Nick TheslofThe grandmother of him learned to make the skate to glaze roughly when he learned to walk, which has not really proven itself as a great life skill since theselof played professional football, not hockey.
But there was another lesson what is learned from her grandmother simply by being near her. And it turned out to be infinitely more precious.
“She was my example,” said Theslof, deputy coach of the Galaxy. “She was simply inspired by watching her move and talk about it because she was a little different. You don't understand it very well, but you want to be at this level.
“This is something that I did very young. I wanted to try to achieve and be good as my grandmother. ”
We must all strive to achieve and be good as Vivi-Anne HultenAn Olympic medalist and 10 times a national skater champion in the 1920s and 30 years which was once greeted as the largest female athlete in Sweden. However, Theslof remembers his grandmother not for his medals, that he remains exposed in his house in Lakewood, but for a simple act of courage and deep character which came to define it.
While Hulten approached the podium of the medal after finishing third in the 1936 Winter GamesShe was told that she should make a Nazi salute to honor the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. She refused.
“At the time, for a woman to defend herself in this environment in Germany, the quantity of integrity and bravery it took her, it is difficult for me to explain,” said Theslof. “She had a way to achieve at that time. It was not a question of skating. It was his integrity. “
Hulten, who left Sweden for the United States and taught skating in Carolines, Tennessee and Minnesota, finally followed her family in southern California where she Died in 2003 At the age of 91. At that time, Nick's days of game had been finished with a serious injury from Achilles and he was at the second stop of a coach career who would take him to eight teams in four countries, a career in which he would train a World Cup with Germany and won a title of MLS in Toronto.
Deputy coach of Galaxy Nick Theslof during his stay with the Toronto FC in 2017.
(Icon sportswire / icon sportswire via getty images)
He could win another MLS cup this fall with the galaxy, which Saturday came closer to a big step To win their first title from the Western Conference in 13 years. But like her grandmother, Theslof will not allow her career to be defined by brilliant prices that will lose their varnish over time.
“What is important to me is that everyone in this building knows who I am and they trust me, they know that I can help them,” said Theslof, 48, who won a national title at the UCLA and played in the youth program of Dutch giant personnel PSV Eindhoven, but remains among the most unknown members of coach staff who understands three all-stars and three all-stars.
“My name is not synonymous with the things my colleagues have done,” he said. “I'm really happy for them. But I am as happy as I am different. ”
In this case, different does not mean lower. And the colleagues of theselofs are well aware of what it brings to work.
“Nick's superpower, his ability to understand how the individual player works with the ball, is spectacular”, ” The Galaxy coach Greg Vanney said of his old UCLA teammate. “Nick does a lot of players' management and glances, how they move and how they move with the ball, in order to create more technical efficiency or improvements. It is one of the best I have ever experienced.”
It was also something that theselofs said that he had learned from his grandmother, who was 64 years old at birth.
“Growing up, when I watched my grandmother teaching ice skating and teaching humans how to play, I have always been so surprised by the way she looked at the body and balance and the little technical things that allowed people to perform better than a normal person would not see,” he said, seated under an umbrella in the Dignity Health Sports competition last week. “She would take time and really slow things down and made sure that humans moved properly. I found it fascinating.”
Theslof grew by playing hockey in Minnesota where her grandmother, who had turned with the Ice Capades, headed a skating school whose customers understood the American Hockey team of the Gold Medal of Herb Brooks.
“One afternoon, she came to us and Brooks was with her,” recalls Theslof. “And we are going to a hockey store and buy a stick. I had a very unique life and very unique experiences. ”
Although Theslof’s grandmother had statues erected in her honor in Hungary and the World Artistic Skating Museum and at the Colorado renown temple and played for the King and Queen of Sweden at the age of 80, she probably remembers her snob of Hitler and her spat with legendary Norwegian Ckater Sonja Henie.
After having received the order to greet the German dictator, Hulten told the investigators of the decades later, she replied saying: “I am Swedish; I don't do that. “
“I just watched it,” she said. “It was a scary.”
The longtime quarrel with Henie, triple gold medalist and world champion 10 times, was much more personal and vicious, with the two parties exchanging barbed wire insults. And although the rivalry came to define skating during a generation, Theslof said that her grandmother had the last laugh.
“Sonja Henie was going out with my grandfather,” he said about Gene Theslof, who was Henie's skating partner before leaving her to marry Hulten.
Although Hulten helped lead Nick Theslof on the ice as a boy, he quickly went to football and at the age of 15, he was in the Netherlands playing in Eindhoven. He returned to the United States to win an NCAA championship at the UCLA under Sigi Schmid Before the injuries forced him to train.
“People said:” Well, you have a good eye for coaching “, said Theslof. “I knew that my grandmother was led to a lot. For me, the coach was the second best to play. I feel like I grew up with a kind of coach, teaching, performance for me. ”
In his first job, as an assistant at Ohio Wesleyan, he won a Division III title of the NCAA and then worked under Jurgen Klinnsman with the German national team and Bayern Munich, then in Chivas USA.
In 2014, he joined Vanney staff at Toronto FC, and both have been together since.
“There is a bit of a version in coaching, then you go out on the other side of performance and it feels good,” he said. “I am proud not only of the successes with which the teams I had had, but I am also very proud of the players with whom I have established relationships.”
⚽ You have read the last episode of soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and highlights unique stories. Listen to Baxter in the episode of this week of “Podcast Corner of the Galaxy.
