For Lloyd Carr, hard work and self-reliance still valuable traits

Submitted by Austen Smith

SEE VIDEO OF LLOYD CARR'S SPEECH AT WWW.HERITAGE.COM/VIDEO

There was a Wolverine sighting in Belleville last week!Wait, don't call animal control just yet, this Wolverine was pretty tame especially compared to some of his more fiery outbursts over his 13 years of patrolling the sidelines as University of Michigan head football coach.

That's right, Lloyd Carr was received as a special guest for the Belleville Rotary Club's Annual Scholarship Awards on May 11, and he certainly didn't disappoint the group of wide-eyed youngsters hoping to receive valuable words of wisdom as well as a proverbial swift kick in the rear thinly disguised as motivational rhetoric. During his speech, Carr was gracious, caring and did well to acknowledge the gravity of the immediate life decisions these 10 young men and women will be facing in the coming months and years. Belleville Rotary members, funded through the Charles B. Cozadd Foundation, were able to award scholarships to five Belleville High School seniors and, in addition, award five "renewal" scholarships for students whom have completed their freshman year at a higher education institute.

But don't get me wrong, Lloyd Carr, who actually coached Belleville football for several years in the early 1970s, is old school through and through. He didn't offer easy answers to the large, gathered crowd of students and parents hanging on the longtime coach's words as if he were drawing up a critical play for fourth and long. His message was simple - work hard and do your best. And the details making up the framework of that directive are left up to you and you alone, of course it's in the details where life gets tricky.

At times you won't know what to do, Carr told the kids, to which he offered a football-related anecdote (which is what everybody was waiting to hear of course) about University of Michigan right guard Steve Hutchinson. In 1997 when the Wolverines won the national title featuring a star-studded team of Charles Woodson, Brian Griese, Ian Gold and Tai Streets just to name a few, Carr related a story about a game they played where Hutchinson was a freshman starter and his first, second and third job responsibilities were to protect the quarterback, protect the quarterback and protect the quarterback. Carr said during the first passing play they had, a linebacker flew in from the right side to which Hutchinson then prepared himself, but then another guy appeared out of nowhere causing Hutchinson to basically abandon his job assignment all together.

The scene afterwards was not pretty, Griese went down and Carr said "he was looking out the ear hole of the helmet."When Hutchinson came over to the sideline nervously anticipating his head coach's wrath, he told Carr that he simply didn't know what to do. Carr's response to that was simple and complete: "Just do something!"And that, essentially, was his message to those 10 eager faces.

Nobody in this world is going to hold your hand through major life decisions and at times it will be so confusing you won't know where to start. But it is within that process where character is built and resolve is hardened.

And what would a Lloyd Carr led speech held in Belleville be without a story about hometown hero Ian Gold? Carr talked fondly of Gold and said he personally recruited him to Michigan because, even as a youngster, he displayed a deep passion and enthusiasm for the game. He told the students that Gold played the game in an unbridled manner that could be applied to the rest of their lives. He said Gold, "did everything he could to get that ball carrier...and (he played) with an attitude that nothing is going to stand in the way of me accomplishing my goals." And that, just like Coach Carr said, is "what it's all about."

In all, Carr's visit to the sleepy town of Belleville was a refreshing reminder that people still value hard work in a society continually de-valuing self-reliance. And, in an ironic twist, Rotary's Deb Juchartz - a Michigan State University graduate who says she "bleeds green" - completed the leg work to get Carr to come and speak. Juchartz's father, Don, who is beloved in Belleville for his more than 40 years of work with Rotary and also a diehard Spartan, couldn't help himself given the opportunity to stir up the rivalry by wearing a green tie. As Carr approached Don with a wide smile to heartily shake the Belleville icon's hand, he casually looked at his tie and asked, "Don, is that the best you can do?"

Contact Heritage Newspapers' Austen Smith at 1-734-429-7380 or email asmith@heritage.com. Check out our staff blog at courierviewnews.blogspot.com