Last night, for the first time in school history, Texas A&M Women’s Basketball brought home a National Championship. I was unable to watch, forgoing television this Lent, so I had to rely on my wife (herself a former basketball stud) for play-by-play in the waning minutes of the game. She was network-caliber, by the way…

“She’s going… and passes it to green…”
“Was that Green or green? Who’s Green?”
“Green… jersey… the team. Oooh! A shot! Miss!”

When the buzzer sounded, I asked her to continue. I wanted to know more. Important things. Like “Are the Irish (Notre Dame) crying?” And “How hard are they crying?” And “Are the fans crying? With blue and gold face paint streaking down their cheeks?”

But I also wanted to know where our Coach Blair was, what he was doing. Nothing. No sign of him, on TV at least. With seconds left in the game, he had been coolly hugging his players. One expected this was a bubbling torrent of fuzzy, effusive mess ready to boil over. Yet there were no shots of Coach Blair going sappy, staggering around like a joy-zombie going “Huuuuuuugsss” as seems so disturbingly common among the beblazered bench set.

For a man who isn’t afraid of his own personality (as witnessed when a poorly-timed in-game interview with Coach during an already-long television timeout ran over, delaying the game and chaffing fandom), he remains curiously unassuming. He seems to believe himself to be an afterthought.

From the moment he arrived at Texas A&M in 2003, he was “one of the students.” At the time, I was a [far, far too] regular on Aggieland’s historic Northgate District, particularly the legendary Dixie Chicken and the other joints founded by its veteran barkeeps. The surroundings… gritty, maybe; rootsy, certainly; Aggie, 103%. And darned if Coach Blair wouldn’t be there too, conspicuously inconspicuous. And entirely lacking the bombast and brooding self-importance of his soon-to-come counterpart, short-time contemporary and now long-gone men’s basketball coach. (If you must know, he was often [maybe even always] sans booze and with wife when the good doctor would visit from Arkansas where she is on faculty at the University.)

He’d just set there watching, smiling, taking in his new folk and their culture, engaging the few who knew him well enough at the time to stop and wish him well. He was content to be that afterthought. But he was there. In fact, he was everywhere. He even called into a local radio show to give his home address and offer free game tickets to the first comers. Finally, after a time, when it was clear that this accessibility was no ruse, I approached Coach Blair at one of these Northgate watering holes. I think he actually had water. I said thanks, not for coaching, but for coming down from on high, visiting we foreign people with our foreign ways, appreciating us, taking an interest in us, getting to know us. Ever the charmer, I continued. By way of clarifying just what exactly I was thanking him for, I told him that I didn’t follow women’s basketball, that I couldn’t tell him the first thing about it. (Keep in mind that we were at a watering hole and I weren’t drinking water. Point is, Coach just plain gets along with people, even jackasses, apparently.)

Notwithstanding my ignorance of the sport, others have clearly come to share some of the same sentiments (on Coach), independently and in vastly different circumstances. As ranging as these experiences have been, they are fundamentally identical and significant.

Genuinely, with all sincerity, Coach Blair appreciated his People, and immersed himself in his surroundings, becoming a part of them until they became a part of him. Through good humor and accessibility he cultivated (however incidentally) an adoring throng. And at the moments of greatest achievement, when a tide of good will and praise was poised to be lavished upon him, he deftly stepped aside leaving his charge to bear the delightful burden. He became an afterthought. It is precisely that which makes him and those of his ilk anything but.

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