McAneney's well-suited tribute to his late father
Tim McAneney is a golf-shirt-and-khakis kind of a football coach, especially on a hot, humid night in early September. Not this night.
Tim McAneney is a golf-shirt-and-khakis kind of a football coach, especially on a hot, humid night in early September.
Not this night.
Not opening night.
Not the night when the Lenape High School coach walked on the field for a game for the first time since the death in January of his father, legendary former Pennsauken coach Vince McAneney.
"I was thinking to myself, 'How do I honor my father without taking the focus away from the kids?' " McAneney said, looking back at his team's 24-0 victory over Trenton on Friday night. "It's not my game. It's their game."
Vince McAneney, who died at the age of 86, was a lot of things: He was one of the greatest football coaches in South Jersey history. He was one of the greatest storytellers of all time. He was one of the greatest guys to sit beside on a bar stool or stand with on a football field after another one of his team's victories.
He was not one of the world's greatest dressers.
Sartorially speaking, if something worked for Vince McAneney, he stuck with it. So he wore the same get-up to every game, stifling heat of late summer or bone-chilling cold of late autumn: maroon sports jacket, gray polyester slacks, powder-blue dress shirt, blue tie.
When Tim McAneney, who has been highly successful as a coach at Bishop Eustace and Holy Cross before revitalizing the Lenape program, thought about marking his first game without his dad, he remembered the outfit.
He had a pair of gray dress slacks. He bought a blue dress shirt. He wore his dad's blue tie and his dad's maroon sports jacket, "cigarette stains and all."
McAneney told his wife and one close friend of his plans, but nobody else. He walked on the field for warm-ups, a picture of his father in his younger days.
"There were some double-takes and then the team stopped and everybody started clapping," McAneney said, pausing to compose himself. "It was something special.
"These kids, they were born in 2000. They don't know my dad. They don't know how dynamic he was. They just knew him as the old guy I would talk to over the fence after the games."
Friday night marked one of the few games in McAneney's career in which his father wasn't in attendance.
It was the first in which he wasn't able to talk to his father by telephone about the game, discussing strategy, hearing the old man's special mix of wisdom and encouragement.
Tim McAneney once said, "I'm not sure I actually know anything about football. I just find myself repeating everything I heard my dad say."
He was being modest. He's a terrific coach in his own right.
But he'll always be Vince McAneney's kid.
Anybody who saw him walking on the football field on Friday night, wearing that oh-so-'70s outfit for the start of another season, was reminded that he never wanted to be anything else.
@PhilAnastasia
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