I was walking through an icy Moscow park about a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union with a guy who went to high school with Bob Dylan in Hibbing, Minnesota. Three Russian soldiers menacingly approached us. Scared and feeling like I’d stepped into a Martin Cruz Smith novel, I feared a painful interrogation.
“Hi, I’m from Minnesota!” my friend called out cheerfully, with flat vowels that instantly neutralized any distrust. The three soldiers all smiled and offered us cigarettes. I felt like I’d been jerked from Gorky Park to Fargo. My companion that evening was Chuck Grillo, a top official of the San Jose Sharks hockey team and, for years, a high school sports coach in Minnesota—and for me, a reminder that whatever else is true about Governor Tim Walz, the vice presidential pick’s life experience as a Minnesota high school coach might be a superpower. It adds to his much-vaunted guy-next-door appeal, proving to be a deft foil to the flimflammery of the Trump-Vance ticket.
Within minutes of the Walz’s selection leaking out, @KamalaHQ was tweeting to its 1.2 million followers: “Fox: Tim Walz hunts. He ice fishes. He talks about rural America and how Donald Trump doesn’t understand it. He’s not afraid to mix it up. He speaks in plain speak. He’s a former football coach and former teacher.”
The veep could have added: Not everyone is a huckster. Not everyone abandons their beliefs for ambition and power. It takes selflessness and decency to be a beloved high school coach. This is worlds away from the grinning greed and shape-shifting ambition of the J.D. Vance-Peter Thiel crowd or even the big-money world of Division I college football. My brother, for example, is a longtime high school golf coach in San Jose for few rewards except the joy of helping young golfers—including Justin Suh, now a PGA up-and-comer.
It’s not just about calling Harris’ running mate “Coach Walz” at every opportunity, as Vice President Harris gleefully did with the 60-year-old by her side at her first campaign event, that joyous, raucous, raise-the-roof barn-burner of a kickoff. Walz is a scrapper, the geography teacher who treats kids and adults with respect and charm, but when he’s at the game, he unleashes an inner fire. This is a storyline Americans understand.
In one of many lines that landed that day in Philadelphia, Harris milked the moment in laughing at “Trump’s running mate”—already a punch line to a million jokes—and then added the comparison between Walz and Vance is “like a matchup between the varsity team and the JV squad.” Why yes, it is, and some took to calling Trump’s flailing campaign partner “JV Vance.”
In sports, something happens. A batted ball goes over a fence. An oblong hunk of pigskin bounces off an upright. Someone runs or swims faster. The result is clear and can’t be spun. So much MAGA pulls us into a hall of mirrors where truth does not quite exist. Even reasonable people—especially reasonable people—fall prey. But in sports, you can run, but you can’t hide. You face the truth of your triumph or failure head-on, or you’re done.
So much of Donald Trump’s insult-comedy routine involves a right-wing echo chamber. Perception pushing becomes the point, and major outlets play along. For example, Trump spoke at a gathering of Black journalists and flopped so badly that his team pulled the plug on him. He was like a World Series starter pulled in the fourth inning. That was the story: He flopped. Instead, many media outlets played up his putdowns of the Black female panelists and called it news.
Here’s some real life: At the start of the 1999 high school football season, the team from Mankato West High School in Minnesota—about 80 miles southwest of the Twin Cities—wasn’t very good. The school was known for good academics and a student body of around 1,000, but its football team lost four of its first six games that year. Then something happened. With its sterling defense, the team got on a roll, opening the playoffs with a 55-0 win over Waseca and a 43-0 rout of Marshall. It won eight straight games on its way to a Minnesota state championship. That defense, led by defensive coordinator Tim Walz, learned life lessons.
“We had to go through some struggles,” Eric Stenzel, the leading tackler, later told the Mankato Free Press. “I think it helped us to stay focused and pull out a win.”
As Harris said at the Philadelphia kickoff, “Under those Friday Night Lights, coach Walz motivated those players to believe they could achieve anything.”
On September 10, 1999, Mankato West had a thrilling win against powerhouse Austin, known as SPAM town, where Hormel is the biggest employer and remembered in part for a labor dispute that turned violent in the 1980s. Mankato West’s coach, Randy Smith, told the Austin Herald afterward: “This was just some … smash mouth football.”
What do most Americans find more relatable, Sand Hill Road sports car-crashing high-tech venture capitalists grooming a fake hillbilly as a man of the people or a former coach leading “smash mouth football”?
