NICK, BILL, MILT AND BRELLY
Nick Saban learned plenty from Bill Belichick. Certainly Belichick — he of the annoying and condescending, “if it’s good for the football team…yup…nope…I don’t know… we’ll release the blah, blah, blah when it’s good for the team…we’re on to Cincinnati…we’re focused on the Browns…” — mentored and tutored Saban who was asked the other day whether or not a loss to Florida in Saturday’s (12/03/16) SEC Championship game should negatively affect his undefeated squad’s inclusion in College Football’s 4-Team Playoff selection, to be announced Sunday.
Saban replied that a loss is never acceptable. Even if it doesn’t matter; it matters. His “distant cousin” the late Lou Saban, a tremendous football coach and executive in his own right, would have nodded his head in approval. (Btw, the Tide spanked the Gators 54–16; they are now poised to win their second consecutive national title and their fifth in eight years under Saban).
Nick Saban and Bill Belichick are certainly cut from the same cloth.
As were Milt and Brelly. These fellows were a couple of my college chums back in the seventies. Two very fine athletes and a pair of smooth dudes. Laid-back — “Hawaiian-smooth” — in description and in reality. You couldn’t — and can’t — fake this stuff.
If Milt could have worn flip-flops daily during the New England winters, he would’ve. And when his tropical toes could take it, he did. As for Brelly, he went to high school in Wenatchee, WA. but Molokai was and is his home and he’s a proud Hawaiian through and through. Milt and Brelly were excellent Division 1 College football players in the Ivy League. And each was fierce in his own way. They just didn’t feel the need to bang you over the head with it, which personally, I found most admirable and endearing.
Nobody knows what you’re thinking until you open your mouth and nobody knows the strength of your heart until you put it on display.
An interesting sidebar to this story is the fact that Belichick, born in Nashville, TN. but raised in Annapolis where his father Steve coached at the U.S. Naval Academy and Milt from Honolulu were postgraduate students together and football teammates at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in the early-seventies. In fact Belichick was the center who snapped the football to Milt, the quarterback. Each set out on respective paths to success, Belichick as a football coach and Milt as a state senator and powerful lawmaker in his native Hawaii. Though their lives took vastly different turns, they are forever bound by their youth, as are we all.
So Saban and Belichick are connected and Belichick and Milt have an intertwined past. What of Brelly? Milt and Brelly were kindred spirits, due in large part to their shared Hawaiian heritage which of course mandated that they each hate the New England cold. Weather that is. As for the patrician people with whom they coexisted, the easy and likable personalities of each warmed the snootiness and stuffiness right out of these broomstick-up-the-arse folks with their first words spoken or mannerisms exhibited. And these boys knew how to enjoy life. Their pace was slow and friendly, so unlike the northeast mind-set. I can still hear Brelly’s soothing and kind advice that we should “just get into it…”
Didn’t matter what he was referring to at the time. It was a philosophy. ‘Live in the moment. Take things as they come. Relax. It’s all cool. Everything’s gonna be alright. Just take it slow.’ Quite valuable and a credo I still try to embrace so many years later.
Two pairs of individuals very much alike. One pair as different as night and day. And yet all uniquely themselves. Moral(s) of the story? 1.) Keep your eyes and ears open — you never know what you can learn and from whom; 2.) You can’t have enough friends; and 3.) Diversity and cultural differences are not the enemy but rather they represent a cause for celebration.
