Post by dubber on Aug 1, 2008 11:24:37 GMT -6
www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2005-10-04-willamette-speckman_x.htm
Speckman is small-time coach with big-time message
By David Leon Moore, USA TODAY
SALEM, Ore. — Like everybody, Mark Speckman multitasks. He talks on the cellphone while he drives. He surfs the Web while he fills out paperwork. Simple things, really.
Williamette's Mark Speckman didn't let being born without hands stop him from playing and coaching football.
By Timothy J. Gonzalez, The Statesman Journal
Like fewer people, however, he was an outstanding high school athlete.
Like fewer still, he rose to a position of authority and became a great leader.
Like very few, his story was once in the tabloids, next to the sightings of aliens and Elvis.
Yet, these days, he labors in relative obscurity in central Oregon's quiet Willamette Valley, seeking achievement, not attention, making a difference, not headlines.
One of the most wonderful and refreshing things in this life is the remarkable man who insists it isn't so. And so it is with 50-year-old Mark Speckman.
The Willamette University football team is in good hands, even though Speckman, its coach, was born without them.
Inspiring? Listen to Tim Alton, a 21-year-old senior free safety on the Division III Bearcats and an aspiring doctor. "At the beginning of the season, we're worried about two-a-day practices," Alton says. "We're tired. We're dragging. Then we look over at our coach, and he has no hands. It's pretty hard to feel sorry for yourself."
This is the story of a man and a team that most people know nothing about. But they should.
There was a time when Speckman avoided reaching out to tell people about his handicap and his experiences. He just wanted to be like everybody else. He didn't want to be noticed.
But he eventually learned that people want to be lifted up, and he had an ability to do that.
He made a pact with God, he says, to talk to anyone who approached him and wanted to know how he could be so satisfied with a life with no hands. "I guess it's a good story," he says. "It took me a while to realize that."
These days, he's in demand in Oregon and across the country as a motivational speaker, noted for his moving personal testimony as well as his wry sense of humor.
Speckman, round-faced with longish, curly gray hair and a slight paunch, tells a good story, and he has ended up at a place with a lot of them. Willamette is one of the top small liberal arts colleges in the country. The incoming freshmen have an average SAT score of about 1,300 and an average grade-point average of about 3.8.
The football players put "student" in the term student-athlete. They receive no athletic scholarships. They have no professional football future.
Speckman conducts team film sessions at 7 a.m. Some of the players must leave early to get to class. As a football coach, that drives him crazy. As an educator at one of the finer universities in the land, he understands.
When the lights go down in the Bearcats locker room for one of the crack-of-dawn film sessions, Speckman controls the video on his laptop computer, which he operates as nimbly as any IM-obsessed teenager.
At Willamette, where Speckman has been the head coach since 1998, the Bearcats run the "Fly" offense. It's probably the only college team in the country that centers its attack on the esoteric offense, primarily a running game based on deception in the backfield.
It's a sophisticated attack, designed to give undersized players a level playing field. "A curveball in a fastball league," Speckman says.
Speckman is sometimes called on by Division I coaches to give clinics to their coaching staffs on the ins and outs of the Fly.
Mike Bellotti, who has built a Pacific-10 Conference powerhouse at Oregon, is one of them. "He's a true student of the game," Bellotti says of Speckman. "And, obviously, he's an amazing person. I have tremendous respect for him."
A lot of 'why' questions
If his offense is a little brainy, so are his players. "I get a lot of 'why' questions," Speckman says.
It's a question you'd think Speckman would often ask.
Why? Speckman's muscular arms end at his wrists, but nobody really knows why. He was born in 1955, but his mother never took thalidomide, a drug that some pregnant women took back then to relieve nausea and that caused birth defects.
The only explanation doctors have given Speckman is that the chromosomes just weren't there.
"It was like a 1-in-100,000 type of deal," Speckman says.
So is he, some people insist.
One of them is John Rushing, who played for Speckman at Merced High School in central California, where Speckman built a powerhouse team, posting records of 13-1, 14-0 and 14-0 from 1988 to 1990. In 1990, Merced was ranked No. 10 nationally by USA TODAY.
