Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (14 page)

Midway through my sophomore year, it all began to change. I had grown to six feet, five inches and was developing a little coordination. I was working hard. I had the advantage of not being distracted by less important considerations, such as schoolwork. That was going to take care of
itself, I thought. I’d heard a talk one day in class about “osmosis,” which really stuck with me. I was counting on it getting me through school. But back to the important stuff.

I was one of only two sophomores to make the varsity basketball team. Actually, sightings of me on a basketball court during a game were rare that year, but riding that school bus to all those little country towns to away games was exciting enough for me for the time being. Sitting on the bench gave me a chance to get used to the crowd pressure in some of those gymnasiums. And I’m not just talking about the decibel level. In some of those old country gyms, the sideline was about one foot from the beginning of the bleachers. In order to inbound a ball, you’d have to fix your feet in among the spectators and not be distracted by an occasional pinch or the pulling of the hair on your leg as you were trying to get the ball in bounds. Of course, our home crowd presented its own challenges. I learned one night that you don’t actually have to be in the game in order to get embarrassed. We were leading by a comfortable margin when a bunch of the students started chanting, “We want Freddie, we want Freddie.” I sat on the bench, grinning, trying to adopt an aw-shucks attitude.

As they persisted, Coach Staggs finally called me over from the other end of the bench. I threw off my warm-up jacket and ran to him. He looked at me straight in the face and said, “Do you hear what they’re yelling—that they want you?” “Yes, sir,” I replied. With that he pointed to the crowd
and said, “All right, go on over there with them,” and laughed. As the crowd howled, I sheepishly walked back down to the end of the bench and tried to act like I was in on the joke. All I could do was smile and think, “Okay, that’s one for you guys.” However, it did teach me something about cool. If you want something really badly, try not to show it. Otherwise, you’re going to get messed with.

The next year it all came together. I had filled out to about 185 pounds of dangerous muscle. However, I had to be doubly impressive in order to overcome an obstacle to my success—my mouth—and a penchant to find humor where others less clever failed to see it.

My first day of summer practice I couldn’t find my gym socks and showed up for practice in my high-top shoes with no socks, looking even more like a backwoods Ichabod Crane. Then our coach gave us a somewhat emotional speech, which I thought was funny since it was only a prelude to running us until our tongues hung out. During warm-ups I yelled for the boys to bear down. “Let’s get serious, guys,” I said. “After all, we’ve got a game in six months.” A verbal lashing ensued, and after that for some reason the coaching staff thought my attitude wasn’t exactly what it should be. Of course, my attitude toward football was just fine. I just didn’t see what that had to do with passing up a good line.

They say that if a kid doesn’t think his high school coach hung the moon, then there is something wrong with either
the boy or the coach. I felt that way about Coach Staggs. He was looked upon with fear and awe because of his exalted position in our eyes and because of his demeanor, which was sort of like Captain Ahab without the humor. He was simply the gatekeeper to the most important thing in our lives at the time, and he commanded respect. No one doubted the story about the player who was out behind the ag building one day when Coach was seen approaching. He ate the cigarette he had been smoking.

The funny thing about it was that Coach was about five feet, six inches tall. Behind his back (and I mean
way
behind his back) some of the seniors called him Stumpy. A creative player from years gone by had come up with this one: “Do you know why Stumpy sued the city? Answer: Because they built the sidewalk too close to his butt.” From a rough childhood he had become a high school phenom as a running back from the mean streets of Nashville. He went on to Ole Miss on a football scholarship. He was Red Grange, as far as I was concerned. He didn’t like smart alecks, comics, or individualists. You can see what I was up against. He had strict rules on and off the field. For example, there would be no water on the football field during a game or during practice, and we had plenty of ninety-plus-degree days under a Tennessee sun.

These and other things that today would have the coach up before the United Nations on charges of human rights
violations were not uncommon back in the day. It’s amazing how kids nowadays seem to be able to play almost as well as we did while still getting a drink of water.

I found that the coaches would overlook a certain number of indiscretions if you knocked enough people on their butt. Another wonderful lesson I was learning. While I was not very fast, I discovered that by employing a rather sophisticated technique I could make up for it. They tried me at defensive end and discovered that from a standing upright start I could crash the opposing backfield to great effect. I would run headlong into a group of blockers and disrupt whatever they were trying to do. I didn’t even have to make the tackle. My teammates could mop that up. Pretty sophisticated, huh? I’ve seen athletes on TV thank the Lord for their “God-given talent.” Well, this was my God-given talent. Occasionally, I could even grab the runner on the way by.

As a junior, my newly discovered skill earned me a starting position on the defensive line. I felt that I had died and gone to heaven. And I wasn’t going to let little things distract me—little things like permanent disfigurement.

This particular distraction came in the form of my old nemesis, Joe Plunkett. Every boy seems to have one growing up, and Joe was mine. Hopefully, most boys are smart enough not to have a nemesis who started shaving at age twelve. Joe was a senior, and he was still tough. We’d had at least three
major encounters over the years. By encounters I mean fights where blood was shed—usually mine.

