Marv Levy started coaching football 47 years ago at St. Louis Country Day School, and he came full circle Wednesday.
The Hall of Fame coach, 91, was coaching children again, hammering home his motto, “Never give up,” with the Northbrook and Glenview children at Winkelman School.
Levy himself hasn’t given up. Twenty years after retiring tied for the record of oldest NFL coach, he’s still not sure he’s done standing on the sideline.
“You know, I’m never gonna close the door on anything,” Levy said. “I’m not campaigning to do it, but it’d still be exciting, sure.”
Levy coached the Buffalo Bills, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Montreal Alouettes, the Chicago Blitz and three college teams. His catch phrase is splashed across the cover of his new kids’ book, “Go Cubs Go, Baseball’s Never Give Up Story,” which he read in full to students and their parents.
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They bought up three cases of the book, and some of the proceeds will go to the Glenview school’s Parent-Teacher Club, president Karina Gitlevich said.
Levy has written several books for older students, perhaps surprising for a football coach, but not for a coach with a master’s degree in literature from Harvard. The new book is his first for the younger set, with illustrations by cartoonist Rob Peters.
The book is a story told by a bear named Bruno to his grandchildren, bear cubs Angela and Georgie.
“Bruno the bear loves his Chicago Cubs, and he loves his little cubby bear grandchildren, too,” read Levy. “He wants to teach them an important lesson: the Chicago Cubs never gave up.”
While he read, his two-year-old grandson, Georgie Alexopoulos, ran around in front of the stage. The boy’s sister Angela, 8, a Winkelman third grader, tried to corral him, mostly unsuccessfully, while their mother, Kim, flashed the book’s illustrations on a screen.
Kim Alexopoulos had arranged for Levy to come to Winkelman as a benefit for the school. She said she hopes to arrange similar excursions at other area grammar schools for her dad, a South Side native who lives in Lincoln Park with his wife, Fran.
Before he read, Levy revealed another full-circle in his life: on furlough from the U.S. Army Air Forces, he had attended the seventh game of the World Series in 1945, the last time the Cubs were in it.
“The line was out of sight, but they moved everybody in uniform up to the front, and I did get to see it,” he said. “You all know they lost the game. Everybody exiting the stadium that day said, ‘Wait ’til next year.'”
He was back at Wrigley Field in 2016, when they got behind but came back.
Levy, of course, knows something about getting to the championship game and coming away empty handed. He’s the only coach to bring a team — the Bills — to the Super Bowl four straight years. Famously, he lost all four.
“No team that lost the Super Bowl ever got back the next year,” he told kids crowding around his chair. “We did it four times.”
One child asked him what year he was installed in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and he answered, chuckling, “2001 — long before you were born.” Another asked who his favorite Cub was, and Levy mentioned Ernie Banks and “a guy named Gabby Hartnett.”
Both men played before most of their parents were born. Hartnett hit his famous “homer in the gloamin'” in September 1938, a walk-off hit that landed in the stands in a darkened Wrigley Field with two outs in the ninth and an 0-2 count. It propelled “the Cubs back into the World Series,” Levy read, “but sadly they still didn’t win. The New York Yankees did.”
Levy grinned and talked to the children calmly, and his daughter said that was the way he usually was when she was growing up.
“Before a big game, we were so stressed out, but he wasn’t,” she said. “He was always so prepared. He slept best the night before the game.”
Nothing much has changed. Levy said he planned to write more books, but he was ready for action, if the action was ready for him.
“Buy a team, and then you can hire me as a coach, OK?”
Twitter @IrvLeavitt