Nick ThesloffHis grandmother taught him to skate around the time he was learning to walk, which didn’t really turn out to be a life skill since Theslof went on to play professional football, not hockey.
But there’s another lesson Theslof learned from his grandmother simply by being around her. And it turned out to be infinitely more valuable.
“She was my role model,” said Theslof, the Galaxy assistant coach. “She was inspiring just watching her move and talk because she was a little different. You don’t understand it very well, but you want to reach that level.
“It’s something I realized at a very young age. I wanted to try to succeed and be good like my grandmother.
We should all strive to be successful and good as Vivi-Anne HultenOlympic medalist and 10-time national figure skating champion in the 1920s and 1930s, once hailed as Sweden’s greatest female athlete. However, Theslof remembers his grandmother not for her medals, which he displays in his Lakewood home, but for a simple act of courage and deep character that came to define her.
As Hulten approached the podium after finishing third in the 1936 Winter Gamesshe was told she would have to perform a Nazi salute in honor of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. She refused.
“At the time, for a woman to be able to stand up for herself in that environment in Germany, it’s hard for me to explain the amount of integrity and courage that it cost her,” Theslof said. “She had a way of succeeding at that point. It wasn’t about skating. It was about his integrity.
Hulten, who left Sweden for the United States and taught skating in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Minnesota, eventually followed her family to Southern California where she died in 2003 at the age of 91. Nick’s playing days had come to an end due to a serious Achilles tendon injury and he was on the second stage of a coaching career that would take him to eight teams in four countries, a career in during which he would coach in a World Cup with Germany and win an MLS title in Toronto.
Nick Theslof, Galaxy assistant coach, during his time at Toronto FC in 2017.
(Sportswire Icon / Sportswire Icon via Getty Images)
He could win another MLS Cup this fall with the Galaxy, who Saturday took a big step forward to capture their first Western Conference title in 13 years. But like her grandmother, Theslof won’t allow her career to be defined by shiny awards that lose their luster over time.
“What’s important to me is that everyone in this building knows who I am and they trust me, they know I can help them,” said Theslof, 48, who won a national title at UCLA and played in the Dutch giant’s youth program. PSV Eindhoven, however, remains one of the most unknown members of a coaching staff that includes three MLS stars and three national team players.
“My name is not synonymous with what my colleagues have done,” he said. “I’m really happy for them. But I’m also happy to be different.
In this case, different does not mean inferior. And Theslof’s colleagues are well aware of what he brings to his job.
“Nick’s superpower, his ability to understand how each player works with the ball, is spectacular,” Greg Vanney, Galaxy coach said of his former UCLA teammate. “Nick manages and monitors the players a lot, the way they move and the way they move with the ball, to create more efficiency or technical improvements. He is one of the best I have ever been around.
It’s also something Theslof says he learned from his grandmother, who was 64 when he was born.
“Growing up, when I watched my grandmother teach ice skating and teach humans how to perform, I was always very surprised by the way she looked at the body, at balance and at the little technical things that allowed people to to perform better than a normal person. maybe not see,” he said, sitting under an umbrella in the lobby of Dignity Health Sports Park last week after a morning workout. “She was taking time, really slowing things down and making sure the human was moving properly. I found this fascinating.
Theslof grew up playing hockey in Minnesota where his grandmother, who had toured with the Ice Capades, ran a skating school whose clients included Herb Brooks’ gold medal-winning U.S. hockey team.
“One afternoon she came to our house and Brooks was with her,” Theslof recalled. “And we go to a hockey store and buy a stick. I have had a very unique life and very unique experiences.
Although Theslof’s grandmother had statues erected in her honor in Hungary and at the World Figure Skating Museum and the Colorado Hall of Fame and performed for the King and Queen of Sweden at the At age 80, she is probably best remembered for her disdain of Hitler and her argument. with the legendary Norwegian skater Sonja Henie.
After being ordered to salute the German dictator, Hulten told interviewers decades later that she responded, “I’m Swedish; I don’t do that.
“I just looked at him,” she said. “He was a scary person.”
The long-running feud with Henie, a three-time gold medalist and 10-time world champion, was far more personal and vicious, with both sides trading barbed insults. And although the rivalry has become a definition of skating for a generation, Theslof said his grandmother had the last laugh.
“Sonja Henie was dating my grandfather,” he said of Gene Theslof, who was Henie’s skating partner before he left her to marry Hulten.
Although Hulten helped Nick Theslof get on the ice as a child, he quickly transitioned to football, and by the age of 15 he was playing in the Netherlands in Eindhoven. He returned to the United States to win an NCAA championship at UCLA under Sigi Schmid before injuries forced him into coaching.
“People said, ‘Well, you have good coaching skills,’” Theslof said. “I knew my grandmother coached a lot. For me, coaching was second best to playing. I feel like I grew up with sort of a coaching, teaching, and performing side.
In his first job, as an assistant at Ohio Wesleyan, he won an NCAA Division III title and later worked under Jurgen Klinnsman with the German national team and Bayern Munich, then at Chivas USA.
In 2014, he joined Vanney’s team at Toronto FC, and the two have been together ever since.
“There’s a bit of work as a coach and then you come out the other side of the performance and it feels good,” he said. “I’m not only proud of the successes of the teams I’ve played with, but I’m also very proud of the players I’ve built relationships with.”
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