Rushing was a tremendous athlete who would go on to play for Washington State and now, at 33, is an assistant coach at Utah State.
None of that would have happened, he says, without Speckman.
"I got caught up hanging out with my buddies, making some bad choices," Rushing says. "I was at a fork in my life. Coach Speckman helped me make the right decision."
Rushing struggled to make a qualifying score on the SAT to become eligible to play Division I-A football. "He'd stay late with me, helping me with the computer program for the SAT," Rushing says. "No way I'd be where I am without Coach Speckman."
At a Willamette football practice, there is a sense of lightheartedness you don't see at the football factories in Division I-A. Players and coaches rib one another. Here there is laughing in football.
Speckman sets the tone by congratulating a player by sticking his arms out and yelling, "Thumbs up!" Every year, the team performs skits, and the players are not afraid to poke fun at Speckman. "We do this one skit where we play rock, paper, scissors," Alton says. "Of course, Coach is always 'rock.' "
But there is a serious side, too. At Willamette, players learn about effort and execution. They learn about perspiration and perseverance. They also learn about personal responsibility. All they have to do is look at their coach and realize that it's hard to point fingers when you don't have any.
Most everything the Willamette football players can't learn from Speckman they learned in kindergarten. Like finger-painting.
"That," Speckman says, laughing, "was a problem."
And tying their shoes. "That's the one thing I can't do," he says.
But the inability to tie his shoes, like many experiences in Speckman's journey, spawned a lesson. In this life, there is value to not being alone, to relying on others.
When Speckman became a football player, he had to turn to his teammates to tie his pants and his shoulder pads.
"I just had to ask for help," he says. "It was awkward, sure. But after a while it wasn't a big deal."
Oh, yes, Speckman was a player, and a good one. He starred for his high school team, became a starting linebacker at Menlo College, then a junior college and at Azusa Pacific University, where he made enough tackles — and, yes, interceptions — to eventually earn recognition as an NAIA honorable mention All-American.
That's when the tabloids noticed.
The Handless Linebacker.
"That was one paper I didn't want to end up in," he says. "It was embarrassing."
He laughs at the scouting report on himself as a player — smallish, average speed, no hands.
But he had a high pain threshold, tons of desire, unlimited toughness and an understanding of how to do things the right way.
In the 1950s, Willamette served as a training camp for the New York Giants, who had an assistant coach named Vince Lombardi, who later became legendary for his championship Green Bay Packers teams and who was always a stickler for execution. It's fitting that Speckman ended up on the Willamette football field. Lombardi would have loved Speckman the linebacker.
One of the enduring video clips of Lombardi on the Packers sideline has him chastising his Packers defense as it comes off the field.
"Grab, grab, grab!" Lombardi growls. "Everybody grabbin', nobody tacklin'."
Speckman, for obvious reasons, was a tackler, not a grabber. He learned how to tackle the right way — hit and wrap up a ballcarrier with his arms and then drive him into the ground.
That's what his players learn now. "It's amazing," says senior running back Quentin Brock, a 22-year-old sociology major from Fresno. "There's our coach. He has no hands. And this guy was a better football player than any of us will ever be."
Known as 'Captain Hook'
As a boy growing up in Belmont, Calif., south of San Francisco, Speckman found sports to be a welcome outlet. A relief, really. And he was relentless at trying to figure out the skills of baseball, soccer, basketball and eventually football.
In elementary school, he wore hooks. And, kids being kids, he inherited the inevitable nickname "Captain Hook."
Being able to perform in sports eased some of the pain and silenced a lot of the snickering.
"Socially," he says, "there were times when I just wanted to become invisible. But sports was where I found out I could be as good or better as anyone else."
Speckman hated the hooks his parents had made him wear. He'd wear them when he left home every morning for school, then take them off on the way.
Eventually, at 15, he got his parents to agree he didn't need them. He's never worn them since.
He has become skillful at using his wrists to balance and grip objects, enabling him to write on a chalkboard, dine at a fine restaurant, type on a computer and, on a football field, throw and catch the ball. He even became a top racquetball player, sticking his wrist into the frame and taping it tight.
