Despite these limitations, the Hurricanes were a consistently decent team for our first two seasons, and we won the league championship in our third season. I flat-out loved being a coach. One time we played a team that outclassed us by far in talent, coached by Bill Burton, the father of the future director Tim Burton, who was Clint’s age. Mr. Burton was a former professional baseball player who served as one of the administrators of the Burbank Parks and Rec department. He had a buzz cut and looked like a marine. We were all kind of scared of him.
Despite his militaristic appearance, Mr. Burton had boys on his team with hair down to their shoulders, including his son Tim, who, improbable as it may sound, had some deft moves on the court. There was a chance that we could get slaughtered. But not too long before this game, USC’s coach, Bob Boyd, had made national headlines by nearly beating John Wooden’s powerhouse UCLA team, featuring the all-world center Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, then known as Lew Alcindor, by slowing down the game to a crawl: a strategy known as stall-ball.
Like the NCAA, the Burbank Bantam League did not have a shot clock. So I ordered the Hurricanes into a stall against Mr. Burton’s team. By the end of the first half, the score was 4–2 in favor of the Burtons. My strategy was working: we were behind but just barely, well within range of taking the lead.
But the parents in the stands were furious at me. Some of them shouted, “Ronny, let them play!” Others yelled less polite things. Dad let me stick to my guns until the fourth quarter, when I did indeed let the kids run and shoot. We lost 12–6, a respectable margin, but I still believe that we could have stall-balled our way to victory.
I coached the Howards Hurricanes all the way until I turned twenty, moving up through the age brackets with Clint and his friends. By the time they were in seventh grade, they had graduated from the Bantam League to the Junior High League, playing with hoops mounted at the regulation ten feet.
I occasionally got temperamental. There was a game where we were behind and the ref was a guy my age who I knew from playing baseball. I felt that too many calls were going against the Hurricanes. “You’re killing me, Ed,” I shouted at the guy, pacing the sidelines like a madman. “You’re blowing it, over and over again!” Ed, very sensibly, told me to sit down.
“Yeah?” I said, going full Bobby Knight. “Give me a T!”
“Fine, T,” Ed said.
“Give me another T!,” I shouted.
“T!” said Ed.
My face nearly as red as my hair, I screamed, “I’m gone!” and stomped off. Dad had to follow me out and place a hand on each shoulder to calm me down. The best I can explain this uncharacteristic outburst is that I had seen a coach go ballistic on TV, and the actor in me overtook the coach. I never let this happen again.
It’s extraordinary, how well my stint coaching these kids prepared me for my directing career. I have found that I work best and achieve the most by tailoring a plan to the strengths of the people with whom I am collaborating, rather than rigidly adhering to some preconceived Ron Howard Method. There is no such method. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that I don’t have what you’d call an authorial signature, and why my films have been so varied in tone and subject matter. Coaching also taught me one of the most important attributes for a filmmaker: patience. I saw kids struggle through half the season before suddenly emerging as quality players once everything clicked for them. I saw my strategies fail in multiple games before they succeeded. It’s the same when I develop and direct a film. The first few drafts of a screenplay can seem hopeless until the writer suddenly turns a corner. A challenging scene bedevils the actors and me alike until we hit upon a solution. Intuitively, I still apply the lessons in leadership I learned fifty years ago to the movies and TV shows I make now.
CLINT
Ron could easily have become a head basketball coach at the high school or college level. It wasn’t just that he was good at teaching the dorkier guys specific skills, like how to box out your opponent when you’re going for the rebound. It was how he encouraged his players and celebrated their successes. When our second-string center grabbed a rebound in a live game, Coach Ron was the first to slap the kid’s hand as he ran up the court on offense, saying, “Now that’s how you do it!”