Gordon got emotional watching the (McFarland) movie. He said it was so much like his time with the Indian students. That time meant a lot to him. – Barbara Nelson
Gordon Nelson, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher and coach, had no idea what the movie was about when he settled into a theater recently to watch “McFarland, USA,” starring Kevin Costner. Nelson’s wife Barbara had urged him to see it. As the movie rolled on, Nelson realized he already knew the story; he already knew Costner’s character; he already knew the kids. This movie was his movie; he had already lived it. He began to cry.
“This is my life,” he told Barbara.
Of course she had known that; she had known what the movie was about but hadn’t let on. It was a setup. “I wanted to surprise him,” she says.
“McFarland” is the true story of former high school football coach Jim White, who is starting over after injuring an athlete in a fit of rage. He encounters more trouble as a football coach at the new school and has an epiphany as he watches kids run around the track. He starts a high school cross-country team in a small, poor California town populated by Mexican-American farm workers. The coach, a white man in a Hispanic neighborhood, has never coached the sport. He convinces the kids (and their parents) to leave the fields long enough to train each day. He becomes part of their lives. They go on to build a championship program.
White’s story could easily be Nelson’s story, right down to driving the bus for the team, leaving football for a new sport and working with minorities. Nelson, a wrestling and football coach, took a teaching job at the now-defunct Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City. He asked school officials if he could coach the cross-country team instead of football. A couple of years later he won his first state championship. Then a second. Then a third. By the time he was finished he had won seven state championships from 1973-1983 with Navajos, Hopis, Utes, Papgos, Seminoles and Apaches, and kids named Black Elk, Watchman, Soundingsides, Serawop and Humeyestewa ….
“Gordon got emotional watching the (McFarland) movie,” says Barbara. “He said it was so much like his time with the Indian students. That time meant a lot to him.”
Like the Costner character, Nelson knew nothing about cross-country when he began coaching the Indian team. He had a background in wrestling. He was a two-time 118-pound state champion at Olympus High, losing only two matches in three years, both during his sophomore year.
After serving two years in the military and two years as a Mormon missionary, he attended the University of Utah on a wrestling scholarship and earned a degree. He applied for teaching jobs. In addition to teaching, Highland High wanted him to coach three sports — for a total of $440.
The College of Eastern Utah offered him $7,000 as a coach. He taught instead at Kearns Junior High so he could have a better-paying second job. For two years he taught during the day, 7:30 to 3, then worked at the post office, 4 to midnight. A couple of years later he began officiating prep wrestling matches, something he would do for 35 years. His work on the mat caught the eye of an official from the Indian school.
“Are you coaching?” the man asked.
“Can’t afford it.”
He invited Nelson to consider coaching at the Indian school. Nelson visited the school that weekend and was offered more than double his salary at the time. He took the job.
The Intermountain Indian School, which served as an Army hospital during World War II, was a federally funded boarding school in Brigham City that catered largely to Navajos who were bused up from the reservation in Arizona. When enrollment nosedived in the ’70s, the school recruited other tribes. Busloads of Indians arrived each fall, representing some 100 tribes.
Nelson arrived there in 1969, and, like Jim White, the first thing he did was research his students and their culture, reading books and grilling those who taught those subjects.
He taught physical education and coached football, wrestling and baseball. A year later he asked to be released from football responsibilities because he objected to the vulgarity and coarseness of the sport. When the cross-country coaching job opened, he volunteered to take the team. “Have you coached cross-country?” he was asked. “No, but I can do a decent job,” he replied.
He began reading everything he could find on running and training and settled on a weekly regimen: A couple of days of long runs in the mountains, a couple of days of repeat sprints and one day of playing a game that was a cross between football and rugby, with no huddles, just non-stop running.
The next thing he did was identify a team leader. He found him in Robert Hanyaktewa. “He was a rabbit,” recalls Nelson. On training runs, he’d take off and no one would see him again until the end of the run when he’d be waiting at the finish. “It doesn’t do me any good if no one is close to you,” Nelson explained. “We have got to have five of you to score if we’re going to win (the first five runners for each team are scored in races). You need to help the other kids.” Hanyaktewa began running with the team and pushed them to excel.