"Obviously," says his mother, Jan Dorn, "he's done very well without the hooks."
Speckman credits his parents with doing "an awesome job" of handling his situation. His father, Don, a salesman and custodian, is deceased. Jan, a stay-at-home mom, has remarried and lives in nearby Eugene.
Speckman was the second of four children. His mother's general philosophy about taking care of him was that he would be treated like anyone else.
"I wasn't going to hide him in a closet," she says. "The kid had a great brain. He had eyes, ears. There was nothing wrong with him except he didn't have any hands.
"I didn't want to coddle him."
His mother would come up with little tests for him, like changing the light bulb on the stove. She just wanted to see what he could do.
The answer, then and now, is pretty much everything.
'Figure it out'
As a result, Speckman developed a philosophy that has served him well. "I've always used the phrase, 'Figure it out,' " he says. "There's always a way."
And there has been. He became a college football player, a trombone player (ah, an instrument with no fingering), a college graduate, a high school teacher and coach and, eventually, in 1995, he was hired by then-Willamette head coach Dan Hawkins to be his offensive line coach and offensive coordinator. In 1998, Hawkins was hired as an assistant coach at Boise State, and Speckman was promoted to replace him.
Speckman has also become a husband and father. His son, Tim, 25, played wide receiver for the Bearcats and now is a part-time assistant coach for his father.
Speckman proudly says his son had the best hands on the team.
"Yeah," Tim says, chuckling. "We say it skipped a generation."
Speckman has taken the Bearcats to the NCAA Division III playoffs twice, in 1999 and again last year. Overall, his teams have posted a 43-33 record.
Willamette is 2-3 heading into Saturday's home game against Southern Oregon. But the won-loss record, while important, is the not the sole measurement of a football coach at a place like Willamette.
"Coaches and players want to win," Willamette President M. Lee Pelton says. "But more important than winning is making sure students are prepared to compete and to make sure they have a good athletic experience and also an experience that will test their limits.
"We look for coaches who can achieve those ends, and Mark absolutely fits."
Speckman is small-time coach with big-time message
By David Leon Moore, USA TODAY
SALEM, Ore. — Like everybody, Mark Speckman multitasks. He talks on the cellphone while he drives. He surfs the Web while he fills out paperwork. Simple things, really.
Williamette's Mark Speckman didn't let being born without hands stop him from playing and coaching football.
By Timothy J. Gonzalez, The Statesman Journal
Like fewer people, however, he was an outstanding high school athlete.
Like fewer still, he rose to a position of authority and became a great leader.
Like very few, his story was once in the tabloids, next to the sightings of aliens and Elvis.
Yet, these days, he labors in relative obscurity in central Oregon's quiet Willamette Valley, seeking achievement, not attention, making a difference, not headlines.
One of the most wonderful and refreshing things in this life is the remarkable man who insists it isn't so. And so it is with 50-year-old Mark Speckman.
The Willamette University football team is in good hands, even though Speckman, its coach, was born without them.
Inspiring? Listen to Tim Alton, a 21-year-old senior free safety on the Division III Bearcats and an aspiring doctor. "At the beginning of the season, we're worried about two-a-day practices," Alton says. "We're tired. We're dragging. Then we look over at our coach, and he has no hands. It's pretty hard to feel sorry for yourself."
This is the story of a man and a team that most people know nothing about. But they should.
There was a time when Speckman avoided reaching out to tell people about his handicap and his experiences. He just wanted to be like everybody else. He didn't want to be noticed.
But he eventually learned that people want to be lifted up, and he had an ability to do that.
He made a pact with God, he says, to talk to anyone who approached him and wanted to know how he could be so satisfied with a life with no hands. "I guess it's a good story," he says. "It took me a while to realize that."
These days, he's in demand in Oregon and across the country as a motivational speaker, noted for his moving personal testimony as well as his wry sense of humor.
