A look at special bonds between coaches, athletes

As his form plummeted to depths never reached before in his professional club career and the goals dried up, Didier Drogba knew that he had an explanation to make.

He was forthright about it: “The mistake I made was to become emotionally attached to the coach,” he said. “When he left, I found myself unable to play my usual game. I felt kind of lost.”

The coach he was talking about was Jose Mourinho and the wilderness period he was enduring after the title winning but uncomfortably self-absorbed trainer was fired by Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.

Drogba had arrived at Chelsea shortly after Mourinho and for two years, they struck what later turned out to be the perfect player-coach relationship.

Drogba’s game scaled heights that surprised even himself and he became the darling of not only Chelsea fans, but football fans worldwide as well.

Beyond Chelsea, he was the axis around which the men who came to be known as the golden generation of the Cote d’Ivoire national team rotated. And then the end came.

Steve Sidwell, his team mate, told football blogger James Gray what happened in the Chelsea dressing room at Stamford Bridge that day in September, 2007.

“I’ve been to a lot of clubs where the manager is gone. The hardest one I had was at Chelsea when Jose left. A lot of the players had been with him for a long time and it was a real family culture. We played Rosenborg in the Champions League.

“We drew or lost at home and then we got called in the next day. We knew that something wasn’t right and Jose got sacked that day.

“We were all in the dressing room. The meeting was going on upstairs and it filtered down that Jose was going to go. He came down. I’d only been there a couple of months and he was going round one-by-one saying his goodbyes. There were people crying. Drogba was in absolute pieces, like in tears. I think everyone was taken aback by it.”

This account, corroborated by other sources, dramatizes a little examined subject by sports journalists: the unique, emotional relationships that result not only in big wins in the competition arenas, but also in better human beings.

Quite often, journalists are content to refer to coaches only in inanimate, mechanical terms like technical bench.

Coaches, and other professionals like medical personnel, are indeed technical specialists. But delving into the circumstances that make people like our own legendary Peter Otieno Bassanga name their sons after them as he did to Len Julians or surrender their lives to them as some people do to God makes for some fascinating reading.

When you come to think of it, effective coaching goes beyond putting in place an array of technical requirements like physical form and tactical excellence. It is about life itself.

It comes with not only a holistic understanding of an athlete’s physical and psychological readiness but the totality of his or her life, too.

It is good technical practice to match ambition with limitation in a difficult tournament but there is so much else to be taken into account.

THEY ARE MENTORS

This means all the small things that make a person mortal and not just a competition machine.

Knowledge of these details makes for a good coach. But it also works the other way round.

The more sportspeople know the person inside the coach, the easier it becomes to form a winning partnership - or not to form one at all.

In fact, the best coaches are far more than technical people.

They are mentors. It is their responsibility to ensure that an athlete grows not just as an outstanding competitor but also one grounded in moral and ethical conduct.

This is important because they will need it when they are no longer active sportsmen and women.

Coaches who have stressed winning alone have quite often led their charges astray and with dire consequences.

The whole industry of doping is the by-product of the avarice of coaches who see their charges from the narrowest technical standpoint - as financial production machines.

When the cover is blown, not only are future earnings severely curtailed but even the money previously earned is lost in expensive, and often futile, litigation. It is difficult to conceive of a harder life than that of a non-person who was previously a world superstar.

The best relationships between coaches and their charges are characterized by openness.

There is no ambiguity about expectations nor are vulnerabilities kept hidden.

All situations that could be a hindrance to the success of the goal are discussed openly. All people with a critical stake in the fortunes of the coach and the athlete are known and their special place in the relationship given its rightful place.

One of the stresses that a relationship between coaches and their charges routinely endures is when both find themselves in adverse circumstances imposed on them by forces they cannot control.

Kenya’s sportsmen and women regularly find themselves unsure of travel as a competition looms, detained in hotels for non-payment of bills, stranded in airports without an official in sight, denied their just earnings, deprived of requisite training facilities, and generally made to feel that what they are doing is not important. Even the soundest relationship between an athlete and a competitor can flounder in such circumstances.

