pitcher Charlie Root, or
the players on the Cubs bench. He did hit a home run, though, and the tale was born of the baseball player so
talented, he could choose what he was going to do at the plate before the pitch
was even thrown. How about the fact that Michael Jordan was cut from his high
school basketball team? This one is true
adjacent. Yes, the future “Greatest Player to Ever Tie His Shoes” was cut as a
sophomore… from the varsity team at his high school. He was, however, still
allowed to play basketball for the junior varsity team and was a star at that
level before growing four inches over the summer between 10th and 11th
grades and then going on to dominate the Tar Heel State and then the NBA.
Sports
have provided us with many metaphors for life, as far back as recorded word can
recount. The tales of gladiators overcoming the challenges in the Colesseum
provided hope to the downtrodden members of early Roman society. The tales of
ex-slave Tom Molineaux and his rise to fame and glory by beating English boxing
champion Tom Cribb can be used to show that anyone can overcome their inherent
circumstances with the proper amount of hard work and perseverance. The lists
go on-and-on with inspirational tales of men and women overcoming the trials
and tribulations that stood before them and conquering their oppressors,
whatever they may be. Movies have been made, both out of true stories like Raging Bull and Brian’s Song and out of the minds of the creative people in
Hollywood like the Rocky franchise or
The Natural. Heroes have been made
out of sports stars because of the legendary things they have accomplished,
both on and off the field.
Never,
though, has there ever been a tale to rival that of Freddie Steinmark, as told
in Jim Dent’s novel Courage Above the
Game. It’s the tale of a smaller than average football player from a small
town with a heart of gold, a love for God and family, and an incredible desire
to achieve greatness in his favorite sport, football. Passed over by his
favorite school, Notre Dame, because of his lack of size, he follows his
superstar teammate from the mountains of Colorado to the Forty Acres of The
University of Texas at Austin where he meets a legendary coach who appreciates
his diminutive stature because it is reminiscent of the coach in his playing days.
He has had a few constants in his life: the same girlfriend he had in the
eighth grade along with her less-than-approving mother; his own family,
including a hard-as-nails dad living vicariously through his son’s athletic
exploits. He arrives on campus and immediately starts turning heads on the
field with his fearless play. As a sophomore, he becomes one of only a handful
of players to ever start as a sophomore under Coach Darrell Royal when he
assumes the role of starting safety at a slight 5’9” and 155 pounds. He
proceeds to lead the Southwest Conference in interceptions and singlehandedly
seals a few Longhorn victories along the way in the 1968 season, thus helping
the Horns enjoy nine wins, one loss and one tie and including a Cotton Bowl victory
over Tennessee. During his junior season, despite enduring lingering and
constant pain in his left leg, he never lets on how much pain he is in and is a
main cog on a national championship-winning defense. Only after the successful
season does he learn that he has bone cancer that has ravaged the lower part of
his left femur and that his leg may need to be removed if the tumor is
malignant. It is and doctors remove the leg a mere six days after he plays his
last down of football. He vows to watch his teammates take on his former
favorite school Notre Dame from the sideline in the Cotton Bowl to solidify
their national championship, and does so. He also vows to everyone that he will
use his new prosthetic leg to walk across the stage and receive his letter
jacket from Coach Royal at the post-season football banquet, which he does a
mere two weeks after first putting it on. Not a dry eye is left in the house as
the young man with the winning smile inches his way slowly toward his stoic
coach, standing at the podium and fighting back the emotions. Then comes the
rebellion and frustration over the new circumstances. Steinmark breaks up with
his lifelong girlfriend, Linda, two days before Valentine’s Day and begins to
date around, attend parties, drink beer and even grows his hair long. His
rebellion is short-lived, as is his remission. He reconciles with Linda;
proposes to her; and on their planned wedding date, he begins to slip in-and-out
of a coma from which he will never fully recover and after 22 years, five
months and nine days of life on this earth, Freddie’s journey was complete. As
Dent recalls in the Author’s Notes section of his book, “Not a single solitary
sole” said anything bad about Freddie Joe Steinmark as he researched this
topic. Spanky Stephens, former team trainer said, “Freddie gave us a roadmap
for life”; Coach Royal stated, “Boy, he was a fighter, and he fought until the
end.” Every quote that appears in the book from former teammates, coaches and
friends explain exactly how revered this young man was across the board.
The
book itself is entertaining with a straightforward presentation filled with a
lot of fun facts and wonderful recollections of those who were there with
Freddie and knew him best. Dent does a fantastic job of transporting the reader
to a time not that long ago that seems ages away all at the same time. The
story goes that many players didn’t know Freddie was even sick before they
found out he had had his leg amputated. It was a very different era than the
constant news cycle that we live in today, and Dent does a masterful job of
taking the reader there. He didn’t take the easy way out and write a story
solely about the months surrounding Freddie’s diagnosis and subsequent death a
year and a half later. Instead, he told the story of Freddie’s life and how larger-than-life
he was in his hometown of Wheat Ridge, CO, and how inspirational he was to his team,
both then and now.
