OPINION:
I went home last week. Not a typical visit home. I’ve done that before. This was a return to pay tribute to the long-time football coach at my high school — even though I didn’t play football and had not seen Ed Christian since the day I graduated from East Stroudsburg High School in 1971.
Christian was a legendary football coach in this small Pennsylvania town in the Poconos just west of the New Jersey border on Interstate 80.
He came there from King’s College in Wilkes-Barre in 1967 as an assistant coach and then took over as head coach in 1981 and built a successful football program, winning 16 league titles, three Eastern Conference crowns and three District XI championships. He coached two NFL players — James Mungro, a running back who went on to play four years for the Indianapolis Colts, with a 2006 Super Bowl ring to show for it, and a name Washington football fans should be familiar with, safety Kyshoen Jarrett, who had a promising career here cut down from severe shoulder nerve damage in his rookie year in 2015.
When Christian retired in 2018, he had a record of 269-164-3. He was a member of the Pennsylvania Scholastic Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame, Lehigh Valley Sports Hall of Fame, East Stroudsburg Area School District Athletic Hall of Fame, and National Football Foundation Lehigh Valley Chapter Hall of Fame.
He passed away at the age of 83 in August 2023 — one month after his wife of 56 years, Peggy Christian, died.
Christian was beloved in this town, an iconic figure in a place where Friday night football matters.
Last week, they had a ceremony to name the football stadium after Christian, with a long list of speakers to tell their stories about how the coach impacted their lives. Among the speakers were football players and coaches, fellow teachers — and me.
Despite all his successes, the powers that be wanted to fire him after the team went 1-9 in 2015. But there was such an outcry from the community that they backed off.
It was during that time when I heard they were trying to fire Christian that I posted my personal story on Facebook about the gift that Christian had given me when I was his student in 11th-grade English. Organizers asked that I tell it again at the stadium dedication ceremony.
I had been one of Christian’s first students when he arrived in 1967 for 9th-grade English. But by the time I had him for 11th-grade English, I was in full-blown class clown mode, making teachers’ lives difficult. Like the Springsteen song — “when they said sit down, I stood up.” But Christian saw something different, and he cared.
A big part of his English class that year was to read Shakespeare’s “Othello.” I would have rather stuck needles in my eyes than read Othello. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the Cliff Notes.
I bombed on the test — a big part of the grade — and Christian pulled me aside after class and told me he was going to fail me for the year.
I tried to convince him I was doing well in other classes, and that Othello was the problem, not me. He asked what classes I was doing well in, and I told him social studies.
Christian took me down to the social studies teacher and asked him if that was true. Fortunately for me, it was, because I read the paper, every day. I knew what was going on in the world. I just didn’t know what was going on in the classroom.
So Christian gave me another chance — a gift. He gave me a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and told me to go home and read it and do a report.
Of course, I devoured it, did the report, and saved myself in 11th-grade English.
Fast forward 30 years. I’m in Cojimar, Cuba, a fishing village outside of Havana. I track down 101-year-old Gregorio Fuentes — the “Old Man” himself — Hemingway’s ship captain and the model for both the old man and the young boy in “The Old Man and the Sea.”
While I interviewed him, all I could think of at that moment was Coach Christian and the day he gave me a copy of that book. It’s a moment I still treasure — a gift that I shared with those who knew and loved him the most.
⦁ You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
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