No one is trying to make Walz out as the second coming of Bear Bryant, the Alabama football coach, or John Wooden, UCLA’s legendary basketball coach. Walz was an educator who leaned into the complicated task of encouraging young people to think for themselves. Having studied in China through a Harvard program in 1993, he organized a study trip to the People’s Republic with about 30 students and chaperones. “Walz’s visits to China had taught him as much about himself as they had taught him about another culture,” the Omaha World-Herald then reported. “He said he hopes his students come away with a similar experience.” And Walz was quoted as saying: “I want these kids to see that differences are differences. They’re not good or bad.”
A lot of coaching sports involves coaching people and seeing if you can’t make them better. That seems to have been a strength of Walz’s. Before he moved to Minnesota in 1996—his wife Gwen had family there—he was a linebacker coach at Alliance High School in Nebraska, coached girls basketball, and taught social studies. Former Alliance football coach Jeff Tomlin, reached by the Nebraska Examiner, had vivid recollections of Walz, calling him “an ordinary guy with the extraordinary ability to have a vision for who he is and who he wants to be. … He was an exceptional teacher, one of the best I’ve been around. A lot of that was the positive energy that he brought.”
The beauty of the “weird” line of attack on Donald Trump and his weird running mate is that it doubles as a defense. Walz conveys zero fear that he is “weird,” or else he wouldn’t have started this weird thing. Walz favors policies—call them “liberal,” if you like—supported by most Americans. We’re not the weird ones. They’re the weird ones.
“We’re in a time when plain truths must be spoken,” said Michael Silver, an award-winning NFL writer for Sports Illustrated and now the San Francisco Chronicle. “Like: We want to keep our democracy. Overt racism is unacceptable. Abolishing the National Weather Service is absurd. After Biden’s withdrawal, Walz emerged as a plain-spoken, no-BS, highly effective communicator. He’s doing what mainstream media and so many other politicians have failed to do: Break it down like the guy at the bar you’re having a beer with. ‘Weird’ works because it triggers the deviants who want to end democracy.”
Here’s another thing about sports: There’s a winner and a loser. “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” as the ABC’s Wide World of Sports opening had it. In other words, it is the full range of human emotion, not unending, tearing down. Trump couldn’t just cheer the recent freeing of American hostages. He had to diss the Biden-Harris administration and praise Vladimir Putin. Trump’s outrageousness—once shocking and, at times, entertaining—isn’t landing anymore. Like all comedians, even the best, they eventually run out of steam. Their act is tiring.
The relatable, down-to-earth terminology of sports is a patois that never dies. When Hillary Clinton ran for President in 2008, I tried to persuade her campaign manager that the Senator needed to connect more with sports fans. Obstacles to that direction included a Barry Blitt New Yorker cover showing her wearing a Mets cap and a Yankees cap.
Republicans had a run of putting Democrats on their heels with the insinuation that they were somehow not real Americans. (The George W. Bush team lampooning John Kerry for mispronouncing the name of Green Bay Packers stadium was one loathsome example.) Walz got his start in politics partly because of training through Camp Wellstone, a legacy of the late, great Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, a godfather of the contemporary U.S. progressive movement, such as it is. Here are two things to remember about Wellstone, who died along with his wife and daughter in a plane crash days before the November 2002 election: One, he was a man of the left but famously built relationships with Republicans in the Senate and worked hard to convince them to think more like him; and two, he was an everyman, married forever, a former wrestler, in fact, a champion wrestler at North Carolina, which he attended on a sports scholarship. Wellstone’s sports background helped make him relatable—and it does the same for Walz.
Sports as a metaphor or biography is not a political panacea. Gerald Ford was a stellar athlete and football coach who lost to Jimmy Carter—after being mocked by Chevy Chase on “Saturday Night Life” for allegedly being clumsy. Denny Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House, went by “Coach” as much as Mr. Speaker. It was also his downfall as he paid off young men he sexually harassed as a midwestern high school wrestling coach. The Harris campaign is, for now, a basketball team on a roll—running a full-court press, leaving the other team panicked. They’re picking off passes, dancing down the court for alley-oop jams, and popping nothing-but-net three-pointers.
A month ago, when various self-styled experts claimed they knew how the Biden-Trump contest would go through November, some of us reminded people that this would be a wild, unpredictable election season, as in, huge surprise after huge surprise. That’s still the case. Even with Trump firing dud after dud since Biden withdrew, he is like a contemporary baseball power hitter: Many strikeouts are soon forgotten with one timely mammoth home run. Sports teaches the discipline to put every win quickly aside and look to what’s next light on your feet. At least in its first days, the Walz selection seems to show some agility—a progressive who strokes the party faithful (especially organized labor) while offering conservative cultural outreach as a rural National Guard veteran, social studies teacher, and, above all, football coach. When he tells voters what they have to do to get out there and win this thing, I think many will listen.
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