There’s No Slackin’ with Coach McMackin
Greg McMackin loves horsing around with grandkids Taylor and Kayla, but with his Warrior team the new coach is a tough taskmaster and vows they’ll play aggressive, attacking football in Saturday’s opener at Florida. Greg McMackin is clearly his father’s son. He is a look-you-in-the-eye sort of guy
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Greg McMackin is clearly his father’s son. He is a look-you-in-the-eye sort of guy who will go out of his way to say hello and shake a hand regardless if the target is a university president, a truck driver with a Colt Brennan T-shirt or even a pushy media member intent on repeating age-old questions. Tough and demanding, he prefers quiet conversation to boisterous demands. With an uncertain first year boasting an unforgiving schedule and the loss of nearly all the past season’s offensive contributors, he’s going to need all of his father’s qualities.
Unlike some of his colleagues who seem determined to keep anyone outside of players, coaches and boosters at arm’s length, and who treat team information as national secrets, Coach Mac has gone out of his way to connect with anyone interested in knowing how this bubbling package of enthusiasm is going to maintain the winning tradition put in place by his former boss. In his seven months on the job he’s probably shaken more hands and kissed more babies than Mufi Hannemann. It’s an approach that his father, Frank, quietly drilled into his athletic son. Work hard, treat everyone with respect, and that the worth of a man is found in his words and actions, and not in physical confrontations - lessons that found relevance after a run-in with someone in dire need of some physical re-education.
Like many schoolyards, the coach’s was home to a bully who regularly fed his ego by taking advantage of his smaller and weaker classmates.A young McMackin knew the time would come when he and the bully met on unfriendly terms. It didn’t take too long.
“He came after me and I had a row with him. He was a bully and he needed it,“recalls the coach, who, with the boxing lessons by his father, soundly defeated the schoolyard menace. “I came home and I thought I was going to be in big trouble. He (his father) was very disciplined, but he didn’t say a word about it.”
The elder McMackin’s day of silence was worse than any tongue lashing or restrictions on the young man’s freedom. He had disappointed his father, the man who worked two jobs to put food on the table,and that was punishment enough.
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“I felt very bad about it because he always taught me to walk away from a fight because he was a fighter, and he taught me how to fight. He just told me next time, you just walk away from the fight and he didn’t come down on me. That was a big lesson for me.”
It may seem strange that a person who attempted a professional boxing career - which got under way after he began mowing the lawn of former heavyweight champ Max Baer and whose bravery would earn him a Silver Star in World War II in such engagements as the Battle of Leyte Gulf - would try to ingrain a more-pacifist attitude into his son. But, in fact, what he did was imprint the character that the now 59-year-old coach uses each day. Or as former pupil and current Baltimore Raven line-backer Ray Lewis said during a 2008 Pro Bowl practice, “He taught me to be a man. Period.”
And he’s still teaching.
At a skills camp for high school athletes in July, the friendly coach showed his so-called “dark side” when he handed out a stern lesson about what is truly important. The young athletes sat with attention focused on the coach as he talked X’s and O’s and about the Warriors’previous season. But when the topic shifted to something other than blocking and tackling, that attention waned and the coach let them know that this indifference was unacceptable.
“I started talking about the neat thing about the clinic is these guys (other college coaches invited to the camp) were going to talk academics, and that it’s so important, and this kid right in front of me started yawning, and kids were looking around.And I said ‘Don’t yawn when I’m talking. This is important. This is why you are all here, and if you don’t take it seriously, none of these guys will recruit you!‘I don’t yell all the time or coach from that standpoint, because I want them to know when I am really ticked off. It brought everybody right back. They knew I was serious about it.”
And now so do all the parents of future UH recruits. Coach Mac doesn’t just give lip service to academics. He suspended his starting quarterback-in-waiting for classroom failures and is not about to alter his rules for an 18-year-old incoming freshman.
While the coach can come down hard on someone not pulling his academic weight, he fully understands the passion that may cause a young man to do things that may not be too wise. At one time, the coach was much the same way.
As a high school freshman in
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