I would be the first to confess that I have not inquired with any depth into the special relationships between our athletes and their coaches from our African cultural point of view. This is obviously a shame because we have been winning since our debut in the world in the 1954 Vancouver Commonwealth Games and more so since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

But I have read about and made comparisons between Western and Far Eastern methods and the differences are amazing. In the West, it is a rigorously mental endeavour while in the East it is seems to be all about the heart.

In 1986, the American writer, John Maier Jr. made an extended visit to Japan to try and unravel the relationship between the legendary marathoner, Toshihiko Seko, and his coach, Kiyoshi Nakamura. He published his absorbing story in Marathon and Distance Runner Magazine.

Maier wrote: “In the two years that I lived in Japan between 1980 and 1982, I became close friends with Nakamura and Seko.

“I spent several days at Nakamura’s house talking with the coach and his runner and trying to understand their relationship. Nakamura was a complex person and his ideas and coaching techniques were criticized and I think greatly misunderstood, especially by Westerners.”

Nakamura was accused of being arrogant and trying to control the lives of Seko and other athletes in his track club. One day, Maier got hold of a translator and went calling on Nakamura and Seko in Tokyo.

He was working on an article on Seko and wanted to interview the runner who lived in a small apartment attached to Nakamura’s house.

“Nakamura answered the door and led me to the living room,” he wrote. “For the next three hours, I anxiously waited for Seko as the coach lectured to me. He talked about the world’s great spiritual, political and social leaders.

Every few minutes, he would reach for his glasses and read me some Zen scriptures, Buddhist doctrines or passages from the Bible.

Then he began telling stories about nature; how rivers were so pure, flowers so beautiful and mountains so majestic. Finally, Seko arrived and I began asking him the questions I had prepared. He remained silent and let Nakamura answer for him.”

This greatly puzzled Maier. Every now and then, Seko would repeat what his coach had said but for the most part, he just sat and nodded his head in agreement.

At one point, Nakamura left the room and Meier took advantage of that to tell his translator to ask Seko why he wasn’t answering his questions.
Seko grinned and said: “I am. What ‘Sensei’ says is my answer. We think the same.” Sensei is the Japanese term for teacher or master which in this case also means coach. Maier reported that he was “disturbed and annoyed” by Seko’s answer. Perhaps, after all, the reports about Nakamura being a tyrant were true, he thought.

“I returned home with mixed emotions about Nakamura,” he wrote. “It was only after living in Japan for another year that I began to understand their relationship. By that time, I had read some of the Zen and Buddhist scriptures that Nakamura had recommended and, more important, I had spoken with monks, lived with Japanese families, taught English in a Japanese school and observed many relationships – parent/child, teacher/student, employer/employee etc.”

BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN

Before leaving Japan, Maier returned to the Nakamura home to write another article. This time, he spent three days with the coach and his runners. Seko was more relaxed and talkative. Maier had a lengthy interview with him during which Nakamura, of course, did some but not all of the answering.

Seko even tried to explain why he and other runners allowed Nakamura to dominate their lives.

He said: “We follow Nakamura willingly because we know it is the right thing for us. We know he changes us, but we are aware of what’s going on and we want it to happen.

“Love holds us together, not nuts and bolts. He is always with me. Just as Salazar runs with God, I run with Nakamura sensei.”

Alberto Salazar of the United States was Seko’s great rival of the time.

He was a born-again Christian.

Maier wrote: “It was this special love, a linkage of the hearts – called kokoro no tsunagari in Japanese – which made it possible, even easy, for Seko and the other runners to turn over their lives to Nakamura.

They saw him not as a ruthless dictator governing and using their lives for his own selfish purposes, but as a benevolent and absolutely committed mentor trying to help them reach their full potential.”

What is the typical relationship between an African athlete with his or her coach?