The coach, who died Friday after being shot in his office, was a champion for Oakland and his players.
Fame is not only fickle but weird, and being a California community-college football coach might be the least likely path to achieving it. It’s a rough landscape: no scholarships, no dorms for players, no media coverage. Nobody really wants to be there. It’s a stop along the way for an often-colorful contingent of wanderers and seekers and fighters, those who believe in themselves despite all available evidence. And what they’re seeking is pretty consistent: someone who shares their belief, or is at least willing to entertain it.
John Beam did more than entertain it. He created it, fostered it, and held onto it with a fierce defiance. He could take your belief and make it his belief, and vice versa. Beam spent 45 years teaching and coaching in Oakland, first at Skyline High and then Laney College, and there wasn’t one day in those 45 years where you could tell where the coaching began and the teaching ended. He bound it all up and threw it at the world in a big bundle of energy and charisma and smarts.
Beam, 66, died Friday after he was shot Thursday in his office at Laney. Police arrested Cedric Irving Jr., 27, early Friday morning. Irving was charged with murder Monday. Police say the killing was a targeted attack, and that the two were acquainted but not close. Irving played football at Skyline long after Beam had left, and there is no indication he played at Laney. None of it makes sense.
Beam retired from coaching after last season and remained as the school’s athletic director. Beam and I first met more than 30 years ago, and I’ve sat in that office several times, the one with the wall covered with framed and signed jerseys from the players he coached who went on to play in the NFL. The office is the first one on the left at the top of an open staircase in the school’s field house. The door was always open.
His death, and the circumstances surrounding it, rippled across the country in ways that are difficult to explain. How did this happen? How did this man captivate this city and this region? How did his death resonate throughout the country, to the point where Warriors coach Steve Kerr wore a John Beam T-shirt for his pregame press conference Friday night and began his remarks with a testament to Beam’s importance in the community? Fewer than eight hours after his death was announced, memorials on electronic billboards along the 880 freeway sent his face out into the night with a message that read, A Life of Love and Impact.
Much of it is attributable to his star turn on the Netflix docuseries «Last Chance U», which chronicled Laney’s 2019 season and let the world know what most in Oakland knew long before cameras showed up. He was the embodiment of the biggest compliment his world had to offer: He was real. One syllable — Beam — could be used as a test in Oakland.
«You know Beam?»
Everyone knew Beam.
He understood the rhythms of Oakland better than any politician or business owner. He understood how Oakland’s gentrification made it nearly impossible for his players to afford to live in the town, so he fought for a designated parking lot with 24-hour security to allow students who are forced to sleep in their vehicles to do so safely. When Laney started a program to teach students how to build mini-houses, he tried to figure out a way for some of his players to be case studies to gauge the program’s effectiveness. He boomed at whoever would listen that it was unfair that he couldn’t buy a player who hadn’t eaten in two days a Cup O’ Noodles without it being deemed an impermissible benefit.
