DECORAH -- How do you want to be remembered?

That tagline from the Iowa-based movie, "The Final Season," rang out through Carlson Stadium at Luther College's commencement ceremony in Decorah Sunday.

On hand to give the address were Luther College Alumni Kent Stock (Class of '85)and actor Sean Astin, who recently portrayed Stock, the man who coached the 1991 Norway (Iowa) High School baseball team during its now-famous final season.

As depicted in the movie, the small-town perennial state-championship baseball team defied the odds under the leadership of then first-year head coach Stock and won Norway's 20th and final state championship title before a school merger closed the town's high school.

The film was released 16 years after Tony Wilson, president of Applied Art and Technology of Des Moines, purchased the rights to the screenplay in 1991.

Astin said he'd never heard of Luther College prior to being given a Luther T-shirt to wear during filming.

But he said after spending time with Stock and hearing more about the college, "I wore my Luther regalia with a newfound confidence over the six-week course of filming, thereby immortalizing my relationship to this place and becoming a sort of forever ambassador of the school for generations of Americans who will watch the movie and be exposed to the values and lessons that one of its son's lives has to offer our country and the world."

Astin told the graduating class the best defense against the trials and tribulations they might face in the world would be a good offense.

"Graduates, you are the frontline attack that our civic life deploys in the service of a much brighter future. As time and failure, sickness, complacency, greed, amnesia and sloth fire back at your idealism and innocence, naivetÃ, curiosity and whimsy, some of you will fall, some may buckle under the burdens of responsibility, obligations, confusion and apathy," he said.

"But among your number are those who will embrace the knowledge and training you've received throughout the course of your primary, middle school and high school educations. You will arm yourselves with the tools and skills and training you've acquired and nurtured and honed here at Luther College.

"You will accept the truth that you stand in the vanguard of the nation with the awesome opportunity and the rightful duty that is laid at your feet -- to rise up and meet the future as present -- to stand strong in the face of a world which presents itself to you in greater peril today than at any time in human history that has come before us."

Astin added, "It is time for you now to go on the offense  to attack, to begin the awesome adventure of your adult lives, carve out the goodness we need in the world. Set the patterns and trends and habits now that will yield throughout your lives the value, the satisfaction and the results that history obligates you. For as Samwise Gamgee would say, 'There is some good left in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.'"

Stock, the principal of Oak Ridge School in Marion, told students there are different pathways to success, and each person has to find the route that best fits his or her personality.

Stock said his love of baseball afforded him the opportunity to receive a college education, and he challenged the graduates to follow their passion.

"Follow it and it will take you great places," said Stock, adding in addition to find one's passion, finding a mentor could be equally important.

"My mentor is my father. … He has been a role model for me on how to be a family man," he said.

"I'd like to congratulate all of you on a job well done. Everyone who has ever graduated from Luther College is with me today and every day. How do you want to be remembered?"

Contact Lissa Greiner at

newsroom@wcfcourier.com.