The coaching life can be tough. 
Wayne McDuffie masterminded Florida State’s high-octane offense in the 1980s. He was part of Georgia’s 1980 championship team, Vince Dooley’s offensive line coach. I heard him speak at a Bulldog Club meeting in Columbia in the ‘90s. He spoke deliberately and was intense beyond description, an iron man. 
He’d coach for Ray Goff, too. In the August 1996 Sporting News, Bill Minutaglio wrote “The Coach, The Players, Their Demons,” describing how McDuffie’s life spiraled down. 
1994—“I really thought I wouldn’t survive this year. I’m so exhausted from trying to put pieces together that don’t fit,” Wayne McDuffie was telling his wife of more than two decades. It was the end of another grueling season as offensive coordinator at UGA. “I’m trying to make something from nothing. I really thought I would die. I thought I would have a heart attack and die because I worked so hard.” The team had what was, for Wayne McDuffie, a disastrous season. The Bulldogs went 6-4-1.
In Tales from the 1980 Georgia Bulldogs, Dooley discussed what a great coach McDuffie was and how he couldn’t turn off his intensity. They had to send him on recruiting trips Thursdays and Fridays. “The players would be so stressed out after Sunday through Wednesday with Wayne that they needed a few days to build their confidence back up.” 
Families suffer, too. The ex-wife of a former coach told me she divorced her husband because she could not take the fan abuse. “I couldn’t go the grocery store without strangers walking up and criticizing my husband. I couldn’t go anywhere without being harassed. It just got to be too much.”
Minutaglio: “Sometimes, the assistant coaches at Florida State, where he coached for most of the 1980s, would hear a strange flapping sound echoing from one of the football offices. It could be 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. There would be Wayne McDuffie asleep on a conference table, his Clint Eastwood face and body oddly illuminated by the flickering light coming from the movie projector. The film he had been studying was spinning wildly in the reels. But, when someone woke him up, he would wordlessly move to the football field where he had ordered his offensive lineman to show up before sunrise.”
Georgia guard Jim Blakewood: “I can’t imagine there being a tougher coach. We felt like nobody in the league worked harder than we did. The teams we were getting ready to play couldn’t survive our practices. The games were a piece of cake.”
From 1989 to 1995, Ray Goff chalked up 46 wins, 34 losses, and one tie. Goff was fired and with him went the coaching staff, Wayne McDuffie included. “McDuffie watched members of the old staff move on to other jobs. Wayne jogged in his golf-course neighborhood, pushing himself hard. He lifted weights. And, with his wife, he wrestled with plans for the future. He hoped a professional team would come calling. He had feelers in with the Dolphins. But his birthday (December 1) and the holidays passed, as did the big bowl games, the pro playoffs and the Super Bowl, and Wayne McDuffie was still unemployed. He was 51 years old. The chart, the map, had led nowhere.” Football was all McDuffie had known. His phone never rang. 
1996, February—After three days in Winter Haven, Florida, writing a cover story for Ski magazine, I’m driving along I-4 when the radio crackled. At the age of 51, McDuffie shot himself to death. He left behind three kids and his wife of 26 years. 
A former player said he “couldn’t stop thinking of Coach McDuffie, of the imposing figure he cut between the green grass and blue sky, of the wonderful way he affected my life.”
Nor can I. A coach’s life ended with time still on the clock.