Sunday, April 1, 2001
Coach Diaz Skippa Diaz was in trouble. Bad trouble.
ready to help city
Legendary Farrington football
By Kalani Simpson
coach Skippa Diaz shares his
mentoring touch with all of Oahu
Star-BulletinThe legendary coach was bigger than life. His handshake could crush you. His voice could scare you. His tough love could steer you straight.
Or else.
But now something was horribly wrong. Something even bigger than the 350-pound mountain of a man.
"I was just laying down dead, you know what I mean?" he said.
Skippa Diaz was in trouble.
The man who was mayor knew who Skippa Diaz was.
"Skippa is sort of a legend in Kalihi," Jeremy Harris said. "He's touched the lives of more kids than anybody I knew of."
A second opinion?
"You know he's a legend here, ah, in Kalihi," said Agenhart Ellis, the man who had hired Diaz at Farrington, where Ellis served as athletic director for several years. "Not too many people don't know who he is."
There's that word again. Legend.
And so yes, the man who was mayor knew very well who Skippa Diaz was. You don't get to be mayor without knowing who a man of that stature is.
So whenever they came across each other, the man who was mayor made sure to say hello. "I didn't know him very well," Harris said. "I would be able to shake his hand, if I saw him at the Quarterback Club. I knew more about him than I knew him, you could say."
But then Skippa Diaz was in trouble. He was in the hospital. He was sick, very sick. Later, it was discovered the coach had sleep apnea, and in the meantime it was shutting down his heart, it was killing his organs. It looked like the end was near for the big man.
"We almost lost 'em," Ellis said.
So the man who was mayor decided to go to the hospital. He wasn't a close friend. But Diaz was a pillar in the community, and he was the mayor. "I just thought the mayor stopping by, offering a prayer, it seemed like the right thing to do," he said.
And then Skippa Diaz got better. He lost over 100 pounds. He felt good. And he remembered.
"It was a really nice gesture the mayor extended to my wife," Diaz said. "He came by to ask my wife if she needed help."
That had meant a lot. The coach was touched. The mayor had found a friend.
And Skippa Diaz is a good friend to have.
"The mayor asked me for help. I said, 'You need help, I help,' " Diaz said.
And that's how, after 30 years as a teacher and coach, the local legend took a city job. He became the deputy director of the Parks and Recreation Department in Mayor Jeremy Harris' cabinet.
The coach was famous for his work with kids. Good kids. Bad kids. Problem kids. Didn't matter. The coach could work with you. The coach could get through to you. The coach would set you straight.
You could be the biggest, baddest, roughest, toughest character in the neighborhood. But no one was bigger, badder, rougher or tougher than Skippa Diaz. He instilled discipline. His word was the law, and he laid it down hard.
Before football games he would tape up his fingers, so he, too, would be ready for action. So he could grab the shoulder pads of his players -- not to hit, not to shake, but to hold. So that he had their full attention. And his players, big, bad, tough as they were, gave him their full attention.
Skippa Diaz is a big, tough, loving E.F. Hutton. When he talks, you'd better listen.
And then his lessons begin to sink in. Lessons about humility. Education. Attitude. Responsibility. Teamwork. Things his mother taught him, Diaz said.
"He's a hard man," said Lance Samuseva, a former Farrington player now on the football team at UH. "He taught me a lot. He taught me how to be disciplined. He taught me how to be humble. He taught me how to be nice to people."
He was a hard man. But no one cared more. The kids could see it. This coach was different. As a teacher, he often taught special motivation classes, with the kids that can be more difficult to teach, more difficult to reach. But he reached them.
"He came up the hard way, too," Ellis said. "He understood. He knew the culture.
"As hard as he was, he's really soft. He got even the hard-core kids to see the value of an education."
Mario Fatafehi smiles now. He's just a big, happy man. He's married. He went on to college. He's expected to be picked in the NFL draft this month.
Fatafehi said that when he was growing up, he was headed for trouble. He was trouble. He would steal. "I see something I like, I take 'em, I run." He would fight. He would drink and smoke and who knows what else. He was on the wrong path. But then Diaz challenged him to play football, and then Diaz steered him straight.
"Now I'm a schoolboy," he said last season as a senior at Kansas State University. "I'm trying to make it and so far I am."
Fatafehi credits Skippa Diaz, but Diaz won't take the credit. "He taught me," Diaz said.
Fatafehi taught him the importance of sticking with a kid, of spending plenty of time with him, of persistence. Besides, he said, there were a lot of people that helped Mario, and Mario also helped himself. "He's a good man," the coach said.
But there are more stories, other stories. In 30 years, too many to count.
"He's got a lot of kids that weren't even thinking about school to go to college," Ellis said.
And so the mayor knew he wanted Skippa Diaz to be on his team.
Everyone wanted Skippa Diaz on their team. "He's always been well sought after," Ellis said. "Everyone wanted a piece of him."
He had been doing good things at Farrington, but politicians wanted him to introduce his impact to a larger audience. They wanted people to see that they believed what Skippa believed. They wanted a local legend on their side.
"It's big, of course," said the mayor. "Skippa's built such a reputation. Skippa opens up all kinds of doors for us."
The mayor's director of customer services, Carol Costa, tells a story of the new cabinet taking a retreat to Turtle Bay. They would walk around, or ride a trolley car. There were all these important city officials, but the only one people recognized was Skippa Diaz. They all wanted to shake his hand, Costa said. Everywhere they went, people waved and gave him shaka and shouted his name.
This is what everyone wanted. Diaz had endorsed people and political causes before. He had backed the mayor and the governor and others in the past. But he always returned home. He always went back to the kids at Farrington.
"He's been asked by them for years," Ellis said. "But he wanted to stay in the school. Lucky for us he stayed as long as he did."
This was different. Now he was retired. Now he was officially a member of the mayor's staff. Signed. Sealed. Delivered. And they were going to take full advantage of it. They were going to put him to work.
"He can step in and handle things you couldn't begin to train someone else for," Harris said.
Diaz said he's ready for this. He had been in the schools for just over 30 years, and that seemed like a nice round number. And he believes in the mayor. They had become close over the years, since that hospital visit. He believes in the mayor very strongly. He wants you to know that.
"I have established such a real high regard for our mayor because of all the great stuff he's doing for our island and our state," he said.
The mayor, he believes, is working toward giving all a high quality of life, and that's something Skippa Diaz knows a little bit about.
"I will do whatever is demanded," Diaz said. "If the mayor tells me to sweep the floor, I going sweep the floor."
No, Harris said. "He brings a whole new dimension to the job."
Diaz will be working with schools. He'll be working with sports. He'll be working with kids. He'll be a liaison with schools and athletic directors. He'll do outreach programs. He'll do special programs with kids and sports clinics. He will be doing many of the things he had been doing at Farrington, the things he did best. "Only now, he'll be doing them for the whole island," Harris said.
"This will be good for him," Ellis said.
Diaz agrees. It is good for him. "If you do everything for the right things -- people, people, people; kids, kids, kids -- you always get benefits."