Coaching on canvas

From playbooks to paintbrushes, former LSU head football coach and athletic director Paul Dietzel has become quite an accomplished artist.

Dietzel became a Baton Rouge household name by leading LSU to a national championship in 1958, and he was the mastermind behind the stingy defense known as the Chinese Bandits.

After retiring for the third time, he and his wife Anne moved to Beach Mountain, N.C., to wile away their golden years. For more than 30 years the couple made the quaint mountain town their home, where the former coach of the year worked as a ski instructor. But after having a heart bypass 18 years ago, he was sidelined from the slopes and had to find a new hobby. He took art classes, trying both oils and acrylics before becoming adept with watercolors.

In 2003 the couple moved back to Baton Rouge after suffering through a terrible blizzard, coincidentally the same year Nick Saban led LSU to its second national championship. The 82-year-old continues to paint, and his work will hang through Christmas at the West Baton Rouge Museum in Port Allen.

It is hard to distinguish between Dietzel the coach and Dietzel the artist, which is particularly evident as he shares his artistic journey sitting among shelves full of game balls, coaching awards and of course the pictures of him with everyone from former President Richard Nixon to Gen. Omar Bradley. And he still speaks like a coach.

“It’s really a wonderful lesson in perseverance,” he says. “In almost anything you do, if you do it enough and if you practice enough, there’s nothing to it.”