Current
Texas football coach Mack Brown provided the foreword for Dent’s novel and has
made sure that Freddie’s legacy lives on within the program. “First, we wanted
the players to understand the pride and tradition of those who had come
before,” Brown says in the intro. “We arranged the plaques of all All-Americans
and academic All-Americans in the hallway leading to the field.” After Coach
Brown learned that the scoreboard had been dedicated to Freddie’s memory, he
felt as if it were time to tell the current players Freddie’s story. He told
them the same courageous story Jim Dent lays out for us in Courage Beyond the Game. To make sure the current players recognized
Freddie’s courage, Brown had Freddie’s picture installed at the end of the same
hallway and the players are instructed to touch with their horns up on their
way down the tunnel. Brown states that, “Armed with the pride of the
All-Americans, and in honor of the courage of Freddie, we ask them to go out
and play as hard as they can.” Brown even takes a smaller version of the
picture on the road with the team.
Many
times in death, we have bright and shiny memories of those who have left us and
tend to forget those times that they let us down, and this book doesn’t falter as
it is chalk-full of those types of memories - the good ones that could warm
even the most frigid soul. Admittedly, the book is a bit redundant; reading the
same saintly story with a different name after the quotation mark, but that
appeared to be Dent’s purpose in telling this story and
he did so with a bevy of tales and quotes from those closest to the situation.
Stories
like Freddie’s usually make front page news and are carried down from
generation to generation for anyone that’s willing to listen. The desire to
win, the love of the game and the willingness to sacrifice one’s own body for
their team; these are the themes behind any great story about sports. Freddie’s
story was big news as it happened, but as time has passed, it seems to get
forgotten in the pantheon of legends of sports.
Seven
Saturdays a year, the Longhorn faithful gather in the stadium named after that
“little” coach that recruited Freddie to come from Colorado to Texas. Seven
Saturdays a year, the stands are filled with people who travel from all over
the state to watch their burnt orange-clad heroes take the field and carry the
tradition of Texas football. Seven Saturdays a year, those same people could
tell you what high school all 125 athletes on the sidelines attended as they stand
there and watch the largest video board ever placed in a college stadium flash images
of Texas football history. There are still shots of the first team from 1893,
indelible images of legendary games gone by like the “Big Shootout” between
Arkansas and Texas featuring James Street throwing the ball to Randy Peschel
and the latter making a once-in-a-lifetime catch or Vince Young scrambling to
the end zone to beat USC in the 2005 Rose Bowl. On-and-on these images roll of
Longhorn greats Ricky Williams and Earl Campbell and so many others, all
greeted with raucous applause. One image stands out to me, though, because it
is met with indifference. The image is that of Freddie Steinmark, the young man
who put everything he had in playing football for the University of Texas. It
baffles me mainly because so many of these people have the tools to figure out
who that strange man is, with the computers in their pockets and a world of
information at their fingertips, but choose not to. My mother and I wait seven
Saturdays every fall with baited breath for the picture of Freddie to appear on
the screen so we may pay our due respects to the young man from Colorado with
the winning smile.
I,
too, was like so many Longhorn fans. I grew up not knowing who Freddie
Steinmark was. That was until my mom asked me one day if I knew his story. Upon
saying no, she appeared with Freddie’s autobiography, I Play to Win, co-authored by legendary sportswriter Blackie
Sherrod. I read it cover-to-cover in the
matter of a week and as I did, I cried and wondered how this story wasn’t
commonplace around UT. Since then, I have told whoever is willing to listen
about the courage of Freddie Joe Steinmark. I personally hope that one day he
is revered and lionized in UT football lore the same way Layne, Nobis, Street,
Campbell, Williams, Young and McCoy are. With books like Dent’s, actions like
Coach Brown’s, and with a supposed movie in the works, maybe Freddie will
become the household name synonymous with courage in the face of insurmountable
odds I feel he deserves to be.
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So, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I hope you enjoyed it. I will absolutely accept any and all feedback and, take Spanky Stephens advice: "When you are feeling lower than a snake's belly, think about how Freddie always rose up."
Freddie never accepted what was was handed him, he went out and earned everything he was able to and then some. He fought for every achievement he could get, never settled for giving less than his all, and never let anyone tell him what he couldn't do. So many lessons can be learned from this young man's courage and sticktoitiveness that it almost seems too Disney, too made up, but I assure you it is all true.
There are many days when life seems hard and the weight of juggling two jobs and going to school seems like too much for me to handle, but when I think of Freddie and his legacy that he has left behind, I know I can muster the courage and ability to keep striving and never settle.
Do yourselves a favor and look at some of the links and familiarize yourself with the little guy with the big heart.
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