What the public saw was an intense coach who produced winning teams. What they may not know are the stories behind those Friday nights.
Former players of Beckwith’s noted his ability to maximize potential. He could motivate players to play as a team; however, Beckwith could spot individual talents in order to help his boys succeed on the field and in life beyond high school.
Fairness was one of Beckwith’s strengths, said Mickey Bowser, who was an offensive and defensive lineman at Kittanning in the 1980s.
"No one was above the team. Harry was very dictatorial and definitive in the way he taught and coached, but you wanted to do a good job for him," Bowser said.
Doing a good job required substantial effort and desire. As a former Air Force veteran and state police trooper with over a decade of experience, Bowser is no stranger to physical conditioning.
However, he will tell you no one outdid Beckwith.
Bowser says, "He made you want to work harder for him. He was a motivator. He exuded confidence and it rubbed off."
Former Kittanning and NFL lineman, Mitch Frerotte, wasn’t that confident when Beckwith dropped him off as a rookie walk-on player for the Buffalo Bills training camp.
"My mother was in the hospital at the time, so Harry and Sam (Panchik) drove me to Buffalo," Frerotte says. "Neither of them said a word the whole trip. They just unloaded my stuff when I got there. I was terrified and all Harry said was, ‘Attract some attention tomorrow’ and left."
Frerotte heeded the advice and leveled Jim Haslett, then a linebacker and now coach of the New Orleans Saints, on the playing field the next morning. Frerotte spent several successful seasons with the Bills during their glory years, playing in three Super Bowls .
Bo Durkac’s post-secondary sports career was all about baseball; however, when he was in high school, he played many sports.
Durkac played quarterback under Beckwith with the Armstrong Central Cougars during the short-lived consolidation of Kittanning and Ford City high schools.
Durkac, who played in the Arizona Diamondbacks minor league system and now coaches baseball at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, recalls the first locker room talk that Beckwith had with the new Cougar team.
"We were all sitting in the locker room and Harry said that he realized that some of us had been sports rivals since we were 10 or 11," Durkac said. "He then said that if anyone had a problem playing together as a team, they could leave and he wouldn’t think any less of them."
Durkac remembers one Kittanning area player leaving, after which, Beckwith continued, "From here on, it’s my way or the highway. There is no Ford City and no Kittanning. There is just one team — the Cougars."
According to Durkac, it was reported at the time that athletic teams of merged schools usually have a poor first season — with especially poor first games.
"The best prediction any sportswriter gave us was to lose our first game by 17, but Harry set the tone from the beginning." The Armstrong Central Cougars traveled to Indiana, Pa., to hand the Indians a 30-0 defeat.
Miami Dolphins quarterback Gus Frerotte’s picture may hang over the Beckwith mantle now, but he did not get special treatment as a Ford City Saber.
He played under his now father-in-law during his high school career and says, "Harry didn’t have favorites. He played whoever was best at that particular position. And if you didn’t see the best player out there, and he wasn’t injured or sick, he was probably sidelined for not respecting someone. He may have been disrespectful to a teacher, coach, teammate, or himself."
Aside from the life lessons learned on the field are the other stories that former Beckwith players tell — from getting rides to practice or their first filet mignon courtesy of the coach.
Many still maintain communication with their former coach and say that they hope that they are considered friends.
Beckwith is hesitant to discuss his accomplishments, although his lifetime record was 150-111-9, including a 121-77-5 mark as Kittanning’s coach. He had eight appearances in the WPIAL playoffs.
He will tell you, though, that when he was hired to be Kittanning’s head coach in 1974, the program had seen a lot of ups and downs.
"My two initial goals were to build a program that was consistent in winning and to help send more players to college," he says. His career record as well as induction into the Pennsylvania Coaches Association Hall of Fame say it all about the first goal.
There are no intricate stat sheets or trophies to verify Beckwith’s accomplishment of his second goal. The tribute to this aspiration is people.
Beckwith once calculated that he helped to send 150 players to college through a football program — and he made that count almost 10 years before he retired.
Beckwith maximized his students’ potential by following up on all letters of interest from colleges and developing a rapport with collegiate recruiters. He worked with them to find a school that was the best fit.
Not everyone could aspire to be "The Bus" or "Big Ben" and Beckwith was a realist who helped them continue to play a game they loved and provided the money for a college education.
Beckwith called plays as he saw them, and while this may have cost him popularity contests, he said what he saw to be the truth.
William Shakespeare would not be considered an authority on the tradition of high school football, but he knew the stuff of which this local legend is made of when he said, "No legacy is so rich as honesty."
(From the Kittanning Leader Times - September 13, 2005 - Reprinted With Permission)
If a playbook of his career is published, an appropriate title could be "Maximize Potential."