Speckman, round-faced with longish, curly gray hair and a slight paunch, tells a good story, and he has ended up at a place with a lot of them. Willamette is one of the top small liberal arts colleges in the country. The incoming freshmen have an average SAT score of about 1,300 and an average grade-point average of about 3.8.
The football players put "student" in the term student-athlete. They receive no athletic scholarships. They have no professional football future.
Speckman conducts team film sessions at 7 a.m. Some of the players must leave early to get to class. As a football coach, that drives him crazy. As an educator at one of the finer universities in the land, he understands.
When the lights go down in the Bearcats locker room for one of the crack-of-dawn film sessions, Speckman controls the video on his laptop computer, which he operates as nimbly as any IM-obsessed teenager.
At Willamette, where Speckman has been the head coach since 1998, the Bearcats run the "Fly" offense. It's probably the only college team in the country that centers its attack on the esoteric offense, primarily a running game based on deception in the backfield.
It's a sophisticated attack, designed to give undersized players a level playing field. "A curveball in a fastball league," Speckman says.
Speckman is sometimes called on by Division I coaches to give clinics to their coaching staffs on the ins and outs of the Fly.
Mike Bellotti, who has built a Pacific-10 Conference powerhouse at Oregon, is one of them. "He's a true student of the game," Bellotti says of Speckman. "And, obviously, he's an amazing person. I have tremendous respect for him."
A lot of 'why' questions
If his offense is a little brainy, so are his players. "I get a lot of 'why' questions," Speckman says.
It's a question you'd think Speckman would often ask.
Why? Speckman's muscular arms end at his wrists, but nobody really knows why. He was born in 1955, but his mother never took thalidomide, a drug that some pregnant women took back then to relieve nausea and that caused birth defects.
The only explanation doctors have given Speckman is that the chromosomes just weren't there.
"It was like a 1-in-100,000 type of deal," Speckman says.
So is he, some people insist.
One of them is John Rushing, who played for Speckman at Merced High School in central California, where Speckman built a powerhouse team, posting records of 13-1, 14-0 and 14-0 from 1988 to 1990. In 1990, Merced was ranked No. 10 nationally by USA TODAY.
Rushing was a tremendous athlete who would go on to play for Washington State and now, at 33, is an assistant coach at Utah State.
None of that would have happened, he says, without Speckman.
"I got caught up hanging out with my buddies, making some bad choices," Rushing says. "I was at a fork in my life. Coach Speckman helped me make the right decision."
Rushing struggled to make a qualifying score on the SAT to become eligible to play Division I-A football. "He'd stay late with me, helping me with the computer program for the SAT," Rushing says. "No way I'd be where I am without Coach Speckman."
At a Willamette football practice, there is a sense of lightheartedness you don't see at the football factories in Division I-A. Players and coaches rib one another. Here there is laughing in football.
Speckman sets the tone by congratulating a player by sticking his arms out and yelling, "Thumbs up!" Every year, the team performs skits, and the players are not afraid to poke fun at Speckman. "We do this one skit where we play rock, paper, scissors," Alton says. "Of course, Coach is always 'rock.' "
But there is a serious side, too. At Willamette, players learn about effort and execution. They learn about perspiration and perseverance. They also learn about personal responsibility. All they have to do is look at their coach and realize that it's hard to point fingers when you don't have any.
Most everything the Willamette football players can't learn from Speckman they learned in kindergarten. Like finger-painting.
"That," Speckman says, laughing, "was a problem."
And tying their shoes. "That's the one thing I can't do," he says.
But the inability to tie his shoes, like many experiences in Speckman's journey, spawned a lesson. In this life, there is value to not being alone, to relying on others.
When Speckman became a football player, he had to turn to his teammates to tie his pants and his shoulder pads.
"I just had to ask for help," he says. "It was awkward, sure. But after a while it wasn't a big deal."
Oh, yes, Speckman was a player, and a good one. He starred for his high school team, became a starting linebacker at Menlo College, then a junior college and at Azusa Pacific University, where he made enough tackles — and, yes, interceptions — to eventually earn recognition as an NAIA honorable mention All-American.
That's when the tabloids noticed.
The Handless Linebacker.
