Lou Giani: wrestling coach
Interviewed in Suffern, New York. January 24th, 2009
Born 1935, New York, New York
“schools tend to be instruments of our greatest denial by
breaking knowledge and experience into subjects, relentlessly turning wholes
into parts, flowers into petals, history into events, without ever restoring
continuity… the young need some sort of initiation into an uncertain world...”
— Marilyn Ferguson, in “The Aquarian Conspiracy,” J. P. Tarcher, 1980, p. 282ff
Note To The Reader:
This was the second of two interviews that I did with Lou. We spent a few years talking about the project after the first interview. Lou brought notes with him this second time, and he refers to them during the first half of the interview. I also spliced some of the stories he told in the first interview into this interview.
LS:
Lou, you’re the only person I’ve interviewed twice, so before you start can you tell me how your thoughts have changed as a result of doing it a second time?
LG:
I changed my approach a little bit. I backed away from a couple of things I said before, that my family would pay for, eventually.
LS:
Do you have more clarity?
LG:
I hope so, maybe, I don’t know. Let’s see how it works out. Tell me something to get me started.
LS:
Well, the story is about learning, and transformation, and finding the power to become something. It’s partly about what you do but also about how you learned.
LG:
I grew up in New York City and went to a Catholic elementary school, and they had no athletics at all at that school. My Mom and Dad moved to Huntington when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, and once I got out there I started to realize, “Wow, look at this!” They got all these athletic events that I could participate in, and I started to really want to do it. My parents wouldn’t let me do it because they were afraid I was going to get hurt, but eventually I got them to go along with me.
I had some great coaches at Huntington, I had some great teachers, and I learned a lot from my coaches. Now the teachers we had, they went out of their way to give me the ABC’s, but my coaches were really instrumental in making me a champion, and giving me a lot of knowledge about coaching that I still use today.
I felt that as a kid, with the great coaches that I had, they never really brought up athletics as a vehicle to go on through education, which I’ve done ever since I started to coach.
I left high school after that and never went on to college. I wrestled for the New York Athletic Club for a number of years, I made the Pan-American team, won a couple of national championships, and made the Olympic team. After that I felt that I still needed to do some more competition, and I wrestled another 10 years.
When I look back to the wrestling that I did after coming back from Rome — our Olympic games were in Rome — I now think that… I had a lot of fun doing it but… I think it was a mistake. I should have started into education. At that time I was working at Grumman trying to raise my family. I had three kids, the whole bit, so I needed to make a living. Grumman made it easy for me to compete as an amateur — at that time you had to be an amateur — and the athletic club paid a lot of our bills for training and for competing.
LS:
You mean the company Grumman?
LG:
Yeah, I worked for Grumman for 20 years. I worked on aerospace at the end, I was part of the LEM project (Lunar Excursion Module, the Lunar Lander stage of the Apollo project that first put a man to the moon. - LS). I was group leader on that LEM project, in charge of thermo-shielding of the descent stage.
LS:
So you weren’t coaching at that time.
LG:
I was still competing. I competed until I was 32 years old. At that point I started to coach at Eastern Military Academy which was a small school in Cold Spring Harbor. I had to start with a bunch of kids who knew nothing about wresting. There were three kids on the team that transferred from a public school that knew a little bit. So we started this program together and we went on. I didn’t know too much about coaching, and I learned so much during that period of time. I wound up teaching kids what I did as an athlete, and dissecting what I did, and taught that in bits and pieces.
LS:
How did that go?
LG:
That went fantastically. We built a team in 3 years that won the private school State’s (i.e. Private School State Championship – LS.) and out of that group of kids we produced 3 state champions. And from there I went to Huntington High School, my Alma Mater. A job opened up. I didn’t have a degree yet, I didn’t even have a teacher’s license because I was teaching in a private school.
