True Charisma | Dave's Place

Robert Grandizio 1943-2023

I was on the first football team Robert Grandizio ever coached.

I didn’t know him well, because he was the backfield coach and I was on the line. But he stood in marked contrast to our head coach, Anthony Botti, a small squat man who was emotional and mercurial, furious at any failure or loss, and who seemed to be working out some personal problem from his youth, never solved.[1] Grandizio was young, for one thing, had just graduated from college and finished a distinguished athletic career of his own. He was more relaxed about the game and the whole situation. While Mr. Botti would rant and rave after a loss, Grandizio was calmly analytical. When we lost our first game (to a much larger public school, by three touchdowns), Gradinzio’s reaction was: “There was a lot that was right about that game. We only made three real mistakes.” He was seeing the glass half full. He wasn’t saying it was all the way full. But he wasn’t ranting and raving.

I remember at the beginning of practice one day, Grandizio led calisthenics, and had us doing much more than we usually did, kept yelling and asking if we liked it, and we kept screaming that we did, with great enthusiasm. He finished by yelling, “And now we’ll do the grass drill, and if you do a good job, I’ll let you do it until you drop,” and we all screamed in ecstasy. We would have run through a wall for that man.

Botti arrived and everyone quieted down and got serious.

Really? Football should be serious? He wasn’t Vince Lombardi, and we sure as hell weren’t the Green Bay Packers.

The next year, Mr. Botti resigned and Grandizio took over as head coach, supposedly the youngest head football coach in the country. I don’t know if we could have proven that. But he was plenty young.

Sitting at his table for lunch was as much fun as playing football for him. (We rotated from one table to another during the year, spent about three weeks at one place.) Most teachers were serious in that situation, but Grandizio was just like a student, happy when the food was good (hot dogs), dejected when it wasn’t (chop suey). The tables that got to the kitchen first were guaranteed seconds, and when there were hot dogs Grandizio made sure the student server took off like a rocket, once giving me an extra hot dog that I didn’t want, “Come on, David, you’re a football player, you need to stay strong,” so we could head back to the kitchen again, for thirds.[2]

The one food he absolutely hated (but I loved) was peach pie. “Oh no,” he’d say, when it came out of the kitchen. “I hate peach pie,” while I was glad to take his helping from him. For the rest of the year, whenever peach pie was served, he looked around the dining hall until he met my eyes and shook his head wistfully, as if to say, You win. Come up and get my piece if you want it.

He asked us sometimes what we were studying, and I mentioned we were reading the Iliad in English. “I read all those books on my own,” he said, “just to educate myself. The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid.” During free periods he went to the library and paged through art books for that same reason. I didn’t know another teacher who did that.

I got to know him a little better after I graduated, when I returned for two summers to work as a prefect in the summer school, where he was the head of the afternoon athletic program. (Summer school was remedial, mostly for kids in the Pittsburgh area who had failed a class or wanted extra help, not for the typical Shady Side student.) Some of the guys were rowdy, and Grandizio could be tough if he needed to, let them know he was boss. But mostly, even there, he let us know we were playing games, and they were supposed to be fun.

We played softball games on the football field. Another jock, some kind of part-time coach, played in those games too, for the opposing team, and each of them played left field. When the opposing coach came up, they played very deep. (We were forbidden to go to right field, because the ball would have sailed down onto the lower soccer field.) The guy at bat would hit a towering drive, almost the length of the football field, way up in the air, but the other guy drifted back and caught the ball. Can of corn. Just a long out.

He also loved boxing, and we did some boxing those summers. He had a collection of boxing films, and one day (apparently a rainy day) he did a screening, with his narration. He knew the movies by heart. Every time there was a knockout punch, he’d say, “Bonk,” right when the punch hit. Down the guy would go. On the best one, he said, “Okay, fellas, now you’re going to see a man who’s lucky to be alive today. Watch this punch. Bonk.”

Indeed, it was a mighty blow.

Before I went off to college, during preseason football, I went back for an early practice, standing above the field, and the guy who had been the other tackle the year before, Gay Guthrie, stopped to see me. He looked great, very happy to be playing that year. They were grooming him to get a scholarship at a major college, and he actually got one at Duke, the school I attended. I remember his huge enthusiasm and excitement to be playing that year for his new coach. He looked like a different person. I wished I’d had that opportunity.

I had both good and bad feelings about the school and my time there, but at first my feelings were dominated by my dreadful junior year (before Grandizio arrived), when, among other things, my father died on New Years Day. So I spent a period of my life when I didn’t want to return to the school, or think about it at all. It was like the famous words of Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again.

