ROCHESTER, Ill. (AP) - “Where any game is being played,” novelist John Updike wrote, “a hedge exists against fury.”
Football’s fury is ubiquitous, visceral, from the Iron Man era when gridders played both sides of the ball, through Woody Hayes’ “three yards and a cloud of dust,” to Mike Ditka’s latter-day “smashmouth” approach.
The hedge is here, where the Rochester Rockets and Coach Derek Leonard, with seven state championships in the past nine years, hosted Sacred Heart-Griffin High School of Springfield, led by Derek Leonard’s father, Ken, the winningest high school football coach in Illinois history.
Friday night’s “Leonard Bowl” was the 10th annual showdown of perennial powerhouses which are more mirror images than opponents. The cracking collisions are here. (“There’s nothing wrong with a little pain,” Derek Leonard said in an interview). But the Leonards, with 530 victories and a dozen state championships between them, are as much interested in spreading their priorities for life as enshrined in the doctrine that’s grown up around the Leonard fall classic: faith, family and football.
“That’s the credo of our season,” Rochester senior quarterback Clay Bruno said. “Faith has different definitions to everybody and any kind of faith, it’s part of this week.”
Finesse, more than fury, is key to these annual matchups. Nearly three decades ago, Ken Leonard, 66, traded notes with Urban Meyer, whom he met during Meyer’s days at Illinois State, and Class 5A SHG helped develop the run-pass option before anyone called it that. Arriving at Class 4A Rochester in 2005, Derek Leonard took his father’s scheme and opened it further. On Friday, Rochester made the young Cyclones pay for turnovers in a 56-21 route and now trail in the series 7-3 .
Derek Leonard is the best prep coach Jim Ruppert has ever seen. The longtime Springfield sports editor said the 39-year-old coach sees the field, vulnerabilities and opportunities in ways that leave behind only head-scratchers.
“He’s always one step ahead of the guys who think they can stop him,” Ruppert said. “His dad was ahead of the curve and Derek has transcended that.”
Derek Leonard’s reputation - and the Leonard Bowl’s mythic proportions - were cemented from the opening kickoff, when in 2010, small-school Rochester, moving from the hickish-sounding Corn Belt Conference to the big-city Central State 8, toppled Goliath SHG and its 59-game loop winning streak 13-10 on a deflected pass in the end zone as time expired. The thrill rebuilds every fall.
“Everybody’s excited about the game except for us,” Ken Leonard said. Father and son each gun for victory but loathe visiting defeat on the other.
At the end of practice Wednesday, Ken Leonard held his cellphone up before his kneeling team.
“I talk to my son three or four times a day. Not once this week,” he decreed.
It’s an unwelcome sacrifice for family drawn even closer by the 2017 death of the Leonard matriarch, Liz, from breast cancer. A 2000 car crash took the Leonards’ adopted foster son, 23-year-old Philip Pearson.
Malik Turner, a second-year wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks and member of the 2013 Cyclone state champions, said his love for Ken Leonard stems from the coach’s steadfast faith despite his life’s trials. That made it easier for Turner to hear Leonard’s on-field lessons of faith and sacrifice.
” ’Big-time players make big-time plays,’ that’s what he always said,” Turner recalled during a telephone interview. “But he expected plays to be made, no matter big or little, being that guy for the team.”
A Chenoa-born quarterback and point guard, Ken Leonard was benched mid-season as South Dakota State’s signal-caller because he wasn’t working hard enough. Internalizing lessons from that first “sting of failure” solidified his desire to coach.
Faith followed.
“The most successful people I’ve been associated with are the people that know what they don’t know,” said Leonard, who arrived at SHG in 1984 after a stint at Gridley. “And then you try to learn what you don’t know, but also get people around you that that are smarter than you in certain things.”
Faith and football naturally mix for people such as the Leonards whose spiritual and secular lives are interwoven, said Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of the Catholic Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, a sideline Ken Leonard confidant.
A hockey goalie and author of “Holy Goals for Body and Soul,” a reflection on connecting sports to faith, Paprocki said that while God doesn’t track wins and losses, on Judgment Day, God will ask us “how we used the gifts and talents He gave us.”
“I’m on the sidelines and I don’t hear any super strategy that nobody else is using that makes them successful,” Paprocki said. “I hear him (Ken Leonard) interacting with players by name, knowing them. Does he yell at them? Yes, but in a way that shows that he cares about them.”
Ditto for Derek Leonard, said Zach Grant, a member of Rochester’s 2010-11 state championships and a graduate assistant football coach at the University of Illinois
“You’d run through a brick wall for that guy and it starts with character and faith and how he treats people,” Grant said. “He’s very loving.”
Crash walls, they do, and the sustained blows are sacrifices. Fury meets its hedge, faith. Derek Leonard, who played quarterback for his father before setting passing records at Division III Illinois College in Jacksonville, noted football’s great irony: an aversion to hitting.
“But when you care for somebody, when you’re trying to win as a group, it changes everything,” Derek Leonard said. “You go out and hit and you lose that fear.
“There’s no better lesson for young boys than to lose that fear for somebody else, to sacrifice that fear for a greater good, for a team, to be unselfish, to put others first, just everything in life that people really struggle with.”
___
Online
Ken and Derek Leonard’s coaching records: https://bit.ly/2nrRS0t
History of the Leonard Bowl: https://bit.ly/2mtQqe3
___
Follow Political Writer John O’Connor at https://twitter.com/apoconnor .
Please read our comment policy before commenting.