The coconut tree meets the coaching tree

Ex-football coach Tim Walz joins the varsity.

Tim Walz at Mankato West High

Well, he’s not Steve Kerr. But for those of us who have always thought America needs a good coach right now, along with two-a-days and a blocking sled, Tim Walz might be more than just a substitute.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, became Kamala Harris’ running mate on Tuesday, appeared at a boisterous Temple University rally, made a couch joke about J.D. Vance, said Donald Trump froze in the face of Covid-19 when he was President and generally projected the image of an avuncular defensive coordinator. 

As you might have heard, Mankato (Minn.) East had a 27-game losing streak, but then won the first of three state titles, in 1999, with Walz running the defense, when he wasn’t teaching history and geography and establishing a gay-straight student alliance.

Walz also resembles the first guy to bring the ladder when your gutters get clogged, and his garrulous optimism has always been a weapon. Fellow teachers in Mankato pranked him one day by telling him a local business was offering a free turkey, which it wasn’t. Walz came back with one anyway.

He is not as big a contrast with his running mate as he might appear. Harris is a power shopper and is married to a Hollywood entertainment lawyer, but she favors Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers for comfort, and her happy place is the kitchen. “When I’m cooking,” she has said, “I feel like I’m in control.”

Seldom has there been such a cultural gap between the tickets. The Republicans have paired two Ivy Leaguers to refill the anger tank of their rally audience. The Democrats’ standard bearers did undergraduate school at Howard, with Harris the first national candidate to come from an HBCU, and Chadron State, in Walz’s native Nebraska. That’s the alma mater of NFL overachievers Don Beebe and Danny Woodhead, who rushed for an NCAA record 7,692 yards.

In a country increasingly weary of elitism, particularly in the educational system, this is a subtle advantage for the Democrats. “Nobody in my small town went to Yale,” Walz said, aiming a shot at Vance. As governor Walz has waived public-university tuition for large numbers of Minnesotans, and both he and Harris are known to favor life lessons.

Walz first joined the Army National Guard when he was 17 and used the GI Bill to attend college. Harris’ parents were prominent educators, but they divorced when she was seven, and she attended high school in Montreal. She also flunked the bar exam the first time she took it. 

Walz taught for a year in China and only became a Minnesotan because his wife Gwen, another teacher whom he met in Alliance, Neb., was from there. The story goes that Walz took some students to a rally for George W. Bush in 2004, and when one of the students was carrying some material that advocated for John Kerry, Bush’s opponent, the whole party was banned from the gathering. That politicized Walz, who began supporting Kerry, and two years later he ran for Congress in a Republican district and won.

The Bulwark reports that the Trump campaign was happy that Harris picked Walz instead of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who is less liberal and supervises 20 electoral votes. The theory is that the Republicans can attack Walz for the Minneapolis riots of 2020 that followed the killing of George Floyd. There is also some Kerry-era Swiftboating that’s looming, because Walz’s opponents have accused him of leaving his National Guard unit just as it was being sent to Iraq. This will be a test for Harris’ gatekeepers, who should have unearthed all trouble spots, but apparently Harris was taken with Walz’s one-liners and his Rotary Club bonhomie. The race for definition begins now and will last only slightly longer than the Olympic 1,500 meters.

(Interestingly, the one name that wasn’t mentioned at the Temple U. rally was that of the current President of the United States.)

Presidents and vice-presidents are usually law school grads and career politicians. Sometimes they have military careers, like VP hopeful Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator, whose only apparent drawback was plodding oratory. Vance is an author, venture capitalist and was a correspondent and PR flack while in the Marines. But we haven’t given coaches much of a chance, with the glaring exception of Tommy Tuberville.

If you want a communicator, well, a NBA coach is in charge of hundreds of meetings a year, counting the practices and the time outs, and nearly as many encounters with the media. If you want an administrator, today’s coaches find themselves directing an endless bureaucracy. If you want decisiveness, try calling a play from the sidelines with four seconds to go, down by a point. “I got a bunch of 18 year olds running around out there with my paycheck in their mouths,” said Jim Harrick, the last UCLA basketball coach to win an NCAA championship.

Just to cite one random example, it’s hard to imagine even the weakest pro or high-college coach calling a pandemic a “hoax” and claiming it will disappear “from 15 cases down to zero, like a miracle.” They live in a scoreboard world, with the outcome in lights for everyone to see, every day. They do their share of spinning, but they know you’ve seen the same game they have. Can you think of any office-holder who sent forth the same consistent message that Nick Saban did every day at Alabama? No, politicians don’t react to kudos by calling them “rat poison,” as Saban did. They declare victory after the first quarter.

Back in the days when a kid entered a school as a freshman and departed as a senior, his world was at least partially shaped by his coaches. Walz not only was in charge of his linebackers, he became a command sergeant major in the Guard. Little did he realize that he could ascend to the heir’s chair by simply coaching up his state. Ninety days from now, we’ll know how effective it is when candidates keep their boots, and Chucks, on the ground.