John Featherstone—better known simply as Feather, the fiery, passionate and championship-winning coach who for three decades ruled California junior college football ranks—is in a memory care facility near his home in Redondo Beach.
The 71-year-old last coached football in 2015, last played volleyball last year and last visited Catalina Island on Aug. 5, two weeks before a seizure left him listless and hospitalized. Seven years into dealing with Alzheimer's, the latest medical event further hampered a once mighty man.
Physically, he is mostly fine, having now recovered from the seizure. He laughs, smiles and even dances to old hits like "Sweet Caroline." He can and has thrown and caught a football. He hugs, he kisses and he still flirts with the ladies.
Mentally, he is not fine. He has been unable to use a phone for three years. Well before that, he stopped driving altogether. The most simple tasks, such as removing a shirt from his dresser and slipping it onto his torso, are impossible. Months ago, he stopped riding his bike to the beach because he would lose it so often.
His speech is now slipping, and communicating with him through FaceTime has grown difficult. Because of the pandemic and an outbreak at the facility this fall, no one from his family has seen him since November. The family's financial resources are dwindling, putting his stay at the care home at risk.
Featherstone's situation got tougher on Saturday. He tested positive for COVID-19. He's now further isolated from the world, quarantined in a separate wing of the facility in which he's spent the last several months, his family hoping he does not develop symptoms.
They FaceTime with him quite often. He says a word here or there.
Football.
Volleyball.
Catalina.
But there is another word he utters. The old football coach reaches back into his memory bank, recalling the young baseball player who he persuaded to play football and the software salesman he first hired as a coach.
Sark.
***
He used to call him Stevie, not Sark.
In 1993, when Steve Sarkisian arrived at El Camino College, a junior college football powerhouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles, he was a failed college baseball player who'd transferred from USC before completing his freshman year.
He was done with football, or so he thought.
Then John Featherstone entered his life as his new P.E. professor. Having watched Sarkisian play high school ball at nearby West Torrance, the coach badgered Stevie to give football another crack.
So during the final week of spring practice that year, Sarkisian relented. He agreed to throw passes at practice. Two years later, he left El Camino as its most decorated passer, then signed a scholarship with BYU, starred as a record-breaking QB for LaVell Edwards and then found himself back in the South Bay area selling software.
He casually dropped by an El Camino practice one day and there was his old P.E. teacher, relentlessly pursuing him again. "Come coach!" Featherstone told him, recalls Gene Engle, a longtime assistant at El Camino.
Sarkisian began coaching quarterbacks, eventually called plays from the booth and, after that season, was hired at USC as a graduate assistant. 
"The rest," Engle quips, "is history."
Sarkisian is the most accomplished branch on Featherstone's coaching tree, made more certain with his hire over the weekend as the new head coach at Texas. It is truly a second-chance story, the details of which have been exhaustively reported. Fired at USC for substance use. Checked into a rehab clinic. Cleaned up his act. And then joined forces with Nick Saban at Alabama to assemble one of the country's most explosive offenses.
Before beginning full-time duties with the Longhorns, he'll lead the No. 1 Crimson Tide (12–0) into the national championship game next Monday against Ohio State (7–0) in Miami. Across the country, some 2,700 miles away, his old coach, the man who sparked his career in the sport, cannot comprehend what his ex-pupil has accomplished.