Hurt I Will Lay Down I Will Rise Again

American Football game Poem

Fight on, my men, Sir Andrew Barton said

(excerpts of a Scottish carol)

"Fight on, my men," says Sir Andrew Barton,
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me downwards and bleed a while,
And then I'll rising and fight again.

"Fight on my men," says Sir Andrew Barton,
"These English dogs they bite and so low;
Fight on for Scotland and Saint Andrew
Till you hear my whistle accident!"

Merely when they could not hear his whistle accident,
Says Harry Hunt, "I'll lay my head
You my board yonder noble send, my lord,
For I know Sir Andrew he is expressionless."

With that they boarded this noble send,
So did they information technology with might and main;
And plant eighteen score Scots alive,
Beside the rest were maimed and slain.

My lord Howard took sword in his hand,
And smote off Sir Andrew'due south caput;
The Scots stood past and did weep and mourn,
Just never a word durst speak or say.

He caused his trunk to exist taken down,
And over the hatch lath cast into the sea,
And about his middle three hundred crowns:
"Wheresoever thou lands, information technology volition bury thee."

The National Football League (NFL) has had only one caput coach with a Harvard caste, only he was an awfully good one. This yr, Marv Levy, A.M. '51, who led the Buffalo Bills to iv straight Super Bowl appearances--a feat matched by no other coach--was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in County, Ohio. At the ceremony, ESPN's Chris Berman introduced Levy past booming out the coach's signature line: "Where would you rather be than right here, right now?"

That question, embodying a Zen-like wisdom, helped focus athletes for the battle. Levy used it before every game for 44 years. His NFL teams compiled a regular-season record of 143-112 and went eleven-8 in the postseason. The Bills destroyed opponents with their famous "no-huddle" crime run by flashy quarterback Jim Kelly, and boasted stars like running back Thurman Thomas, receiver André Reed, and defensive cease Bruce Smith.

But perhaps Levy's greatest coaching achievement came in remobilizing the Bills each fall during their four-year Super Bowl run, since the team lost each of those large games. "Losing each ane was tremendously disappointing," says Levy, who was 65 when the streak began. "I'd like to be able to say that we won one of them, or all four, but that'south non going to alter. Still each time, our athletes showed their resilience--they got right back to piece of work. The only manner to win a Super Bowl is to go into it." Later on the first loss, a 20-19 heartbreaker to the New York Giants, the motorbus recalled a small-scale book of poetry his mother had given him when he went into the service, and typed out four lines from an unknown British poet:

Fight on, my men, Sir Andrew said,

A little I'm hurt but not even so slain.

I'll just lie down and bleed awhile,

And I'll rising and fight once again.

"Viii or ten players came upward and asked for a re-create of that poem," says Levy, who on another occasion cited Hemingway'southward definition of character as "grace under pressure," suggesting why one paper called him a "Renaissance homo on the sidelines."

His own college-football career took identify at Coe College in Iowa, where Levy was both a running back and a fellow member of Phi Beta Kappa. "I loved the coaches at that small college--their loftier ideals," he recalls. "They were models who embodied everything I wanted to be." After graduation in 1950, he "reluctantly trudged off" to Harvard Law Schoolhouse, only immediately found himself sitting in classes thinking, "I don't want to exist a lawyer--I can't accept this." Levy called home to tell his father he was dropping out of law school, and that what he really wanted to do was exist a football jitney. "At that place were 30 seconds of painful silence," he recalls, before his male parent said, "Be a good 1."

Levy quickly transferred into a master'south plan in history at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he studied under luminaries such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr., Merle Fainsod, and Sidney B. Fay, who advised Levy's thesis on the Lend-Charter program. The time to come leader too attended every Harvard football game. "I cannot avow that what I learned at Harvard prepared me precisely for a career equally a football omnibus," Levy wrote in a 1994 memoir for the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter, the Key Reporter. "Mayhap being in an environment where such earnest enthusiasm pervaded all the activities--intellectual and nonacademic--of those who fabricated up the Harvard community helped me understand how important it is to be associated with people who are intrinsically motivated."

Levy's coaching career began at St. Louis State Day Schoolhouse, and included higher jobs at Coe, New Mexico, William and Mary, and Berkeley, where time to come San Francisco 49er coach Pecker Walsh was his assistant. (In 1970 Levy would be a finalist for the Harvard head coaching chore that ultimately went to Joe Restic.) In 1978 he got his first NFL head coaching job with the Kansas Urban center Chiefs and joined the Bills in 1986, staying through the 1997 season. When Levy took charge of the New Mexico program, he was the youngest head bus of a major college team in America, and by 1994 he had get the NFL'due south oldest head coach. "Challenge my coaching accomplishments if you wish," he wrote in the memoir. "But my stamina, at to the lowest degree, defies criticism."

"I went into football game considering I enjoyed information technology," he says. "You are surrounded past these slap-up role models, playing a game that's energizing--and that's your life's work? How lucky tin can you become?"

(by the way, the poem is really a ballad almost a Scottish Captain killed by the British, a true story remembered as a vocal, but that is some other story for another 24-hour interval.)

lyonsvaniffew.blogspot.com

Source: https://leasingnews.org/Poetry-football/Fight_on.htm

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