In yesterday's blog we touched on Dana Holgorsen's behavior and talked about how rare it's become for high-profile head coaches to publicly demonstrate impulses and frailties that affect the rest of us humans.
Holgorsen appears to be a different dude. Mark Richt is also a different dude -- just in a much different way.
News recently came to light that Richt put his Lake Hartwell home up for sale, and naturally the speculation followed that he was doing it because he knew he might be out of a job soon.
As is often the case these days in this crazy, Wild Wild West media world we live in, the conclusion was baseless. Chip Towers, Georgia beat writer for the AJC, caught up with Richt this week and got the real story.
Turns out Richt, a devout Christian, was profoundly moved by a book entitled "The Hole in Our Gospel."
“I’d challenge anybody to read this book and not be affected by it. We just live in such wealth here in America. And I’m talking about everybody. Anybody who’s making 30 grand a year is extremely wealthy compared to rest of the people in the world. These kids, these families will walk two or three miles, half a day or more, to get water that’s really not healthy. They’re drinking stuff that’s not safe for them. Then children die of AIDS, they die of malaria and they die of dehydration. Kids end up dying or the parents die and they’ve got nothing.
“This book just talks about how much of that is going on around the world and, if it was sitting right outside our door, what would we do about it? It’s a very compelling book. Compelling enough for me to say, ‘you know what, I don’t want to pour money into a home like that when I can use it for better things, for eternal things.’ It was just very alarming to find out what’s going on out there and we need to do something about it.”
I'm not going to quibble with anyone who points out that Richt isn't exactly slumming it. He makes more than $3 million a year at Georgia, and Towers notes that he's made more than $25 million in Athens since his 2001 hiring.
But this revelation is only the latest proof that Richt is an extraordinary guy in the coaching profession. Not that all the other coaches are disingenuous snakes, but Richt is just different in a very refreshing way.
In 13 years of covering college football, Richt and Mike O'Cain are by far the nicest, most genuine guys I've come across in the coaching profession. They just never seemed encumbered by the insecurity and deviousness that infect some of their peers.
You'd be hard-pressed to find many, if any, people in the coaching industry to say anything negative about Richt, and how impressive is that in such a cut-throat profession that's rife with grudges and conflict and bad blood?
I was around Richt fairly regularly over the 2001, 2002 and 2003 seasons, when he was returning the Bulldogs to SEC prominence after a decades-long drought that brought Georgia fans to their knees.
Through it all, he always seemed like the same dude. Comfortable in is own skin, never taking himself too seriously, always warm and thoughtful.
He came across to me as a pretty deep thinker, someone who spent a lot of time pondering his faith. And you never, ever got the sense that football dominated his life.
Towers reports that Richt will spend some of this summer in Honduras helping construct water wells, and my hunch is that he'll devote himself to this kind of stuff full-time when he's done with coaching.
He's an impressive guy whose heart and priorities seem to be in the right place, and maybe all of us -- not just coaches -- can take a lesson from that.
LW
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