Meet Joe • Recent Press

2005

February 2

Honoring Joe Ehrmann, and men transforming football culture

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been thinking a lot about football. It's the quintessential masculine American game, and both players and fans are often associated with a callous and exploitative attitude towards women. But the fact that the game is in some ways inherently violent does not mean that valuable lessons about justice and gender cannot be taught through it. This morning, on the Men Can Stop Rape website, I read that they will be giving their annual Frederick Douglass award to Joe Ehrmann. As a football fan and a men's movement activist, I rejoiced.

Ehrmann became a hero to the real men's movement after he was profiled last summer in this Parade magazine article. (Which I first learned about thanks to Christy at Dry Bones Dance.) Ehrmann, who played 13 seasons for the Colts (when they were still in Baltimore), is the defensive line coach of the Gilman High School (MD) Greyhounds. When I read how he opened his practice sessions, I cried:

“What is our job as coaches?” Ehrmann asks.

“To love us!” the Gilman boys yell back in unison.

“What is your job?” Ehrmann shouts back.

“To love each other!” the boys respond.

Now, if all of us who work with youth started our practices, classes, and youth meetings with that, we'd be a damned sight better off.

Ehrmann correctly diagnoses the problem, and describes his solution:

Aside from the X’s and O’s of football, everything Ehrmann teaches at Gilman stems from his belief that our society does a horrible job of teaching boys how to be men and that virtually every problem we face can somehow be traced back to this failure. That is why he developed a program called Building Men for Others, which has become the signature philosophy of Gilman football.

The first step is to tear down what Ehrmann says are the standard criteria—athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success—that are constantly held up in our culture as measurements of manhood.

“Those are the three lies that make up what I call ‘false masculinity,’” Ehrmann says. “The problem is that it sets men up for tremendous failures in our lives. Because it gives us this concept that what we need to do as men is compare what we have and compete with others for what they have.

Ehrmann calls his method "strategic masculinity". It is, he says, all about "relationships."

Masculinity, first and foremost, ought to be defined in terms of relationships,” Ehrmann says. “It ought to be taught in terms of the capacity to love and to be loved. It comes down to this: What kind of father are you? What kind of husband are you? What kind of coach or teammate are you? What kind of son are you? What kind of friend are you? Success comes in terms of relationships.

While coaches elsewhere scream endlessly about being tough, Ehrmann and (head coach Biff) Poggi teach concepts such as empathy, inclusion and integrity. They emphasize Ehrmann’s code of conduct for manhood: accepting responsibility, leading courageously, enacting justice on behalf of others.

“I was blown away at first,” says Sean Price, who joined the varsity as a freshman and is now a junior. “All the stuff about love and relationships—I didn’t really understand why it was part of football. After a while, though, getting to know some of the older guys on the team, it was the first time I’ve ever been around friends who really cared about me.”

Ehrmann's got as good a set of guidelines for raising young men as I've ever seen. And for those who question whether young men coached with these values can do well, the Gilman Greyhounds have finished three of the past six seasons undefeated and were ranked #1 in Maryland at the end of the 2002 season.

Feminists and their male allies have good reason to be leery of American football culture. The connection between this most violent of high school and college sports and rape has been well-documented. The tendency of many coaches to use cruel and misogynistic language with their players is well known. And yet, Ehrmann's strategy offers a vision for how the real men's movement ought to approach an activity such as football. Rather than condemning it (or any other popular pastime for young men) out of hand, we must seek to change the culture in which the game is both taught and played. The profeminist men's movement will be most successful when we bring our values of justice, inclusion, and love into locker rooms and other traditionally all-male environments.Ä We need to change from within rather than condemning from without.

Coach Ehrmann, with his years as an athlete and his success in coaching, has a special legitimacy that allows him to deconstruct traditional ideas of what it means to be a man. Those men who long to do the same kind of work with their younger brothers would do well to ask where it is that they too can serve. Though cross-country is not nearly as "macho" a sport in terms of its public face as football, I know that as I continue to pursue my interest in coaching high school boys, I'll try and bring a bit of the Ehrmann philosophy to the task. And I have already started to do some of this with my high schoolers.

So, hurrah for Men Can Stop Rape, hurrah for Joe Ehrmann, and "go Greyhounds."