A legend, a Coach

Sporting News, The, Dec 11, 2000 by Dave Kindred

In the winter of his 18th year, the college freshman John Camardella had lost his way. His father died that summer of a stroke suffered during heart surgery. The boy had been the father's only child, a miracle baby, born after his mother had miscarried five times.

Now the young man, away at school, worried about his mother at home, alone. Nothing else mattered, not basketball, not class. A world once shiny had fallen dark, and John Camardella didn't know where his place was. "I wasn't sure I could handle it," he said.

Then, one day after practice he sat with an old man in a grand basketball building made possible by the old man's life. They'd talked before. "Coach would keep up on your grades. He'd ask if you needed any help; he looked out for you," Camardella says. "He was into you as a person."

So Jack Horenberger recognized Camardella's malaise and came to him, and they talked for l0 minutes, a moment in time but a moment so vivid in the young man's memory that he tells you it changed his life.

"Coach told me, `Get back on track,'" Camardella says "And he wasn't soft about it, either. I'd call it a nice scolding. He said, `I know you've got it in you. Keep pushing. Everything'll be looking up pretty soon.'"

The semi-amazing part of Camardella's story is that Jack Horenberger could scold a young man and in the process earn his admiration. But that's only semi-amazing because the coach had done it a thousand times at Illinois Wesleyan University. The fully amazing part is that Horenberger, on that day, was 86 years old, a man born before World War I pumping up a teenager on the eve of the 21st century.

"That day had such an effect on me," Camardella says. "And everything's going incredibly now. But this -- this has been a hard day."

The day we spoke, last Friday, Coach died that morning. Camardella, now a starting forward, would play a game two days later.

Jack Horenberger spent 60 years on the Illinois Wesleyan campus, first as student, later as baseball coach (37 seasons), basketball coach (21 seasons) and athletic director, finally as icon.

"He was the constant" says Dennie Bridges, a Horenberger player who succeeded him as coach and athletic director. From a shadowy old gym to today's glistening palace, from a baseball diamond laid over football ground to today's Jack Horenberger Field, from canvas shoes to Air Jordans, from four-car caravans to chartered buses, through war and peace, as everything changed, Jack Horenberger was always Coach.

Memory puts me in Coach's big, black Mercury. It's a boat of a car, and it's night, and we're floating in the darkness of a two-lane highway south. It's a baseball trip to somewhere exotic, maybe to Ole Miss (then supplying most of the Miss Americas) en route to New Orleans (where a kid first drank rum and the next day struck out four times).

"Hey, Lou," was Coach's call to signal a double steal. All these years later, remembering that, and this: a locker mom before a game in Mississippi, leaving a toilet stall, buttoning up for battle, hearing Coach's high-pitched voice, "Kindred, flush it, you're in the big leagues now."

Coach had big-league players at Illinois Wesleyan, the best of them Doug Rader, a Gold Glove third baseman with power, later a coach and manager Another big-league coach and manager, Bobby Winkles, played for Horenberger and says, "Coach taught me a baseball team is not a democracy. He was a benevolent dictator. I loved the man."

Horenberger's longtime assistant and friend Bob Keck: "The man lived an ideal life. He's led one of the great lives. Everybody loves him and respects him. What else is there?"

Dennie Bridges was on the golf course when he heard the news of Horenberger's cancer -- news delivered by the coach himself, and delivered typically. Croxton Street runs by Lakeside Country Club's 17th green, and there Horenberger stopped his car to call out to Bridges, "Winning any money?"

First mentor and protege, Horenberger and Bridges became all but father and son. Now the old coach told the young coach he wouldn't need the kidney operation he'd been dreading.

"I got a great break," Horenberger said. "During the exams, they found out I have cancer. If I hadn't been lucky enough for them to find the cancer, I'd have had all the pain of the kidney surgery."

Bridges asked, "But, Coach, what about the cancer?"

"We'll deal with that," the great man said. He dealt with it with dignity. He met his buddies for coffee every morning on campus, and every afternoon at the club he played rummy. As for chemotherapy, he said no.

"It wasn't that he was too weak to face chemo," Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Verdi wrote. "On the contrary, he was strong enough to recognize that quality of life entails making difficult decisions on where and when and how."

Horenberger decided to stay at home with hospice care. He'd be with his wife of 59 years, Mary Ann, his daughters, Jane and Jill, and their families.

From bed, he yet coached. "Coach flied out his own obituary form," said Ed Alsene, a morning-coffee friend, "and he told me, for the memorial service, to put some humor in it."