Actually, of course, you have to go home again, you can’t go on until you reconcile yourself to home. So eventually, I realized I had to face my father’s death, write about it, in fact write a novel about it, and it became my first published novel, Football Dreams. It caused a bit of a stir at my school because people could identify themselves (you can change the names and physical descriptions all you want, make somebody purple and ten feet tall, but if you say he’s the star running back, everybody knows who you’re talking about). So eventually, for my 20^th reunion, during Homecoming in the fall, the school asked me back to give a talk.

I had just arrived on campus and was walking rather nervously toward the reception area (actually, the old dining hall, where they had served that delicious peach pie), when Bob drove up and said he was glad to see me. He said that in his remarks that night he was going to make a joke about my second novel, which had come out by that time and was quite sexually explicit. He hoped I wouldn’t be offended; he was just having fun. I told him he could say anything he wanted. The man was never offensive. Everything he said was in fun.

The joke he made fell flat, probably because no one had read the book. (“That book was hot,” he said, “but when they heard about it at Western Reserve”—the team we were playing that weekend, whose Headmaster was sitting right there—“they wanted it illustrated.”) Another joke, exactly the kind of joke men make about a good friend, got a huge roar from the crowd. “I was very nervous about coming to speak tonight. There were so many distinguished speakers, an accomplished author, the Headmaster of Western Reserve, our own Headmaster. And I thought, please God, please do something to give me confidence. Please give me something that will make me less nervous. And my prayer was answered. Doug Campbell got up to speak.” Campbell was a lawyer in Pittsburgh and a prominent alumnus, had been on that first team that Grandizio was head coach for. Another member of that team was Tom Vilsack, who eventually became the Governor of Iowa and the Secretary of Agriculture under two presidents.

Grandizio was a superb public speaker, a perfect master of ceremonies, who always struck exactly the right note. I don’t know where he got that ability, but it seemed an emanation of his personality. He was a warm generous person, and you could feel it even when he was behind a podium.

At that same reunion, he was standing beside me as we watched the football game on Saturday afternoon. By that time he was the school’s athletic director, which he called the greatest job in the world. Things weren’t going well on the field, and he wasn’t happy with what he was seeing; it must have been difficult to be the former coach and see the current team struggling. Finally he’d had enough, shook his head and walked away, with one parting remark. “Don’t write a book about this game, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

He left for awhile to become assistant head of school and admissions director at The Kiski School, our great rival; apparently that was a job he couldn’t turn down. But a dozen years later he returned to Shady Side as the director of alumni relations, an absolutely perfect job for him. He spent a lot of time, I would guess, eating meals with people, also giving speeches. He was great at both things.

The last time I saw him, he and another man came to Durham to ask a well-heeled alumnus, whom I didn’t know, for a substantial gift. Since they were in town, they asked to meet me for lunch, and I suggested a favorite restaurant, a Greek place called Nikkos, which had delicious but unpretentious food. No peach pie. By that time Bob had put on some weight, but he carried it graciously and easily, like an old athlete. He ordered the lamb shank, which was a delicious but rather substantial dish, and finished it off with dessert. I had a light pasta and joined him in dessert, but thought, my God, I’m going to need a nap after this lunch. He and I talked over old times and old friends, and he filled me in on a lot of details. At some point, the other guy (I unfortunately forget his name, or what he looked like) made his pitch for my money, which Bob must have known was rather hopeless. Half-assed authors don’t have a lot of money to spare. He stared off around the room as that pitch went on. Finally it was over, and time to leave. It must have been around 3:00.

“When are you guys having dinner?” I said.

“We have a reservation for 6:00.”

“Where are you going?”

“The Magnolia Grill.”

“The Magnolia Grill?” I said. “At 6:00? Good Lord.” He had just named the best—and most expensive—restaurant in Durham, also one of the best and most famous in the country but with food that was notoriously rich. “You guys should have had tomato soup and crackers for lunch. You’re about to have a feast.”

He didn’t look worried. The man had found his calling.

[1] I’ve sometimes wondered if Mr. Botti should have been a coach at all, though I think he loved coaching and completely gave himself to it. He was a physics and physical science teacher, a devout Catholic, educated by the Jesuits, and had a philosophical mind. There were many fine teachers at the school, but my brother told me in recent years that the only teacher he could talk to about absolutely anything, philosophical or religious, was Mr. Botti. Bill had taken physical science his junior year and then took physics the next year when Mr. Botti promised that, if he worked hard, he would at least pass. Bill wanted to take the class because he liked the man. The last period of the day was called DS (for Detention Study) and was the period when you could return to any classroom for extra help. Bill often went to Botti’s classroom just to talk with the man.

[2] This is a bit of an aside, but one day my classmate Quincy Love ate seven hot dogs at lunch.