Anyway, beyond having my starting defensive-line job, I had the added responsibility of centering for punts and extra points for the team. Joe was the punter. One day on the practice field we got into an argument about something. Naturally, as any fool would do, I pulled off my helmet equipped with face mask. As I went for his legs, Joe adroitly grabbed the back of my shoulder pads and pulled me forward and down onto the ground, causing my face to plow up enough turf to plant a nice row of beans.

However, all I actually planted was two of my front teeth—one tooth and about a third of another, to be precise. The thing I most vividly remember about this episode is how utterly narrow-minded a boy’s mother can be about such situations. It seems to take a mother to point out that, even though you may be acting like a six-year-old, teeth don’t grow back when you are a teenager. Mom was heartbroken. She probably also felt that I didn’t need any additional disadvantages as far as my personal appearance was concerned.

My coaches were concerned, too. Sensitive guys as they were, they asked me if I was still going to be willing to stick my head in there. Of course I’d stick my head in there. After all, nothing of particular value was at stake—just my head. Besides, this was a chance to prove my toughness. Also, there was an upside that nobody had counted on. Due to the state
of dental technology at the time—at least in Lawrenceburg—I not only got a false replacement tooth but the third of the other tooth was capped with gold! Hot dang! Gold on my front tooth, just like Dad’s from his encounter with a deputy sheriff when Dad wasn’t much older than I was. As proud as I was, it did occur to me that we Thompsons ought to learn a lesson from this legacy—we ought to learn how to fight a little better. But as far as I was concerned, the gold tooth was only adding to the legend.

Football season started and I did fine. In fact, I was named Schoolboy Star of the Week in Middle Tennessee after one game. But it was like when things were going well I always seemed to want to spice them up a little bit. I guess a young man’s heritage is bound to catch up with him every once in a while. One Friday night in Fayetteville, Tennessee, during a play a guy’s finger stuck me in the eye. I had never felt anything so painful. After the play, I was doubled over on the ground trying to decide if I was going to be blind. Although the pain was short-lived, the referees stopped the game and our managers ran out to check on my condition. Everyone was huddled around me, wondering how badly I was hurt. I couldn’t help it. I looked up, grinning, and said, “How are the fans taking it?” I think it’s fair to say the coaches were not amused. It would also be correct to say that to this day I am known more in Lawrenceburg by some of my old friends for this incident than anything else I ever did on a football field.

We lost only one or two games that year and were rewarded for our efforts by being selected for a bowl game. We were the top team in Middle Tennessee, and we got to go to the Butter Bowl in Pulaski. Some of our farm boys on the team could have probably walked there with no problem. Pulaski was eighteen miles down the road. We won the game handily. Capping off a very good year, I was selected Honorable Mention All Mid State. I could hardly wait for the next football season to begin the following year, when I would be one of the few starters to return. I knew that, with the increased weight I would pick up, glory days were right around the corner.

But first there was basketball season, which actually started before we finished playing football. The beginning of the season was not a pretty picture, because most of the basketball players were also football players. Putting a bunch of rawboned country boys on the basketball court with no practice is problematic at best. Add to that the fact that they’d been playing football for several months, and it’s all knees, elbows, and sliding on the floor. But before long, it was obvious that we were going to have a very good team.

The team was made up of mostly seniors, including Joe Plunkett, who played under the basket, where it became very dangerous for the opposition to tread—a fact to which I could personally attest. (Joe and I later became good friends before he tragically died while still in his twenties.) I was the sixth man on the team, and I played a lot once I got over my
football tendencies, which was not easy. One night early in the season, Coach Staggs put me into the game, and I got fourteen points in a little over a quarter. The bad news was I also fouled out. Coach decided he needed me in smaller doses—perhaps in more ways than one.

We qualified for the state tournament. This, my friends, was a really big deal—especially for those on our team who had never seen a tall building before. This may be stretching it a little, but the word was that during the tournament you could tell country boys from the country schools. They were the ones over at Harvey’s Department Store putting their chewing gum on the escalator so they could watch it come back around again.

This was the big stage—at Vanderbilt University. The gymnasium was cavernous and unique even among college gyms, with the court extending several feet beyond the out-of-bounds line before you reached the first row of seats, which were below court level. It’s like the court was a huge stage. I remember double-checking to make sure I had put on my basketball shorts under my warm-up pants. I could hear the huge crowd from our dressing room. Other guys were checking, too. I guess it was kind of like a paratrooper checking his chute one last time before his first jump.

Of course, as I have discovered in other forums since then, it’s surprising how quick the crowd and noise all blend into the background once the work starts. Things turned out pretty well for us. We won the first game and lost in the second
round, leaving us fourth in the state. In those days, there were no school classifications according to size. The smallest schools competed with the biggest, so fourth in the state was a significant achievement. Bowl game in football and fourth in the state in basketball. Not bad for country boys, and it really set the stage for next year and a scholarship offer—probably for football. I had heard that my coaches thought that would happen. Of course, I had little interest in the scholarship part. I just wanted to play, and a man’s got to make certain sacrifices.