Sept. 28, 2007
Looking to the next game
by Bill Spurr Features Writer
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| Former QEH football and basketball coach Bob Douglas leans on a bleacher during a Citadel High football practice at the Wanderers Grounds in Halifax on Tuesday. (Peter Parsons / Staff) |
BOB DOUGLAS may finally be in a competition he can’t win, but as the thousands of kids he taught and coached over the years learned, he doesn’t know how to throw in the towel.
Douglas, who earned 16 provincial championships in basketball and football during a 34-year coaching and teaching career at Queen Elizabeth High School, is battling cancer, a battle his doctors thought he would have already lost.
When three good friends heard his cancer had progressed, they drove from Halifax to his Pugwash cottage so they could get in a farewell round of golf. That was two years ago, and when Douglas greets people his handshake is still as firm as when he ruled the sidelines.
He’ll get plenty of chances to use that grip today, when the Bob Douglas Community Gym is unveiled at the new Citadel High School.
In the fall of 1960, on his first day of work at QEH, Halifax native Douglas had a year’s experience at St. Patrick’s High School and a master’s degree in physical education from Boston University.
In those days, your religion determined which Halifax high school you attended, and phys-ed was mandatory for boys, as was a post-class shower. For years, he taught every Grade 10 and 11 boy in the school, knowing them all by name.
"In the ’60s, they called you ‘sir.’ That changed. The curriculum was so strict and so unimaginative, they started to ask questions and the teachers had to be smarter and smarter, because the kids were smarter," Douglas remembered.
"I was a little luckier than a lot of people in education because the kids wanted to get into the gym in their free time, and I had the key. It was easier than an English teacher saying: ‘If you don’t behave better than this, I am going to keep the next chapter of Shakespeare away from you.’ Having the key was good."
But Douglas knew more than how to open the door. He had a gift for getting the most from the athletes he coached, and also the ability, maybe even more rare, to do it without tearing them down.
"What made him so unique, to me, was that coaching football players at that age is not an easy thing to do," said Craig Garson, who played football for Douglas. "You’re dealing with adolescents who have other interests. There were no airs about him; he was as straight a shooter as he could be, and he had a way of getting people to put forth efforts that probably nobody else could have gotten."
Douglas won seven provincial crowns in football before stepping aside in 1978 when he got a "so-called promotion" to proctor, equivalent to a vice-principal.
"I was in charge of discipline throughout the school, outside the classroom," he said. "There were something like 28 doors to the outside and 1,400-1,500 people, and with the drug business and all the rest of it, they wanted somebody to (keep an eye on things.)"
He continued coaching basketball, and built a program that nine times produced the top team in Nova Scotia, and sent a flood of players to the university ranks. For a time, his teams were so strong he had the luxury of selecting players based on more than just their ability on the court.
"I think that I had a certain style and we were so successful — in the ’80s we won six provincial championships . . . and the kids knew what they were getting into. Practice was very important to me, and if you didn’t practice, you didn’t play," said Douglas.
"School was very, very important. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if one kid was a little better basketball player and another kid was a better student, I’d take the kid who was a better student. If you had guys on the team who wouldn’t miss a chemistry class, for example, the other guys on the team would realize there’s another aspect."
Consistently successful as a teacher and coach, Douglas, a proud father and grandfather, did suffer one failure when his first marriage ended in 1975. Near the end of that marriage, the story goes, Douglas, who was what used to be called a man’s man, went out for a loaf of bread and didn’t come back for five days.
Now, that’s the kind of story that, as it gets retold over the years, can become a bit exaggerated. So, the old coach was asked, any truth to that one?
"Mostly true," he said, a bit ruefully. "I was married then, and the marriage was getting kind of tough. I just went with two friends and we went to Montreal to see a hockey game. I did go for a loaf of bread and I didn’t get back for four or five days."
Douglas married Libby MacDougall, herself a highly regarded teacher at QEH, in 1988. He agrees with the friends who say marrying Libby was the best thing that ever happened to him.
"I was divorced in 1975, so I had 12 years in which, well, in some of those years I wish I had somebody looking after me. There were a few mistakes," he said. "I don’t think I was cut out to be a single guy, especially after being married. I needed somebody to grab me by the collar, and that was her."
Toward the end of his classroom career, Douglas became an economics teacher, something that didn’t come naturally to him. The work he had to put in to stay ahead of his students kept him from suffering from burnout, even as retirement approached. He left the classroom in 1993, but coached one more year.
"I eased out that way, and saw the kids through who were in Grade 12," he said. "That year, Halifax West had beaten us all year and somehow we beat them in the championship down at St. F.X. and I got to go out a winner."
The years that followed were marked by winters down south and summers at the cottage and lots of golf. Then in 2002, a doctor gave him the bad news: terminal cancer, count on three years.
"The only treatment that was available for me originally was hormonal," he said. "Radiation was out, chemotherapy was out.
"Well, they’re making so many advances in how they treat cancer . . . I’ve had radiation and now I’m on chemo.
"The chemo is making me stronger and so what I’m looking at is extended good time, extended time in which you’re feeling well. That’s what this chemo has given me. The chemo wasn’t available to me in 2002."
This summer was the first that Douglas, now 73, wasn’t able to golf. He uses a walker now and just completed his seventh round of chemo. He didn’t see very many high school games last year, although he made the final basketball game between QEH and St. Patrick’s.
Already enshrined in the Nova Scotia and Acadia University halls of fame, Douglas admits to being "overwhelmed and touched" by the news the community gym at Citadel will bear his name. Craig Garson was the driving force behind the campaign to have the gym named for Douglas.
"Because first and foremost Bob was an educator, and it was through his teaching that he came to realize his true calling, in the field of coaching, and I thought recognition through the community at large was far more fitting than just the gym at the school," said Garson. "He is far more a legend than even he realizes."
As for Douglas, soon it will be time to close up the cottage. There are more chemo treatments, other doctor appointments and soon it will be basketball season.
"Hopefully, if the treatments keep going well, I’ll go to games," he said.