In my first year of high school, our baseball team played at Worthington Field. Our football team played at the Worthington Park complex. My first high school PE teacher was "Coach Worthington."

It didn't occur to me that this man, Glen "Zeus" Worthington, was the man after whom my schoolboy field of dreams had been named. I just remember thinking he was really old.

He was 61.

During my junior year, I walked into the cafeteria for lunch just as Coach Worthington toppled backward, off his chair. He was dead by the time an ambulance arrived. I just stood there, young and dumb.

His coaching whistle was still around his neck.

I strongly remember reading his obituary in the next day's newspaper. Zeus Worthington might have been the finest athlete in the first half-century of Utah, 1900-1950. He was a four-year letterman for the Utah State Aggies in football, basketball and track. He had been coaching at my high school for 30 years, and I didn't know a thing about him.

The obituary mentioned that in addition to coaching three sports at Logan High School, he was also chairman of the Logan Golf and Country Club, director of the city's summer recreation program and was looking forward to retirement.

But at 61, he was lying on the cafeteria floor, dead, surrounded by a bunch of nave high school kids who hadn't taken the time to appreciate what the "old coach" had accomplished.

I later met his son, Jack, who traded at my dad's gas station, and I remember Jack Worthington telling me his dad died of far more than a heart attack. He had died from the accumulation of stress, almost all of it self-imposed, a lifetime of coaching three sports in which Glen Worthington did not compromise his standards. He literally lived and died for his school.

When I heard that UA softball coach Mike Candrea was taken by ambulance from Sunday's UA-ASU game, I felt the same sense of dread that overwhelmed me 40 years ago in the cafeteria at Logan High School.

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