The athletic director there approached me and talked to me about coaching and I said, “How am I going to coach, I don’t have a degree, I don’t have a coach’s license?” So he said, “Well, I think I can work something out.” So I coached for a few years at Huntington under the title of Visiting Lecturer. Then I started to realize that I wanted to teach, to become a gym teacher, so I went back to school and went through the normal process of getting a degree. I wound up getting my degree in 4 years, spending most of my time going to school and working at Grumman.
(Lou consults his notes.)
Problems that I see today is primarily with the way our schools treat disadvantaged kids. I feel that there’s a certain element that don’t understand what athletics do for minority kids, kids that really have no other way out of the ghetto. The focus needs to be on having some sympathy for these kids. Maybe that’s the wrong word: “sympathy,” but have some feelings for these kids and not try to penalize them when they screw up a little bit in school: don’t punish them by taking them off the team for a week. If they take them off the team for a week, that don’t put them a week behind, it might put them 2 or 3 weeks behind.
I also think that there’s so many ways that kids can get to college, or to trade school, and I think that’s avoided too. A lot of times we try to push a kid to graduate from high school and he really should be in a trade school, and I’ve always fought that. If I felt that a kid should be in a trade school, then I was out there trying to get them to that trade school. Maybe they weren’t going to college, maybe they weren’t college material, but if I seen a kid that was not doing well in school, and I just couldn’t get him to do well, and he just couldn’t do well, then my feeling is, “Hey, let’s get him in a trade school. We can still have him wrestle, but get him in a trade school where we can teach him a way to earn a living.”
The other thing that I see now in education, and it bothers me, is that there’s hardly any shops in our school system today. All the stuff that I’ve done as a student in shop class I used in my lifetime, in Grumman, and in my home. I’ve put rooms on my home, I’ve built things, and what-not. It’s vital for kids to learn and I can’t believe they abandoned it! You’re learning something you’re never going to learn otherwise, and it’s gone: there’s hardly any shop classes anymore.
Let’s talk a little bit about wrestling and where we’ve gone, where everyone’s gone with wresting as far as I’m concerned. When I was wrestling there was no Peewee program and today wrestling has changed because of the Peewee programs, and that was developed through USA Wrestling. And we have Peewee programs right to the Olympic games, and a kid from the Peewee program eventually becomes an Olympic champion. That’s something that’s much different from when I was competing.
My god, I learned how to wrestle with a football coach who was a great motivator, but knew nothing about wrestling. He was teaching us wrestling out of the Navy book and actually showing us: “Oh, look, this is how you do a move…” And he’s showing you the book and saying this is how you finish a hold, and he’s not too sure about finishing himself. But he was a great motivator, and he would get us to think about that book, and we would eventually learn how to do these things.
Now a kid starts in the Peewees and when he gets into high school he knows quite a bit about wrestling. You’re getting him in real good shape and teaching him some outstanding techniques. It’s made better teams, and that really comes from USA Wrestling. They’ve done a great job with wrestling in this country.
(Lou consults his notes.)
My goal as a coach has always been “desire, discipline, and determination,” and to prepare a kid to go to college, or to prepare him to earn a living somehow.
What do I feel I’ve done for wrestlers throughout the years? This is how I feel: get them in the best fitness possible; teach them to never give up; motivate them to be the best they can be. Teach basics: techniques that they can learn, that they can learn, and not be over their heads.
High school, as far as I’m concerned, is basics. You don’t have to go into the elite moves; you’ve got to stay with the basics. Then they’ve got a great foundation to either go on in club wrestling, or go on in college wrestling. Teach desire, discipline and determination.
You once asked me, “Do they teach this in a classroom?” I think that in some gym classes they do. In coaching they do, that’s for sure. No matter whether you’re coaching football or what, they teach all these things or they’re not worth their salt.
I also believe that if you come in to a real tough program, and I consider our program a tough 4-year program, then you’ll be successful in the competitive world that we live in. I have no fear that you’re going to leave and be successful in our world.
