The Leadership Story Of Bleachers By John Grisham

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Introduction
Most people think that being a leader is all about prestige, loyalty, or fame. While being a leader certainly is a great confidence and social status booster, there is more to being a leader than these. Being a leader requires passion, dedication, time, effort, and most importantly hard work. I would like to make myself believe that leaders are made and not born and that hard work can spell the difference between an immature and a holistically effective leader. The objective of this paper is to discuss by knowledge, belief system, and perception of leadership in relation to Bleachers by John Grisham which outlines the leadership story of Coach Eddie Rake and how he handled his team through thick and thin and through the greatest leadership challenges, towards success; to outline which character in the story I see myself in; and to characterize what type of leader I want me to be not in the future, but as early as now.
Background of the Story
Bleachers is a brief story about a former high school football superstar in the Town of Messina, Neely Crenshaw, his American football teammates during his time, and their legendary coach Eddie Rake whom Neely and his teammates had an intense love and hate type of relationship with. The setting of the story was in the town of Messina. The story focused on the life of the Protagonist, Neely Crenshaw, although at some point the lives of his other high school football teammates get mentioned in the story too, and how the treatments, discipline, and training he received from his former high school football coach, Eddie Rake, created an impact to his life not only as a person who leisurely played American football during his high school days, but as a grown up man. The first scenes...

... middle of paper ...

... skills set the type of aggressiveness that Coach Eddie Rake used in training his players, disciplining them, and managing the team overall; the democratic spirit that Neely Crenshaw unconsciously instills in his leadership style and the way how he raises his colleagues’ morale especially in the toughest situations. As a said earlier, their leadership styles and qualities lie on both ends of the leadership spectrum—they are polar, which means that if I use the strength of one to cover for the weakness of the other, an ideal leader could emerge. In reality, I do not expect myself to be this kind of leader in the future because it is too perfect: a democratic leader who could get the job done just like how an authoritarian leader could. However, if I could at least get somewhere near that level of leadership that would have been a great achievement already in itself.

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