College football is starting its 150th anniversary season, and I never played in a single game during all that time. That is one of the big disappointments of my life.
Growing up, I had the mind and heart to play football. I loved everything about the game and thought about it all the time. It was all the other things I didn’t have…muscular legs, broad shoulders, speed, power, agility and stuff like that.
Not that I didn’t try to be a football player. I went out for the eighth grade team at Springhill even though I was skinny and could be knocked off my feet by a brisk wind.
Billy Baucum, our coach, was a hero at school and in town. He had been a college quarterback and had put together a high school team that was beating schools like Haynesville and Minden.
He dropped by our math class once in a while, and the teacher asked me to show him some of the football plays I drew in my notebook while she did math problems on the blackboard.
That’s one reason I didn’t do well in math and had to take it over in summer school one year to graduate with my class.
Coach Baucum looked at my diagrams with lines going in every direction and all the X’s and O’s like coaches used in those days for offensive and defensive players.
His response was usually just a nod. I couldn’t tell if that meant he didn’t grasp the complexity of my plays or if he secretly planned to use them in the next game. If he ever ran one of them, I didn’t recognize it.
The second day we were trying out for the eighth grade team on the practice field with the dirt, rocks and patches of parched grass, an older player came to tell me Coach Baucum wanted to see me.
He was down on the lush green field at the stadium where the varsity worked out and the Springhill Lumberjacks played their games in those shiny black and gold uniforms.
Big water sprinklers were usually running on that field when there were no games or practices. The only time the eighth grade field got a drop of water was when it rained.
As I was jogging to the soft green field to see Coach Baucum, my first thought was that he had seen me catch a pass and wanted to move me up to the varsity.
I would have been the only eighth grader on the team, so he must have been impressed not just with my pass catching but also by the plays I drew up.
It was like letting the air out of a balloon when Coach Baucum looked me in the eyes and said, “Son, how would you like to be a trainer?” My football career was over before it started.
Maybe I should have been prepared for the letdown. We had tackle football games on empty fields in our neighborhood all the time, and I never scared the other players.
John David Crow, who lived down the street from me, did. John David was a brute who ended up winning the Heisman Trophy at Texas A&M.
When he showed up for our sandlot games, I was the first one who claimed to hear my mother calling me home for supper. I never felt like a sissy just because I didn’t want to get any bones crushed trying to tackle John David.
After Coach Baucum made the humanitarian decision to keep me from playing football, he sent me to some clinics to learn how to tape ankles and treat injuries.
In my first season as a trainer, I asked a coach who was helping me tape ankles for some more tape. He tossed the can of tape to me when I wasn’t looking. It hit me above my eye and left a gash.
While Dr. Garrett was sewing four stitches in it at his clinic, I asked him to put it in his records as a football injury. He did, so I have not been lying when I told people that all these years.
I regret I never got to play college football, but I plan to watch all of it I can during the 150th anniversary season.
Maybe Coach Brad Laird at Northwestern or Coach O at LSU or Nick Saban at Alabama will use one of those plays I drew up in math class.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES