There are people in our lives whose influence is significant but fleeting. They’re there one moment, often at an opportune one, then they’re gone. Their presence and absence are a sequitur to something more lasting. 

Coach Jim Petty was one of those people for me.

I read the news of his disappearance on Facebook. A FB friend had posted a link. Coach Petty’s truck, swept away by “swift-moving water,” was gone, with him in it. It wouldn’t be found for another week. He was still in it, submerged twenty feet in the White River. 

The comments from FB friends, all former high school classmates of mine, spoke of Mr. Petty, the basketball coach, the English teacher, the health teacher, the coach who the school let leave, and the one who went on to greater coaching success at a larger, urban high school.

I didn’t know him in any of these other roles. He was my track and cross country coach. He coached me in track for two years and cross country for one. 

My first encounter with Mr. Petty was March 1976, half-way into the first two weeks of track training. The entire team ran the country roads in freezing weather to get in shape for the upcoming season. We had to because our cinder track was covered in oddments of snow and slush. 

After a three-mile run, I sat in the locker room, trying to dry my worn Adidas basketball shoes enough to wear home. They were now my running shoes. Coach Petty walked in and scanned the room of the ten to fifteen stragglers who were keeping him from going home. 

His habit was to observe, eyes narrowed, a tight-lipped smile conveying pleasure in the moment or maybe only amusement. This time, though, he walked up to me. He asked quietly what I planned to do on the track team. I hadn’t given it much thought since deciding to try out, but my plans were to pole vault. I shrugged and told him as much. 

 Without losing a beat, Coach Petty shook his head. I should run distances, he said, with enough persuasion for me to know he wasn’t offering an option or even a suggestion as much as telling me of his plans for me. 

The next day, he handed me a pair of running shoes. They were almost new. He told me I should try to stay with the distance runner. I did, as we finished up our road workouts and moved onto the track. My goal was to stay as close to our best two runner as I could. The three of us plus a couple of other freshmen were our team’s distance runners. 

I ran my first two-mile race in a tri-meet with Mt. Vernon and Hamilton Southeastern high schools. I passed our best distance runner at the mile mark and the Southeastern’s best with a half mile to go. I had no idea what I was doing. I knew, though, I could run forever if I had to. Coach Petty was at the finish line to congratulate me.

Our top runner, a senior, despised me from that moment on. Our top miler, Jeff, embraced me. He cheered me on like no other teammate in any other sport ever had. He showed me what it meant to be among other runners, wanting them to be as successful as me. 

The following fall, I ran away from the field in my first cross-country invitational run.  Coach Petty told me if I kept it up I could be the best runner the school ever had. He would know, I thought. He had coached the best basketball team and the best basketball player the school had up to that time. I believed him.

Coach Petty wouldn’t be around to see his prediction come true. He left after my sophomore track season. I ran that spring with a broken arm. For six weeks, I had a full-arm cast, then a half-cast for three weeks. I didn’t miss a race, and I usually won. Coach Petty would laugh and say other runners were afraid to pass me because of the cast, which swung wildly at my side, catching more than a few other runners in the chest.

Coach Petty was the first coach since Moon Bailly, my Little League baseball coach, to see something in me that not even I could see. His smile, assuredness, and genuine enthusiasm for what I was doing defined for me what it meant to be a distance runner. It was supposed to be fun but done with commitment and purpose. Success was to be celebrated; failure shaken off. 

The coaches that followed—Coach McKinney, Coach Griffey, and Coach Maddox—reinforced and built on what Coach Petty instilled in me. I owe a greater debt to them, but without Coach Petty, there would not have been a them.

A week after I saw the Facebook post announcing Coach Petty’s disappearance, I Googled “James Petty.” By then, his body had been found. 

I scrolled down. After three pages of nothing but news reports of his disappearance and death, I found a few other mentions. Some were other, “James Petty’s.” The ones I knew were about him included a mention on the Butler University website about his athlete days in the mid 1960s. He was selected for the Butler University Athletic Hall of Fame in 2003. The announcement read, “James Petty was a varsity letterwinner in both track and basketball at Butler. He was a Big State, Little State and ICC conference champion in the long jump and triple jump in 1966, and he placed fourth in the NAIA National Track Meet that same year. He was a two-time track M.V.P. and played guard on Butler's basketball teams, 1962-66.” 

The other mention was of an arrest notice from 2012. He would have been 68 then. What he was arrested for and what subsequently happened were not given. To find out more would have required paying for the information. I didn’t need to know. 

The perp photo was of a beaten, weathered, maybe drunk, man. All perps look drunk in their mug shots though. And not all perps are guilty. And whether a person is or not, one arrest or conviction does not a life make. These are not excuses. They are facts. But there it was, on the Internet. If that was all someone knew about Coach Petty, well then…

I share these two mentions not to sway my or anyone else’s memories of James Alvin Petty, the teacher, coach, role model, or whatever we choose to remember him as. Google searches, Facebook posts, and AI are poor determiners of a life lived. Left to Google, the major event in Coach Petty’s life was the week he went missing in his truck and was found dead at the bottom of a river. 

I barely knew Jim Petty, and he barely knew me, but what I do know, and what I feel about him, is so much more than what Google knows. Yet, my knowledge of him hardly defines the life he lived or captures who he was in his totality. But isn’t that the case for all us? What I do know about him mattered to a fourteen-year-old kid and matters now and for that, in memoriam, thank you, Coach Petty.