By Marshall Chapman | Sept/Oct 08 | 

Dear Coach...

One woman's obsession with the guys who call the plays

I’ve always had a thing for coaches. Especially Southern coaches. A woman I know has made a career of marrying them. I’ve never gone that far, but I’m in the neighborhood. A few years ago, Jim Foster, who coached Vanderbilt’s women’s basketball team to the Final Four in 1993, gave me away at my wedding. Several family members initially questioned this. ¶ “Marshall, you have two brothers-in-law who adore you,” said one. “Not to mention three uncles. Have you thought about family?” ¶ “Marriage is a play only a coach should call,” I replied. Foster now coaches at Ohio State. We became close during his eleven-year tenure at Vanderbilt. He’s a Philly guy, and I consider my inability to convert him to our Southern way of life one of my biggest failures as a Southerner.

“Too many churches” was his terse comment upon fleeing Nashville.

Both Foster sons have since married girls from the Deep South. This fact alone has done more to strengthen my belief in a just and loving deity than all the churches in Nashville.

 Last spring, I wrote a love letter to Coach Bob McKillop after watching his Davidson team upset Georgetown in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament. How could I not write him? My father was a Davidson graduate. In the mid-sixties, even on school nights, he would drive us the seventy-nine miles up I-85 from Spartanburg to Charlotte to see those great Lefty Driesell teams play in the old Charlotte Coliseum. I can still see Barry Teague dribbling the ball up court to distribute to his teammates—Terry Holland, Fred Hetzel, Don Davidson, and Dick Snyder. My father died at a relatively young age in 1983, so it was with great interest and emotion that I watched the Davidson-Georgetown game. But it was more than the memory of my father that had me so engaged. It was the way McKillop’s team played with so much heart and desire. They simply believed they would win. So that’s what they did. So yeah, I wrote him a letter.

I once wrote a letter to Gene Stallings, head football coach at Alabama (1990–96), to express my concern about one of his players. Stallings wrote me back on official Crimson Tide stationery. For years, the letter was pinned to a wall in my office. One time some painters were in there doing some work and when they saw the letter, they freaked. “You know him?” said one in a hushed tone.

I miss the old-school coaches, especially the more colorful ones from the South. Guys like Paul “Bear” Bryant—Stallings’ legendary predecessor. On a bet, Bryant once wrestled a real live bear to the ground, which is how he got his nickname. At Alabama, he won the national championship a record six times, yet never wore his trademark houndstooth hat in a dome or covered stadium because his mama always told him to take his hat off indoors.

Then there’s Frank Howard, who was head coach at Clemson for thirty years. I grew up in nearby Spartanburg and can still remember watching The Frank Howard Show with my mother on the little black-and-white TV she and my father had in their bedroom. Coach Howard was talking in his usual homespun manner: “He don’t” this… and “Son of a gun” that… Finally, my mother couldn’t take it anymore.