I’m sure that you’re thinking, “Well, how did you teach that?” I believe that you teach kids all of that stuff by simply dissecting specific areas in wrestling. I’m just talking about wrestling.
So I walk in to my wrestling room and I’ve got this youngster and he’s getting beat up all the time, and he’s getting beat up in my room, and I want to make him successful. What I do is try to get him to dissect the moves his opponent is always getting on him. Then I try to get him to try to stop part of that move. Then I try to get him to stop more of the move. Finally, I’ve got a defense worked out, now I try to score a point. Once I’ve scored a point he has some confidence, and from there I just go on and on, with that same process.
You said one time that kids will not wrestle their whole life, they’ve got gender and sexuality problems, there are parents’ pressure, and what have you. And somewheres along the line they’ve got to think about making money. After two hours of practice in the Huntington wrestling room you don’t have a gender problem, and you’re not worrying about sexuality, you’re pretty damn tired.
We demand 3 months of focus in the program. You come in to our program, we want you to be focused for 3 months. If you have a girl friend, that’s OK. A lot of coaches say no, they don’t want that; I don’t say no, I’ve never said no. If the girlfriend is keeping you out on Friday night and you have a tournament on Saturday, I have a problem with that, and we’re going to address that. But other than that, as long as you’re not dissipating and ruining your conditioning you can do what you want. The moment you cross that line, then we need to talk.
I’m talking with kids all the time, all the time. Even now, as a part-time assistant, I’m talking to those kids all the time. And they’re listening because they know that I am really for them, and it’s not only about winning and losing — but I do want them to win, and I want our team to win also — the prime objective here is to make them better kids, stronger kids, and kids who are confident in themselves.
Parent pressure. Parents sometimes are a pain in the neck. I haven’t had too many problems over the years because I don’t let a parent in on me. I never let them get too close. So if I don’t wrestle their kid they’re not going to come up to me and say, “I’m your buddy, what are you doing?” I never let them get close enough to do that, with nobody.
LS:
Are you guarding against something?
LG:
No, I just don’t want them to interfere with what I’m doing with their kid. If the kid’s on a wrestling team, I’m the coach, we’ve got three other coaches with us, we’re professionals, let us do the job. I’m going to say hello to you, and I’m going to tell you what’s going on, but don’t step over the line. I’m not going to let you step over the line.
LS:
What kind of stepping over the line does a parent do? Do they put pressure on you, or on their kid?
LG:
They’re going to do it both ways. The kid don’t want the parent talking to us anyway, OK? The other way that they’re going to put pressure on me might be because their kid didn’t go to practice for three days and I’ve decided, “Hey, you’re not going to wrestle this week.” They’re going to come in and tell me, “Well, we had to go on this skiing trip…” or “We had to do this…” Stay right there! That’s the bottom line.
I feel we build toughness, confidence, and fitness that should last them a lifetime. It’s going to make them go forward in life, and I don’t think there are too many sports that really do it like wrestling: that one-on-one thing where you really get close to a kid, and he understands what you’re talking about. And he understands you as well as you understand him, because you are in close proximity all the time. You know what he’s thinking, and you want him to know what you’re thinking.
Let’s talk about confidence, and we’ve heard so much about winning: “Winning builds confidence.” Yeah, winning does build confidence. I believe that self-confidence is developed through repetition in specific techniques of moves, and drills. Position scrimmages and competitive situations.
LS:
What does that mean?
LG:
Teaching a specific take-down, like a Low Single, we do that through repetition and drill. First you teach it and show it, and then you drill it, and drill it, and drill it, with another member of the team or with a manikin. Or if I want to do something with a specific kid — like now I’ll do it a lot because I’m not head coach and I’ve got time to do things — I’ll work with a few kids on specific techniques they can handle, OK?
