Coach brought holiday of love to ill daughter

ON THAT CHRISTMAS long ago, the old coach was still a young man. He was 32 years old, and though the hairline had begun to recede, the face was smooth and unlined. He looked like a man without worry, but it wasn't true. Christmas was coming, his daughter was bedridden and money was short.

It was 1962, and the coach had just been hired as an assistant at BYU earlier that fall. It was the big break of his professional life, but all that was forgotten when his oldest child, Ann, became ill. The best guess is that she contracted an infection through abrasions she sustained in a bike accident. Anyway, one morning she woke up and her bed was floating.

"I can't stop my bed; it's twirling around the room," she was saying in her delirium, but what really frightened her was the fear she saw in her mother's face at the end of the bed.

In the hospital her father prayed over her as the 104-degree temperature raged. The diagnosis was acute nephritis, a kidney disorder that was often fatal. Her mother had lost a cousin and a friend to the same illness. For long stretches of time, her father sat on her bed and held her hand.

For the next three months, Ann lay flat on her back in her bed at home, unable to lift her head. She passed the time reading, knitting, listening to records and writing her own stories, a 6-year-old prisoner of bed. She peppered her parents with questions about death. Could she take her things with her? With the onset of winter, she watched the neighborhood kids play in the snow outside her window.

Christmas was coming, and Ann announced that she wanted a doll from Santa. There were two other kids, John and Jim, to get presents for as well, but because of their recent move to Provo, money was tight.

They had never had a lot of money, but they had always had enough, thanks to a hard-working father. He coached at the high school, but this was long before he would become successful and famous, and the money wasn't enough. So he sold shoes at Sears. He taught drivers education. He gave swimming and skiing lessons. He refereed church basketball for $2.50 a game. He refereed in shoes that were too small, and at the end of each basketball season he would always lose both of his big toenails. But he said he couldn't afford a new pair of shoes.

He was gone a lot, but he improvised ways to be with his children. Ann visited him at Sears. He gave her swimming lessons. He took her on errands. He was warm, funny and fun, and she thought she was his favorite child, although years later she would realize he had made all his kids feel that way.