Viktor
Well-known member
- Mar 19, 2019
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Mike Michels recalled the way that his father and Grant would use racquetball as a metric for gauging speed, footwork and agility. It also became somewhat of a litmus test on the mettle of people they wanted to evaluate.
“It ultimately degenerated into, ‘Let’s hit this guy with the ball over and over again until we get a reaction out of him,’ ” Mike Michels said. “When you hit him 15 or 20 times, often in the same spot, they’re either going to respond with, ‘I’m never going to play here,’ or ‘OK, Coach, watch this.’ ”
Bob Lurtsema attested as much when he took hold of the microphone, joking he still has a welt on his backside. Lurtsema said he and training camp roommate Doug Sutherland were able to play some pranks on Michels during bed checks in Mankato.
Michels didn’t back off in backyard basketball games, either.
“[Neighbors] told me that when they went down to play basketball with my father in the driveway, they came away as if they had been in a fight because my father played basketball according to Philadelphia rules, which meant if there’s no official, there’s no rules,” Mike Michels recalled. “Everything pretty much short of rugby was allowed.”
Neighbor Fran Heitzman, who founded Twin Cities nonprofit Bridging, verified that shooting baskets soon became a “knockdown, drag-out game because I happened to get in his way one time, ‘Oh, so now you want to play dirty, huh?’ ”
Family man for multiple families
Heitzman relayed a hilarious anecdote before saying, “If I had picked a neighbor out of the whole world that I would love more, there’s nobody that I would love more than John Michels.”
“There was one time that he was mowing his lawn, and his lawnmower quit,” Heitzman recalled. “He just went over to my garage and got mine. When he brought it back, he said, ‘You know, this is the closest you’re going to get to communal living.’ ”