As he gets better at it he becomes more confident. Then you bring that into the competitive arena, he tries the move and he gets it: it works. There’s your confidence. It’s learning a move that you can execute on somebody and make it happen. It’s not winning the match, it’s “I know how to get this take-down.” That builds confidence.
Lots of times you have a young kid who just never gets over the hill. He gets up there but just doesn’t finish the thing, and you just keep saying to yourself, “If I can only get him through a match and be successful.” Then, all of a sudden, through all this repetition, it happens, and he’s on his way to winning and being successful. And you can see in his eyes: “Yes, I can do it!”
LS:
If you’re working on these essential life skills, and you say they’re also taught in other sports, then what the hell are people doing in classrooms?
LG:
They’re teaching them the skills of math, reading, English, the skills of geography, the skills of whatever.
LS:
But if those aren’t the things that make or break you in terms of being a success, then shouldn’t everybody be in athletics?
LG:
I think everybody should be in athletics, but I’m an athlete so I’m biased.
LS:
Was your program open to everybody?
LG:
The program was certainly open to everybody, some people came out and they made it, and some people didn’t, they just couldn’t do it, but it’s open to everybody. We never closed the door to anybody.
It’s always been open, it’s an open try-out. Like in basketball they’ve got a certain number of days for try-out. My try-out is the whole season, it’s up to you. If you can stay, fine. If you can make it, good. If you can’t deal with it, then that’s something else.
LS:
If you could reshape the way kids learned, what would you do?
LG:
We’d have a lot of athletes. But realistically some kids can’t be… You know what? I think that I would focus a lot on physical education. I really would. We need to teach some skills, not winning but being confident in your self. I don’t think we do that enough in Phys Ed.
LS:
You almost said that Phys Ed is not for everybody, and I would like to know if that means that you’re teaching something that’s only right for some people, or is it the way that you’re teaching it that’s only right for some people?
LG:
Wrestling is not right for all people. If you’ve got a kid that’s uncoordinated, how can he ever learn how to wrestle? And you need to get in shape and stay in shape, and you need to believe in yourself.
LS:
Yeah,
but what about focus, and determination, and the other things you teach? Does
he have to find those some other way, and it’s not your problem?
LG:
Yeah, I do feel that way. But you can do it in physical education. We can teach him self-confidence, focus and motivation, all that stuff.
I can remember teaching when we had archery and gymnastics — and gymnastics is a great thing to teach self-confidence in — it’s not very hard to do either, on a basic level. But they threw it out because of insurance; we’re not allowed to do that, there’s no more gymnastics, not at our school.
I think that there are certain lifelong skills that we should be teaching in physical education. You should teach any sport that a kid can do for the rest of his life. You should be teaching fitness.
LS:
You say, “Here’s my program, this is what I do, this is what we think we accomplish.” But many kids are not in your program, or in any program at all. Most kids don’t have mentors, they don’t have good family situations, their teachers don’t really care about their individual accomplishments, and the kid is left to figure out how to navigate through life. What can you say that will help kids find what they need. Very few of them are lucky enough to find a person like you…
LG:
But there are others like me out there. They’re not everywhere, but they are around. And I think you can teach a lot of the things I’m talking about in a Phys. Ed. class, I really do.
Phys. Ed. What the heck does it mean? Phys. Ed. means getting a kid physically ready, getting his body physically in shape. We got a little bit away from that, and we need to go back to some of that. I’m not saying we got to do calisthenics all the time, but I’m saying we should be teaching fitness, big time.
LS:
But it’s more than just a physical education course. It’s an
emotionally empowering thing… People who worked with you in wrestling speak
about how important it was to them.
You talk as if you’re a sculptor working with good material and how to get the best out of it. And my question is, what about all the kids out there that aren't exactly good material? Most people would not qualify as athletic material. Are they out of your reach?
LG:
They’re out of my reach. I just think that we need to get more people on the right page, of getting their bodies in shape, and also offer them things that are life serving. Teach them golf, volley ball, badminton, bowling, archery, anything they can do for the rest of their lives. Teach them how to get in real good shape. I think it’s important, and I think that we’ve got away from it.
