What athletes can learn from this late sports icon (not Bob Knight)

He was known as “The Capital Punisher,” a reference, in part, to his large presence. That man, who died last week, could be intimidating to those who watched him, and to those on his team who hadn’t gotten to know him.

I’m talking about Frank Howard, not Bob Knight. Playing for the hometown Senators from the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Howard powered baseballs into the upper reaches of the seats beyond the outfield wall of D.C.’s RFK Stadium. Also known as the “Washington Monument,” he stood 6-7 and weighed well over 250 pounds in an era when baseball players weren’t that big, with biceps that bulged out of the short sleeves of his jersey.

Then he spoke to you, and you were completely at ease.

“I’ve got camaraderie with all ballplayers – young, old,” Howard told me during spring training 2007, when he was an instructor for the New York Yankees. He was 87 when he died.

“If we don’t have the ability to interact with other human beings with a sense of courtesy, respect, then something’s rotten in Denmark,” he said then.

While Howard quoted Shakespeare – the only sports subject I have interviewed in 30 years I recall doing so – Knight was “almost Shakespearian,” as John Feinstein pointed out in The Washington Post when the famed but notorious basketball coach died at 83 last week. “Brilliant, thoughtful and tragically flawed,” the college basketball coach’s chronicler and sometimes nemesis wrote.

Knight and Howard achieved the pinnacle of success in their fields, Knight three times over in terms of national championships, yet went about doing so in opposing ways: Knight was a harsh, loud disciplinarian; Howard a kindly, gentle giant. They both leave legacies as leaders, and the ways they led teams give us starkly different examples of how we can instruct our kids on how to behave on the bench or sidelines.

The men’s lives teach us the pitfalls of being a jerk and the value of being nice. As Howard, and not Knight, taught us, it’s not about you, even when you’re the one everyone comes to watch. The same lessons apply when you are the biggest kid in the dugout, or just one of many trying to fit in with other boys or girls.

Team sports is about the big picture. At its highest levels, it’s about winning, but in those levels leading up to it, it’s about development. Your growth includes character development, too, a quality we learn from these two iconic sports figures is crucial to whether you are remembered as a true star.

It takes more than skill and work ethic to succeed. It takes decency.

USA TODAY Sports remembers Knight and Howard for what they were, and were not, as a method to help you understand your young athlete as he or she evolves.

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1. Anyone can be nice, and humble, even if you’re the biggest star like Frank Howard

“How long you been writing?” Howard asked me shortly into our interview.

He was a 70-year-old former All-Star and World Series champion who had pounded 382 home runs in the majors. I was 32-year-old journalist who was old enough to be confident in what I did and yet still a little unsure of myself.

Howard had shifted the focus away from himself and empowered me. Sometimes, a few words is all it takes to relax someone and give them confidence to play their sport better – or, in my case, do my job better.

“You gotta let your players know that you’re for ’em 100%,” Howard, also a former manager and longtime coach in the major leagues told me. “That you’re here to help ‘em in any way they deem possible. It doesn’t take much. It really doesn’t take much to be able to communicate.”

Niceness is an underrated character trait in sports. It feels different when someone on your team, and not just your parents, tells you that you are good. Parents are programmed to do this. Teammates, and coaches, often aren’t.

Knight’s former players at Indiana are remembering the coach’s authoritative style as “good for them” in the formation of their characters as men. But those same players also clung to the moments of praise Knight doled out.

Steve Alford, who became Indiana’s all-time leading scorer under Knight in 1987, would tell his coach to direct his yelling toward him, as opposed to teammates, because Alford could “handle it.” But the yelling cut deep into the star player’s soul, too.

“While it was the best (playing for Knight) because that’s what I had dreamed about, I mean, it’s hard,” Alford, an Indiana native, said in 2019, according to the Indianapolis Star. “It’s tough. But he got the best out of me.”

Knight’s players got a constant dose of profanity and abuse.

2. It’s not about you, even if you’re Bobby Knight. It’s about the people you influence.

“I had to sit around for a (expletive) year with an 8-10 record in this (expletive) league,” Knight tells his team at halftime in an audio clip that was recorded during the 1990-91 season and widely distributed that decade. “And I mean you will not put me in that (expletive) position again or you will (expletive) pay for it like you can’t (expletive) believe.”

Such tirades were a common thread of Knight’s coaching, as we have seen and heard over the years, perhaps most keenly from Feinstein’s epic, “A Season on Brink,” which followed Knight through the 1985-1986 season.

I remember laughing about the clip when it was shared during the pre-social media age. We generally brushed off such coaching styles as the norm in those days. Even today, if you look at the sidelines of youth and high school games, you can find a coach acting with this fire-and-brimstone style (in most cases, minus the expletives).

Have you ever been on the receiving end of such an outburst, from either a coach or a teammate? Did it make you play better? More likely, you tried to block it out of your mind because it haunted you. If you got it often, you became so used to it that you shut down.

We know today through the research and work of neuroscientists like Bruce Perry that trauma, neglect and abuse have a powerful effect on a developing brain. Brains develop throughout adolescence, which last until the mid-20s. (I wrote about the heavy impact of fear-based coaching on the adolescent brain last week.)

Perry also found, however, that a person’s history of relationships – family, community and culture – is more predictive of your mental health than a history of adversity.

“This is similar to the findings of other researchers looking at the power of positive relationships on health,” Perry says. “Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.”

