 |
 |
|
Keith Dorney, a master’s student in education at the Santa Rosa campus, with a copy of his recently published memoir, Black and Honolulu Blue.
|
|
School of Education Student Writes About NFL Memories
Keith Dorney, a master’s student in the School of Education, always wanted to be a writer. But his “practical” career opportunities waylaid his plans.
As a first-round draft pick in the National Football League in 1979, the 6-foot-5-inch, 285-pound Dorney felt he couldn’t pass up a professional football career and played nine years for the Detroit Lions.
“I look at my tenure in the NFL as a deterrent to me in finding out what I wanted to do,” he said. “I knew football wasn’t going to be an end in itself.”
Retirement from football threw him into a new career search. He took on various odd jobs, such as working as an extra in the movie “The Animal” and trying his hand at grape crushing for a Sonoma County winery. Both experiences served to help him jump-start a career in writing when he turned them into newspaper articles for a local paper. He then tried fiction, writing a novel about a former NFL player who stops a terrorist, but publishers rejected it. It wasn’t until a friend suggested he turn his NFL experience into a book that Dorney’s career in publishing took off.
Black and Honolulu Blue: In the Trenches of the NFL, a memoir of Dorney’s football career, was published in September by Triumph Books. Dorney said it’s been a great experience to travel the country not as a pro player but as a writer focusing on the game. “More than one teammate has called me up in tears,” he said. “It pays tribute to a lot of people.”
But writing is only one of the 45-year-old Dorney’s newfound careers. The burly former Pro Bowl player is also an English teacher and football coach at Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa. Teaching has become a passion for him, especially after enrolling in USF’s master’s in education program last year. “I get to learn new teaching techniques and try them immediately,” he said.
Dorney has several more book projects in mind, including resuscitating his old novel. He also hopes to turn his USF master’s thesis, about how to find a career, into a book on time and life management.
But with book tours, coaching, and teaching, Dorney said his schedule can be tight. “It’s more stressful now—when I was playing against a 6-foot-7-inch, 300-pound freak of nature, that was a little less stressful.”
|
