The Last Lecture: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Randy loves tackle football. He started playing when he was nine, and football helped shape him into who he is. Although he didn’t reach the NFL, Randy believes he got more from pursuing his dream and not getting there than he got out of many of the dreams he actually accomplished. At first, his dad dragged him, kicking and screaming, to join a league. Randy was a tiny, wimpy kid, but his fear turned to awe when he met his coach and mentor, Coach Graham. Jim Graham was an enormous man who was a linebacker at Penn State. He was extremely old school. On the first day of practice, Coach Graham didn’t bring along any footballs. When one of the kids pointed it out, Coach Graham told them they didn’t need footballs. He asked how many guys there are on the field (22), then how many of them have the football. “So we’re going to work on what those other twenty-one guys are doing.”

Fundamentals. That’s the gift Coach Graham imparts to Randy—if you don’t learn the fundamentals, “the fancy stuff is not going to work.” Coach Graham rides Randy hard—one day, he makes Randy stay to do push-ups after practice, and when he’s finally dismissed, an Assistant Coach comes over to talk him. He says that Coach Graham riding Randy so hard is a good thing, because “When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.” Self-esteem, Randy believes, cannot be given to someone—it must be built. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone, because he knew that there’s only one way to teach kids how to develop self-esteem: give them something they can’t do, make them work hard until they can do it, and then keep repeating the process.

When Coach Graham first got hold of Randy, Randy was tiny, with no discipline, physical skills or conditioning. Through hard work, Coach Graham made Randy realize he could do things tomorrow that he “can’t do today.” Randy knows that these days Coach Graham would likely get thrown out of a youth sports league, because parents would complain. Randy remembers one game where his team played horribly, and Coach Graham got livid when the boys all ran to the water bucket at half time. “That’s the most I’ve seen you boys move since this game started!” Coach Graham yelled, then he dumped the water bucket all over the ground. Coach Graham then told an Assistant Coach to give water to the first string defense, because “They played OK.”

Coach Graham, Randy notes, would never endanger any kid, and the dash to the water was more about the kids being brats than really needing hydration. Randy laments that if this incident happened today, parents on the sidelines would pull out cell phones and call the league commissioner or a lawyer. It saddens Randy that kids today are so coddled, because he remembers how he felt during Coach Graham’s halftime rant—disappointed, and, further, humiliated for letting his coach down. Deep down, Randy and the other kids knew that Coach Graham was right, and he let them know in a way they’d never forget—getting chewed out by him really meant something to them. During the second half, they played much harder.

Randy says he hasn’t seen Coach Graham since he was a teenager, but his coach continually shows up in Randy’s head, forcing Randy to work harder. Randy attributes this to Coach Graham having given Randy a “feedback loop for life.” Randy says that we send kids to play organized sports not to learn the sport itself, but for the fundamental character traits sports teach—“teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, the value of hard work, an ability to deal with adversity.” This kind of indirect learning is what Randy calls a “head fake”. Randy says that there are two kinds of head fakes—literal ones, like when a football player fakes one way, then goes another. That’s like misdirection. The second kind of head fake is “the really important one,” which is the ability to teach people things “they don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process.” Coach Graham, Randy says, was a master of the second kind of head fake.