Mortimer Snerd
I played college basketball for a baseball coach. He played college basketball for “the” Henry P. Iba at Oklahoma State University, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was doing. But two out of three days every week, he’d close basketball practice with a metaphor about trying to steal second with your foot on first or a mini sermon about the danger of swinging for balls that were high or wide early in the count. It was always fairly obvious where his heart was most at home.
Retrieved from www.oc.edu
For over two decades at Oklahoma Christian College--before working the gym full-time—Max Dobson worked the third base line as the Eagles’ skipper, on the diamond at what would eventually come to be named Dobson field. He’d stand just outside the base path, dressed like a player with his shirt tucked in tight and his pants pulled up high, pinwheeling his arm signaling for runners to round the corner for home. By the time I got him, Coach was an indoor sports man, wearing a coat and tie on the sideline like all basketball coaches did at the time. But he always looked a bit like a transient, I thought. Like he’d just left a meeting or a church service and, on his way home, stopped off to coach a game. The uniform suited him much better. It let the boy come out of the man.
Coach was a two sport phenom in his own day, excelling at both baseball and basketball despite being not very big… and not particularly fast… and not specifically strong. His athleticism was always a conundrum to me. I suppose his guile, work ethic, and pure love of competition covered up the physical iffy spots. In my 18-year-old eyes (those almost but not quite grown-up ones that rarely see all there is to see), he just looked like a middle-aged guy with grey hair, glasses, and a bit of a spare tire above his belt. But Max Dobson loved to coach.
And he was born to play.
During his 47 years of service at Oklahoma Christian, coach had all kinds of titles and held all kinds of jobs. In addition to coaching baseball and women’s basketball, he was the athletic director and chair of the physical education department for over two decades. He was an institution at the institution, where he was most beloved for the work he did with ‘his kids.’
A steady stream of Max’s kids came to Oklahoma Christian’s campus every Wednesday and Friday for 37 years. Some walked into their classroom, the Barn (the old gym down the hill from the Nest, the main gymnasium where we played our collegiate games), some rode in as someone pushed them, some others had to be carried. But the commonality that connected them all was eager anticipation about the next hour of their lives.
The kids were from the Edmond Public Schools. Max Dobson was the instructor. The class for college credit was called “Teaching the Exceptional Child.” We all fought to enroll in it, sometimes taking it multiple times even though we were only allowed to count it as credit once. Our experience with those children in that barn changed our lives. Coach was magic in the space. We learned more from watching him love and challenge and play with those kids than a textbook could ever teach.
Retrieved from www.oc.edu
Coach Dobson didn’t have a picket fence life, though he built one before he was done. He grew up in a broken home, shipped back and forth between relatives and separated from his brother, the only tether he could name. I’ve often wondered if the underpinnings of his love for baseball didn’t stem from the game’s straight white lines and precise corners, the simplicity of its set up, the resoluteness of its rules. Maybe it gave him bumpers his youth never had. Or maybe it was just the place he escaped to, as sports can be, to feel like a kid while he was one when no other place gave him such a chance.
A childhood without anchors can send a little boy one of two ways. Max Dobson rose to the high road. He could have easily been bitter, as he had very little help becoming who he was. But he wasn’t. Coach Dobson was a happy, happy man. I can’t think of anything he loved to do more than laugh. He was a prankster with a cornball sense of humor and an alias, Mortimer Snerd, that he went by on occasion. He’d just pull out Edgar Bergen’s old dummy’s voice when worldly things started to swerve and in no time the road would straighten and we’d all continue on our way. I used to wonder where it came from, this reference to a ventriloquist’s puppet from a radio show long, long ago. Was it a singular happy memory in an otherwise dark and dingy childhood or was it just a costume he liked to play with to make himself and others laugh? It was probably a whole lot of one and a little of both depending on the day.
In addition to an extraordinary sense of humor, Coach developed an uncanny ability to see a way out of a maze even if it was pitch black outside. And he had a resourcefulness that rivaled Andy Dufrene’s. If Coach had been at Shawshank, I swear he and Andy would have been digging out together. Max Dobson was nothing If not a man who found a way.
I always thought coach’s life was the classic loaves and fishes tale. The more he gave, the more he had to give.
And what he doled out freely was always what the crowd who gathered needed, a little something more than what they thought they had to have. No matter how hard you looked, you couldn’t discover where it all came from. The stuff he gave away had to come from God.
Coach was about as close to an earthly extrapolation of Jesus with a whistle around his neck as you might ever find. He served and guided and taught and led. And he did it in the classroom, on the court, and on the field.
But baseball housed his heartbeat. The secret language of signs and gestures was perfect for the man who never outgrew the boy inside or his sidekick Mortimer Snerd.