"That was one paper I didn't want to end up in," he says. "It was embarrassing."
He laughs at the scouting report on himself as a player — smallish, average speed, no hands.
But he had a high pain threshold, tons of desire, unlimited toughness and an understanding of how to do things the right way.
In the 1950s, Willamette served as a training camp for the New York Giants, who had an assistant coach named Vince Lombardi, who later became legendary for his championship Green Bay Packers teams and who was always a stickler for execution. It's fitting that Speckman ended up on the Willamette football field. Lombardi would have loved Speckman the linebacker.
One of the enduring video clips of Lombardi on the Packers sideline has him chastising his Packers defense as it comes off the field.
"Grab, grab, grab!" Lombardi growls. "Everybody grabbin', nobody tacklin'."
Speckman, for obvious reasons, was a tackler, not a grabber. He learned how to tackle the right way — hit and wrap up a ballcarrier with his arms and then drive him into the ground.
That's what his players learn now. "It's amazing," says senior running back Quentin Brock, a 22-year-old sociology major from Fresno. "There's our coach. He has no hands. And this guy was a better football player than any of us will ever be."
Known as 'Captain Hook'
As a boy growing up in Belmont, Calif., south of San Francisco, Speckman found sports to be a welcome outlet. A relief, really. And he was relentless at trying to figure out the skills of baseball, soccer, basketball and eventually football.
In elementary school, he wore hooks. And, kids being kids, he inherited the inevitable nickname "Captain Hook."
Being able to perform in sports eased some of the pain and silenced a lot of the snickering.
"Socially," he says, "there were times when I just wanted to become invisible. But sports was where I found out I could be as good or better as anyone else."
Speckman hated the hooks his parents had made him wear. He'd wear them when he left home every morning for school, then take them off on the way.
Eventually, at 15, he got his parents to agree he didn't need them. He's never worn them since.
He has become skillful at using his wrists to balance and grip objects, enabling him to write on a chalkboard, dine at a fine restaurant, type on a computer and, on a football field, throw and catch the ball. He even became a top racquetball player, sticking his wrist into the frame and taping it tight.
"Obviously," says his mother, Jan Dorn, "he's done very well without the hooks."
Speckman credits his parents with doing "an awesome job" of handling his situation. His father, Don, a salesman and custodian, is deceased. Jan, a stay-at-home mom, has remarried and lives in nearby Eugene.
Speckman was the second of four children. His mother's general philosophy about taking care of him was that he would be treated like anyone else.
"I wasn't going to hide him in a closet," she says. "The kid had a great brain. He had eyes, ears. There was nothing wrong with him except he didn't have any hands.
"I didn't want to coddle him."
His mother would come up with little tests for him, like changing the light bulb on the stove. She just wanted to see what he could do.
The answer, then and now, is pretty much everything.
'Figure it out'
As a result, Speckman developed a philosophy that has served him well. "I've always used the phrase, 'Figure it out,' " he says. "There's always a way."
And there has been. He became a college football player, a trombone player (ah, an instrument with no fingering), a college graduate, a high school teacher and coach and, eventually, in 1995, he was hired by then-Willamette head coach Dan Hawkins to be his offensive line coach and offensive coordinator. In 1998, Hawkins was hired as an assistant coach at Boise State, and Speckman was promoted to replace him.
Speckman has also become a husband and father. His son, Tim, 25, played wide receiver for the Bearcats and now is a part-time assistant coach for his father.
Speckman proudly says his son had the best hands on the team.
"Yeah," Tim says, chuckling. "We say it skipped a generation."
Speckman has taken the Bearcats to the NCAA Division III playoffs twice, in 1999 and again last year. Overall, his teams have posted a 43-33 record.
Willamette is 2-3 heading into Saturday's home game against Southern Oregon. But the won-loss record, while important, is the not the sole measurement of a football coach at a place like Willamette.
"Coaches and players want to win," Willamette President M. Lee Pelton says. "But more important than winning is making sure students are prepared to compete and to make sure they have a good athletic experience and also an experience that will test their limits.
"We look for coaches who can achieve those ends, and Mark absolutely fits."