LS:
Tell me some stories of kids. Give me an example of the transformation. Somebody’s transformation and how it proceeded in real life. How about that kid who was badly burned?
LG:
That is a good story, that is a positive story. It was out of the ordinary, there’s no make-up there. He got burned pretty bad, I mean his fingers were burned, there was a burn on his back, his fingers were really burned. They were taking the skin off him by putting him in a whirlpool. Everyday I would go to see that kid down in Huntington Hospital. I went there just about every day. It was so horrible.
It took a year for him to come back and he had to wrestle with gloves. We had to get the OK for him to wrestle with gloves. He was a good wrestler to begin with and I always thought the kid would come back because he was so motivated, he just loved the game, he just loved wrestling, and he did come back, and he won the state championship. You know, it’s like what other kid do you know that did something like that?
LS:
Did you make it happen, did he need your support?
LG:
I was supportive of him, I definitely was. But the point is that he had such great heart that he was going to come back, and he did come back, and he did a great job. Imagine wrestling with gloves on, that came up to your elbows.
LS:
Did that have any effect on the team, or on you?
LG:
I guess it proved to me that you really can do what you want, as long as you want to do it. The kid had such tremendous drive and determination, I mean, when I first seen him after the fire, “Oh my god, I hope he lives.”
I think that it inspired the kids on the team too, you know. It’s quite far back and I don’t remember how that year went as a team, but I’m sure that he was definitely an inspiration to the kids on our team.
Here’s another story. A few years ago we had a kid that took All County (championship). So, generally speaking, this kid would have been one of the best kids on my team and could have made this team a better team.
He was a minority kid, and he was a pain in the ass in school. The teachers in the school, and not all of them, but there’s a certain group of teachers that didn’t want that kid to compete. They were pissed that he wrestled because he dodged the bullet all the time, and no one ever ran interference for him, but we kept talking to him. We, I mean my staff and I, nurtured him through the whole summer of wrestling. Brought him to maybe 12 tournaments. In the fall he started school and got mingled in with a bunch of bozos.
The rule in our school is that if you get thrown out of school three times… Thrown out doesn’t mean you have to do something real bad, you could have said to an aide “Get the hell away from me!” OK? That’s good enough to throw you out. He didn’t break a window, he didn’t beat up somebody, nothing crazy.
So between the beginning of the semester and when our program started I walk in to the office, we had a meeting with all the winter coaches. Right before the meeting’s over I say to the Athletic Director, I say, “How’s Mason doing?” And the Director goes, “Oh, he’s not going to wrestle for you this year. He’s got three suspensions and one more suspension and he’s done.” So I go, “What are you talking about? How come nobody was informed? We could have fixed this.”
The kid lost a family member last year, it was a very upsetting situation. So the kid is a little off. He’s a little off. You can’t tell me he’s straight ‘cause he’s not. There’s something wrong. He’s got to be feeling bad or something. And they haven’t done anything for this kid. And then they shelf him in wrestling, the only thing that could have saved him.
He had another year and we got him back, but suppose he was a senior, what would have happened to that kid? He’d be on the street next year stealing. Whereas maybe we could have changed that whole thing. And we did, we did get him back.
LS:
What is it that you’re giving him? It seems he’s fighting very different thing from the battle you’re fighting.
LG:
I’m making him believe that he can make a name for himself in wrestling. That he can win the championship, that he can place high in the county, and people look at wrestling on Long Island as quite a thing. If you can place in the county you’re a pretty good wrestler. So, we’re instilling the idea that he can do it.
I would never give you a goal that you could not reach. I want my kids to get goals that they can reach, that are definitely within reach. Our goals are always within reach. You know what I’m saying? We never tell a kid, “Hey, you could be county champion!” when there’s no way he could be county champion. We’ll tell him something else, but we’re never going to tell him that.
