'A Coach's Journey' Website
Book signing: Sunday, July 18, Super Jock 'N Jill, 7201 E. Green Lake Dr., 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
Catching Up With ... Rower Rachel Alexander (June 25)
Catching Up With ... Volleyball player Alyssa Given (July 2)
Catching Up With ... Soccer player Meredith Teague (July 9)
SEATTLE -- At first, it was just a series of thoughts, written down to draw upon at various speaking engagements.
Those thoughts blossomed into a full-fledged manuscript.
Then, for more than 30 years of Ken Foreman's very busy life, the written-down version of those thoughts got packed away. One could even say forgotten.
Until someone remembered.
Now, almost two years to the day after a friend and coaching colleague in North Dakota sent him a friendly e-mail asking about that manuscript, it's no longer just a manuscript.
A collection of stories, anecdotes, life experiences and working philosophies forged in the fires of 62 years as a legendary mentor have come together in “A Coach's Journey: From a Sand Lot to the Olympic Stadium.”
Through approximately 200 conversational pages, Foreman, the man who served three distinguished tenures as Seattle Pacific's track and field coach and is regarded as the father of the school's athletic program, talks about any and all aspects of his lifelong craft. How to communicate. How to motivate. How to prepare. How to strive toward becoming the very best, no matter what that might be.
“My father always used to say, 'If you're the best at spitting through a knothole, you're the best at something,” said Foreman, 87, who now lives in on the Big Island of Hawaii with wife Denise, but who will be in Seattle for the next several days and will sign copies of his book on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Super Jock 'N Jill (7201 E. Green Lake Dr.).
“When we walked to church on Sunday about a mile away, we would see how far we could hold our breath. We would see how many lines we could cross over on the sidewalk while still holding our breath,” Foreman added.
“We were always trying to be the best.”
While the father usually won those breath-holding contests, the son went on to become the best in the world in the 25-foot rope climb, setting the world interscholastic speed record in that endeavor during his high school days in Los Angeles. Later, he developed into an All-American gymnast at the University of Southern California.
Then, Foreman became one of the world's very best coaches in track and field. And though “A Coach's Journey” isn't a step-by-step, how-to manual, it is equal parts good storytelling, inspirational speech, and lovingly written thank-you note to so many of the athletes who came under Foreman's tutelage.
“This was put aside and completely forgotten until Myron Loberg (an assistant track coach at North Dakota State University) reminded me that I had a manuscript,” Foreman said. “When we moved over here to Hawaii, I moved a great deal of stuff that I had accumulated in my office at SPU.
“I began looking in that stuff, and lo and behold, there was a rat-eared copy of this manuscript. I got it out and decided it could be a fairly good book.”
DIVING INTO IT AGAIN
Foreman, who already had written a book on SPU star and longtime track and cross country coach Doris Heritage (“The Fragile Champion”) and also has written a nearly 300-page manuscript on aging, blew off the dust and went back to work on it.
“It wasn't polished – it was ideas set down,” Foreman said. “I decided that the principals espoused were universal. I don't use many dates. I tried to integrate some stuff from more recently that had relevance to the subject.”
The title wasn't the first one Foreman had in mind. In the manuscript's infancy, his working title was, “I Would Rather Be Called Coach.” But he decided to change it since former SPU men's basketball coach Les Habegger previously had published a book of his own, “We Still Call Him Coach.”
“I sent several titles to friends, and they all thought this was the best,” he said.
One thing Foreman makes very clear in his book: No matter what the sport, X's and O's isn't the biggest part of coaching.
“It has turned into more of a science these days,” said Foreman, who earned his doctorate degree in sport science from the University of Southern California in 1961. “I had an experience with one of my longtime friends, a great pulmonary physiologist. His observation – with which I agree – is not enough scientists know enough coaches, and not enough coaches know enough science.
“If you're going to be an effective coach in this day and age, you either have to have a significant background in exercise physiology or biomechanics,” Foreman said. “It's just that simple – or that complicated.”
Foreman, who still coaches cross country and track at Konawaena High School in Kailua Kona, Hawaii, was the man behind 167 All-American athletes, six Olympians, and more than 50 members of the U.S. national team. He was the head women's coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team and the 1983 U.S. squad at the World Championships. Last December, he was inducted into the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame.
BEYOND THE BASICS
Certainly, he could write book after book on the finer points of running, jumping and throwing – and in fact, he has written four technique-based track and field books.
But “A Coach's Journey” is more about the finer points of coaching.
It's about not asking too little of an athlete. One of his best steeplechasers thought Foreman never asked enough of him, and belatedly told him so, leading the coach to conclude, “We're far more likely to ask too little of ourselves and those we work with than we are to ask too much.”
It's about finding one's “unlimitations.” One time, Foreman and some mountain climbing buddies, lying on their stomachs, inched out over the ledge of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, gazed down its sheer face to the ground about half a mile below, “and we looked at all the reasons why the mountain would never be climbed. And those who climbed it looked from the bottom up and thought about all the reasons why it could be climbed.”
It's about overcoming “this thing at loose in the world called fear.” As Foreman recalls of a conversation with a former athlete, “The kid said to me, 'I didn't have the courage to stand up to the pain at the end of the race. But when I realized that was the reason I was failing to win big races, when I showed a little courage, I was able to face that particular fear.'”
It also has its funnier points, and a few poignant ones -- tales told as only Foreman can tell them.
For instance, there was the shoe company representative who came to visit with Doris Brown Heritage shortly after she had set the world record for the indoor mile. The rep arrived in a taxi at the track that Foreman and several friends had just built themselves, since Seattle Pacific did not have a track at the time. He asked if that was the only available training facility. Foreman affirmed that it was.
The rep got right back into his taxi, saying, “No one of any stature will ever come from here.”
The rest is history, as Heritage made plenty of it with Foreman guiding her. As Foreman went on to write, “Obviously, the shoe man got it all wrong. Where you train is not the issue. How you train is.”
Staying true to one's beliefs. “Stretching up tall” in any pursuit, athletic or otherwise. Risking failure. Being “an experiment of one to see if something can be done.” Whether coach or athlete, hard-core competitor or recreational jogger, die-hard fan or casual observer, Foreman – through the pages of a once-forgotten manuscript -- has something to say to everyone.
Perhaps the most of important of those things to say is that anyone can be successful – but not just by wishing it.
“I think more people fear success than fear failure. Failure doesn't ask anything of us. Success does,” Foreman said. “We have been engineered for success.
“We really can be achievers if we believe strongly about it.”
