Siriani and Me: The Thin Line

Mike Sielski, a sport columnist for the Inquirer, wrote an interesting column about the personality of Nick Siriani. He is one of Howie Roseman’s favorite coaches. The sportswriter reflected that the most important part of Siriani’s personality is his greatest weakness as he is often too emotional and impulsive.

He grew up in a small town in western New York where his father was a football a coach for nine years at Southwest Central High School. Siriani was an assistant coach at the University of Mount Union. He was a small-town guy, but the line that caught my attention was that there is a fine line between small town and small time and a demanding situation as a NFL coach.

I have lived on that thin line between relatively small demands of a small town and the large demands that defined my life. What Siriani has done is to sublimate everything that you gain from growing up in a small town to how it can be a base when big demands populate your life when you have a position that requires you to work in a completely different culture in your life’s work.

Siriani still reverts to behavior that he had as a small-town guy who is too emotional and impulsive as he heckles people in the opposing crowd who is heckling him. He sometimes is a poor winner. He has not turned that small town behavior in to what the ideal coach should do. That takes time and experience to make him more acceptable.

But as Sielski points out “the important part of Siriani’s future that allows him to be himself and to survive is that he “does is always what is best for the team or institution”. You can criticize him for that emotional and impulsive nature, some would say inappropriate behavior, but no one could say that he doesn’t takes responsibility when things go wrong and never makes excuses. No one could say that he doesn’t love the team and cares about them deeply. Watch him when player makes a great play and heads to the sidelines. Siriani is like a little kid when he embraces him. He is more excited than even the players.

Successful sublimation turning something viewed as negative into something positive is the great hope in doing therapy with a patient. I value you because behavior is really a thin line. Hugh Misseldine spoke to this when he wrote Your Inner Child of the Past.and how those formative years shape you in your adult life.

Someone once wrote to me, “I don’t recognize that person I was in the past. Thanks for never giving up on me.”

Siriani took his small town experience sublimated it into a very difficult world of the Eagles. I took my small-town life and sublimated that experience into a very demanding school. He protected a team. I protected two families, one at home and one that was a school community. I too don’t recognize that person I was in the past. I was driven to leave the town. That is not to say that I didn’t value my friends and the community. I worked hard and then was 5 feet 10 inches tall weighed 120 pounds on the football team. I spent a good bit of time on the practice squad. I gave it everything that I could but sometimes that wasn’t enough, but I enjoyed being on a team. But I loved the school and my friends. It was my refuge as I kept school and family separated and achieved some important goals as  president of my class and valedictorian. I was filled with a sense of me and not so much a sense of we.

I have several institutions and a people that shaped me, a steel mill and a father’s stroke and the hard times that followed. I knew that I was in a new world when I arrive at Berkeley at Yale. Ms. Rafferty had dinner in our dining hall every night. It was her job to help us to learn to be gentlemen. The academics there and at Duke was an experience that trained me in the medical center as well as the classroom. My seven years at a parish in Swarthmore was like swinging threw an intellectual jungle gym. Then to EA where that thin line was always there. Jay Crawford, legendary Head of EA and my wife who grew up in the South and to this day always says please and thank you in our exchanges. My hot button is respect. When a challenge came to my family, they would say in jest/truth “Big Jim” has arrived to confront anything that disrespected them.

Like Siriani and his team, at EA I felt that I had to protect anyone from disrespect. It is the thin line. Like Siriani when I was able to make a positive difference in someone’s life, I felt like a little kid with such joy inside as I experienced with friends long ago on my own psychological sideline.

An occurrence in chapel comes to mind. I had a big donor to the school ask me to have a very conservative clergyman in to speak. Before we went out into the chapel, I told him that we were a diverse community with different religions and different political views. I wanted him to know his audience. He looked at me and said with a grin that he would be telling them that if they didn’t believe his conservative view of Christianity, they could not live a good life. I told him that he could tell them how important his faith was to him, but he couldn’t say that “it’s my way as the only way”.

He indicated that I should remember that family who wanted him to speak. You don’t want to upset them. (The thin line). I told him if he said my people could be less than good if they didn’t believe what he believed, I would personally remove him from the pulpit even if he was in the middle of speaking. He was shocked and did as I asked him to do. After the service, the family saw me and thanked me for having him in to speak as a guest preacher. He just stood back and left without saying a word.

Like Siriani “I” changes to “we.” But we both live in two different worlds, the haves and the have nots. One of my former students messaged me today asking me, “Why are we so divided?” 67% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That is not sustainable.

I never had a discipline problem in class in my 38 years of teaching. Teaching ethics can bring about some robust conversation. I simply stopped talking and allowed that small town set of feelings to never disrespect me to rise. I guess they could sense it because things just settled down. This is a class which would be guided by respect and no ad hominin statements which means to attack the person instead of disagreeing with someone else’s point of view. It’s called civil discourse. You can discuss anything if you stick to the issue.