Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

*

In a celebratory banquet room one recent summer afternoon, I learned about a somber hospital room from nearly two winters past and my esteem for a man I have admired for four decades further grew.

The happy occasion was a retirement party for Phil Mathews, honoring his half-century of coaching basketball, including a decade of dominance at Ventura College from 1986 to 1995 when he guided the Pirate men to ten consecutive conference banners with state titles coming in his second and final seasons.

His overall record as head coach at a handful of schools, including the University of San Francisco, was an eye-popping 611-354; he also enjoyed laudable success as an assistant, including at UCLA; and for good reason has been inducted into three different halls of fame.

And so, also for good reason, more than 200 former players and fellow coaches, family members and friends, and even one bygone sports writer, showed up to show him their respect and gratitude and love.

A few laughs were shared reminiscing about Phil’s fire-and-brimstone coaching style, but more important were the heartfelt stories that offered a truer measure of the man; a man who, despite the full-court-like pressure the college coaching profession puts on marriages, has fast-breaked to 32 wedding anniversaries with his dear bride Margie; a man who is Velcro close with his four children in adulthood; a man who remains an active father figure to five decades worth of players.

Joey Ramirez played for Mathews at VC and later became the Pirates’ second-winningest head coach behind him, but he told the assemblage that the most important way he wanted to emulate his mentor was as a champion husband and dad. Goal achieved, for as he spoke, Joey’s lovely wife Olivia and two of their three affable sons looked on proudly.

There were no smiles in the Ramirez family two Decembers ago, however, after Joey contacted COVID and legionnaires disease and severe pneumonia – a medical triple-threat that landed him in the ICU for nearly two weeks while being intubated and fully sedated.

The great poet Robert Frost famously said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” Conversely, Joey proved as he spoke at the podium this day: tears in the speaker, tears in the listeners. In a choked voice, Joey said that upon finally regaining consciousness in the hospital the first person he saw at bedside keeping vigil was his ol’ coach.

Something like that doesn’t go on a Hall-of-Fame plaque, but should.

Let me close with a story about the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. The magnificent edifice took 83 years to build, from 1907 to 1990, and near the end of construction progress slowed to a crawl because it became nearly impossible to find stonecutters with the skill necessary to prepare the stones properly.

Curious about this dying art on life support, a journalist went to the job site and interviewed two of the remaining stonecutters. Specifically, the writer asked the pair of master craftsmen to explain what they were doing.

“I’m shaping this stone so that it fits perfectly into that space over there,” the first stonecutter replied, pointing.

Coach Mathews certainly shaped his players to fit perfectly into their roles to help their teams succeed year after year after year. But it was the second stonecutter who truly epitomized Phil, for he offered a grander answer: “I am building a cathedral.”

By dedicating his adult life to shaping young basketball players into successful men in the game of life, Philip Lewis Mathews has indeed built a beautiful cathedral.

* * *

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

*

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.