Positive relationships can deeply influence your well-being. Think about the reassuring coach, or a more senior teammate, you have had who was especially nice to you. Didn’t that make you play better?

You have a responsibility as a coach and a teammate. If you want your team to have success, you need to get the best out of everyone on it. Reassuring them is a better method toward that end than berating them.

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3. Being nice is not a sign of weakness. Nice guys don’t have to finish last.

Howard was known to those who knew him as “Hondo,” a nod to a John Wayne character.

J.P. Nerbun, a former Division I basketball player who has coached kids and professionals and is now a leadership coach, has studied two extremes of coaching. The first is Knight’s old-school way – “Yelling, screaming, making kids run and punishment,” he says. The other is permissive coaching, meaning not holding kids to a high standard.

Nerbun says the best coaching is a kind yet firm approach.

“It looks different for each person and you can still coach within your personality,” Nerbun tells USA TODAY Sports.

The next time your player or teammate makes a mistake, resist the urge to scold he or she in front of everyone. Instead, say, “You’re better than that.” Those four words acknowledge you believe that they have strong ability yet you expect more out of them. If he or she still seems flustered, say, “get the next one” or “make the next play,” another indication you believe in them.

Howard shaped his character as a teammate and coach in the “Hondo” style, as the character was known for ruggedness but also compassion. When he was a coach with the Yankees in the early 1990s, he urged the players to push themselves beyond their limits, even when they were down by large deficits. Those teams, under Buck Showalter, became known for their scrappiness and comeback ability.

Howard acknowledged to me that the difference between first-division and second-division major league baseball clubs was three high-quality players. But at the youth levels up through high school, tenacity and team unity go a long way toward winning games and, more importantly, everyone feeling they are a vital part of a team.

4. Make sure it’s you everyone is seeing

Before he played for Washington, Howard helped lead the Los Angeles Dodgers to the 1963 World Series title. He still wasn’t fully formed as a player.

Howard had some Knight in him. Perhaps we all do when we get really upset. During an exhibition game the following spring, he found himself retaliating against a fan along the third-base line who was verbally laying into him.

“Bad!” Howard told Sports Illustrated in May 1964. “The next day I got a letter from a man who said that he was at the game with his wife and son and that they had heard what I’d shouted. I was ashamed and wrote the man a letter of apology. Then Vin Scully asked me to go on a radio program with him, and when I did I told everyone that I was sorry that I had lost my temper and was ashamed of myself.’

No one remembered that irascible side of Howard. Everyone remembered the tempestuous Knight, despite his charitable work and deep friendships with former teammates and players. The fiery, brutal and hurtful side of him became ingrained as part of his legacy.

“Big-league is not only talent but it’s your ability to interact with other human beings,” Howard told me in our interview.

As a young athlete, you have the power to shape your own legacy. Coaches value how you interact with others. If they are deciding between you or another player for a travel team, and especially for a high school or college team, they are likely to choose player with more character: That’s the one who supports his or hear teammates and isn’t disagreeable.

Every time you’re in public, think about how someone may be watching you and ready to form their opinion of you. Always put forth your best representation of yourself.

5. Your star fades. Your kindness last forever.

Neil Reed had watched Knight’s practices in person, and he thought the public impression of the coach was overblown. The guard chose Knight over Kentucky’s Rick Pitino.

Reed became the central figure around Knight’s dismissal from Indiana, when horrifying video emerged of the coach choking the player. Knight was placed under a zero-tolerance policy and was officially fired when a he grabbed the arm of an Indiana student who said to him, “Hey, what’s up, Knight?”

Knight coached at Texas Tech for 6 ½ more seasons but never came close to the levels of success he reached at Indiana. He wasn’t getting the most talented players anymore. His reputation was sealed.

Howard’s career with Washington ended in 1971 in front of a crowd at RFK that showered him with applause for a sixth-inning homer that sparked a Senators comeback against the Yankees. He waved his batting helmet, a rare display of emotion on the field, as he neared the dugout after rounding the bases.

“Everything that happens after this is anticlimactic,” he said, according to The Washington Post’s William Gildea. ‘Everything is downhill after this. I’m not sentimental about this. This is the greatest thrill I’ve ever experienced.”

It was Washington’s last day as a major league city for almost 34 years. The team moved to Texas to become the Rangers the next season.

Everything, of course, was not downhill. Yes, Howard played only two more mostly forgettable seasons with the Rangers and Tigers. But wherever he went, as manager of the Padres and Mets, as a coach with the Brewers and Yankees, as a talent evaluator for the American and National Leagues, he brought along his reputation as a good guy.

The kid beside us as Howard and I talked in 2007, though, didn’t know about Howard as a person. Howard, wearing a Yankees uniform, saw him and said, “You want that signed, son?”

“Thank you,” the boy told Howard after he wrote his name on the ball.

“All right … enjoy Yankee baseball,” he said. “The New York Yankees thank you. We really appreciate your great support.”

With the Yankees, Howard was known as “Uncle Frank.” His Yankees boss, owner George Steinbrenner, always preferred to be linked to generals, as Knight was.

‘Some men are Pattons, and others are Eisenhowers,’ Steinbrenner would tell Rick Cerrone, his public relations man, ‘I’m a Patton.’

Sometimes, as Howard knew, it’s better to just be yourself.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.