We’re going to tell him the truth. What he can do. All we’ve got to do is keep talking about how good he can be, and then work on that. Work with him one on one, and talk to him one on one. Well, (in this case) we were never given that opportunity. And that happens a lot.
LS:
Is your relationship with the kids you coach limited to practice time? Or do you become a sort of uncle or father figure?
LG:
I think so. I think some kids… yeah. I’ve had so many black kids with no father that they latch on to me. And that’s OK, I don’t have a problem with that. I love it, it’s great. I work even harder with them. I get to know them better. I get to know their family better. I kind of help guide them through their lives.
We had a kid that won the New York State Championship for us some years ago and then he screwed up. I got him into Nassau Community College and he screwed it up. I got him back in and he screwed it up again.
He came to me again and says, “Hey coach, I want to go to school but I don’t have any money.” So I says, “Yeah, but you screwed up three times! What are you doing?” So he goes, “I know, but what am I going to do?” I says, “Here’s what I did: I went to work and went to school.” I says “That’s what you’ve gotta do. This is America, this is what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to go to work, get a job, and go to school.” And I says, “If you need help doing that, I’ll help you.”
LS:
What was his problem?
LG:
He was mixed up. He was really mixed up. I got 25 other kids and he’s graduated. I mean, if he calls I’m definitely gonna help him.
LS:
Do you feel bad that you weren’t able to get him on the track before he went out of your grasp?
LG:
No, I don’t feel bad about it because I went out of my way to get him into Nassau Community two different times. I called up the coach who I knew and I said, “Come on, stop it. You’ve got to give him a break. You’ve got to help him out.” And he did. He found some more money and got him back in, and he blew it again. Three strikes and you’re out. I think there comes a time where you’d better pick up the ball and run.
LS:
I think people misunderstand athletics, and wrestling, in believing that winning is what gets you self-confidence. That’s my question. Is it just winning, or is it… ?
LG:
No, no. Being successful… first of all it involves going in the room and finishing the practice. There’s success there, right? Now you aren’t doing well — you’re in a group of three guys — and not doing well, every day. Then all of a sudden somebody grabs you aside and somebody says, “Hey look, just go for a take-down. Just go for an escape.” Success, right? That doesn’t mean you won the state championship, but you had success in the room.
You keep on building on that until he goes to the top: where ever he can go. He may not ever be a state champion, but he might be able to win 50 percent of his matches, and he knows he did his best. And we’ve been telling him it, too. So he’s been successful and he feels great about himself. No one’s ever going to take that away from him.
I’m thinking all the time. When I talk to a kid I always think — I don’t just talk — I’m thinking about what I’m going to say. I’m talking about kids, I’m not talking about adults. When I talk to adults I say what the hell I feel like. But normally with a kid I’m always thinking, “Am I going to screw him up psychologically? Am I going to make him feel down?” I don’t want to do that. I want to keep him up, as much as I can.
It is a psychological game, it really is. You need to be right on top of your game with them. You gotta know what to say, and when not to say it. In the room, when you’re working with them… on the mat right here… you've got a kid that comes off the mat and he's destroyed. If you go over there and pat him on the back that frigin’ sucks, man. You make him feel worse. Let him go and cry it out for a couple of minutes, do what he wants to do, as long as he don’t break anything. Let him get rid of it and then go talk to him after he’s cooled down a bit, when the anxiety is gone. That’s what makes good coaches, people that know how to do that.
Where does it come from? I don’t know. Half the time I don’t even know what I’m doing, but I know it works.
LS:
People give you an awful lot of credit. Joey’s story was interesting
because he wasn’t in it as a wrestler, he was in it as a person who needed to
find himself, and he did. He credits that with saving his life, you know.
LG:
He was a great kid. He calls me up every once in a while. We have a lot of kids like that. We do. They never become great wrestlers, but they become pretty good people.