Like White, Nelson did it all in those days. He gassed up the bus for road trips and drove it to the school. He collected the team’s sack lunches from the cafeteria. Then he’d drive the boys to their competitions. He was also a hall monitor. The school had a potentially volatile situation with so many different tribes in close quarters. Most of the trouble began when the school recruited a wider variety of tribes in the ’70s to beef up enrollment. “Most of the time they were troubled kids they wanted to get rid of so they sent them to the school,” says Nelson. There were rivalries among the tribes that caused friction and fights. Some tribes were forbidden to date or socialize with members of other tribes.
“We had to get leaderships to get it under control,” Nelson says. “It took a couple of years. I had to go up there in the evenings and patrol. The local police were there quite a bit, mostly for fisticuffs. One of the things that contributed to it is the kids would get hold of alcohol.”
Nelson received phone calls from students in trouble — Coach Nelson, I’m in jail; can you come get me out? He was a father figure to many of the boys. One of them would grow up and name his son Gordie, after the coach.
Nelson was only 5-foot-3 at the time (he’s lost an inch since then), but he had a commanding presence that exceeded height. Like White, he had his own style. When one of his athletes skipped a road trip to avoid a long bus ride, Nelson found him sleeping in his room and dumped water on him. “They (school officials) wrote me up for cruel punishment,” he says. “But the kid never missed another competition.” He made some of his athletes sign contracts agreeing to commit to the team for an entire season instead of quitting, which was what some of them did once they were given government-provided uniforms and equipment. When one kid quit the team anyway, Nelson pinned him against a wall and scolded him.
“I wanted the kids to know I was serious,” he says. “That’s what they understand. That’s the way their dad handled them on the reservation.”
In an attempt to ingratiate himself with the kids, he asked if they would teach him some Navajo words. What they taught him instead, he quickly realized, was profanity. “They got a big kick out of that,” he says. “The whole team would laugh. So that was the end of that.”
On one occasion, he drove all the way to New Mexico to retrieve a couple of his athletes who had failed to return to the school after traveling home for a funeral. In Gallup, he made inquiries about the boys. He was directed to follow a dirt road about 10 miles that way — “They’re out there somewhere,” he was told. He drove the 10 miles and never saw a soul until he found the boys sleeping in a lean-to on the backside of a hogan. They had decided not to return to school, they explained. He told them to pack their things; they were headed back to school.
“While I waited I asked for a drink of water and they pointed to a 50-gallon drum,” says Nelson. “They said, ‘Just skim the bugs off the top.’ They offered me something to eat. There was some stew in a five-gallon bucket in the hogan. I asked how long it had been there, and they said a couple of days. I waited.”
As Nelson began to train the kids, he realized they were natural runners who just needed guidance and discipline. Like the Mexicans in “McFarland,” running or walking was part of their culture and often their only real means of transportation on the reservation.
Nelson rode behind his runners on a small motorcycle on training runs around Brigham City and on the dirt roads in the surrounding mountains. His teams began winning meets, and when the winning became too routine and Nelson worried his runners would grow cocky and lazy, he found a remedy. “I’d make sure we’d lose a couple of times a year before the state meet,” he says. “I’d take them to invitationals against big schools.”
Nelson’s team won the 2A state championship in 1973 and again in 1974. Nelson was just getting warmed up, but when the federal government ramped up Title IX the school decided to put a woman in charge of the boys team. They failed to win the state title that year and Nelson was reinstated as the boys coach. His teams won four consecutive state championships from 1977 to 1980 and another title in 1983.
The school closed in 1984 and Nelson quit teaching. The government offered him a job on a reservation, but he declined and sold real estate instead. Over the years he received occasional visits from his former students — and many of their relatives. As Barbara recalls one occasion, “One day this great, tall Indian fellow with a tiny boy showed up at the door and asked for Coach. He said his boy was named Gordie — after Gordon. They had come all the way from Arizona. I invited him in and he turned and gave the signal to someone in his truck. They were in the camper on the back of the truck, and they just kept getting out. They filled the house and everything we had. They stayed all day.”
Nelson sits in his living room looking through scrapbooks filled with photos and newspaper stories from those days. He has had little contact with his former students in recent years, but last year a friend bumped into some of those students at the town’s annual Peach Days Celebration, which Nelson usually avoids. “You need to come see them,” he said. “They always ask about you.”
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com