Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Notre Dame’s new football coach pulls out the oldest trick in the playbook

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"My media consultant had all these notes for me," said Notre Dame's new football coach Brian Kelly near the beginning of his press-conference speech Friday. "And I’m supposed to pay attention to all these notes that were drawn up for me. But one thing that has driven me through my career is that I speak from my heart, I’m passionate about it, and I really want to talk to everybody out there about why I am so honored to be the head football coach here at Notre Dame."

And with that, he tossed aside those cold-blooded and insincere bullet points laid out by the Machiavellian media consultant, and went on to do some really heartfelt rapping about challenges and opportunities.

Along the way, he said some things that no callous, glib communication goon could ever come up with. Deep truths, at once searingly personal at at the same time universal:

• "There’s a football coach, and then there’s the football coach at Notre Dame. Because nobody—nobody doesn’t like Notre Dame …."

• “I want tough gentlemen. I want football players that are mentally and
physically tough, that will play for four quarters, and I want
gentlemen off the field that we can all be proud of.”

• “Yes, we've got challenges just like everybody else. But we'll go to work on it right away. And we'll do that by continuing to recruit what I call the RKGs: the right kind of guys ….”

A hundred, two hundred, two thousand years after the first speaker pulled the my-PR-guy-wrote-this-speech-but-tonight-I-want-to-speak-from-the-heart gag, why do speakers still do it?

Because people still go for the fake!

"Kelly hits the right notes in introduction," was the headline of ESPN.com writer Brian Bennett's account of the press conference.

Bennett noted, "A media consultant [Kelly] recently hired gave him some prepared notes, but he ignored them and talked mostly off the cuff."

Our hero!

Words (still) between us

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Last year at this time I was in Middltetown, Ohio, taking care of my 86-year-old father, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. (He died Jan. 7.) Yesterday, in hopes of finding solace for a friend whose mother has cancer, I went back there.

Back, as I remembered it with the help of the Writing Boots archives, to that cocoon where Dad and I lived for a little while—the brightly lit living room where he gaped at the newspaper all morning as I fiddled with my laptop, but never let him out of my peripheral vision.

That part hasn't changed. In fact, my friend, not much about my relationship with Dad has changed. The phone calls have ceased, but the words remain. —DM

***

Words between us

Dad
can't write anymore because the pills make his head fuzzy. He wants me
to come up with something to write back to "all these people," a
half-dozen family members and friends who have written him letters
telling him what he's meant to them.

I instinctively resist
because I think writers can't ghostwrite for writers, a notion he seems
to think is a cop-out. "I asked David for help writing these letters,"
I hear him telling my sister on the phone, "and he put on his hat and
went out the door."

So I try.

I tell him
he's already done his part in the lives of these letter writers, and
all they really want to know is that he received their letters of
appreciation. "Thank you for your fine letter," I propose he writes on
cards that I'll address. "And I want you to know that it meant a great
deal to me, and so do you."

"But that's what you'd write," he says. "It's not what I'd write."

Between reruns of the above episode, words hold us together.

He
remembers a fragment from a poem he once knew: "like a bubble it burst,
all at once and nothing first." We search in vain for the rest of the
poem.

We make fun of the hospice nurse, who can't
pronounced a particular one-syllable Middletown street name correctly
because of her southern accent.

At the dinner table, he
stares at a photograph of himself in the cockpit of an airplane that has the numbers
N1451R on the fuselage. "Five-One Ringo," he says over and over because
doing so makes him feel like pilot again.

Reading Old Cars Weekly,
he grumbles about the term "swapped out" as it's used to refer to
engines that are replaced with other engines. The "out" part, he says,
is "totally unnecessary." He says so with such increasing force that
I'm compelled to remind him, defensively, that I didn't invent the
term. "Well, you need to do something about it," he says with only the
hint of a grin.

Words to us are things, every bit as much
as airplanes and automobiles and Oxycodone pills are things, and we
hold onto them, one on each end, and we spin around together.

What’s your favorite communication video?

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As the chairman of the Cicero Speechwriting Awards and editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, I'm conducting a rhetoric "jam session" at the Building and Protecting Reputation 2010 conference in Scottsdale, Feb. 24-25.

I know all Boots readers will be there (it is going to be a whale of a show, featuring many of the biggest stars in executive communication), so I'd like to include your nominations for your favorite communication-related video. As you can see by one of the current leading candidates here, I'm open to lots of different kinds of stuff.

Let's have your nominations, either here or via e-mail: [email protected].