Fathers & Sons & Sports (7 page)

“No, baby. That’s okay.”

Sometimes in the afternoon, Mama drove me out to the school. She parked under the oak tree by the gymnasium, pointed to where she wanted me to go, and I walked out past a gate in a hurricane fence to the field where my father and the other coaches were holding practice. Four years old, I wore the same crew cut that my father wore. I stumbled through tall grass and out past the red clay track that encircled the field. At home,
my father didn’t raise his voice, but here he seemed to shout with every breath. A team manager took me by the hand and led me to a long pine bench on the sideline. I sat among Igloo coolers, spare shoulder pads and toolboxes crammed with First Aid supplies. I waited until the last drill had ended and the players came one after another to the coolers for water the same temperature as the day, drunk in single gulps from paper cups shaped like cones. The players took turns giving the top of my head a mussing. “You gonna play football when you grow up?” “I don’t know.”

“You gonna be a coach like your daddy?” “I want to.”

Already I was certain that no one mattered more than a coach. I would trade any day to come for a chance to be that boy again, understanding for the first time who his father was. Give me August and two-a-days and a group of teenagers who are now old men, their uniforms stained green from the grass and black with Louisiana loam. Give me my father’s voice as he shouts to them, pushing them harder than they believe they can go, willing them to be better. Give me my father when practice is over and he walks to where I’m sitting and reaches his arms out to hold me.

I was doomed from the start. If not an LSU football player, what else might I have become? Daddy was so devoted to the team that in the fall he would weigh the merits of each week
based on whether the Tigers won or lost on Saturday night. He could be as thoughtful and philosophical as any other high school coach when his own team lost, but he was so devoted to LSU that he was far less understanding when the Tigers from Baton Rouge did. How many times did he leave the house late in a televised game, unable to watch another play? If it looked like the Tigers were going to lose a close one, he was especially long in returning. “Where have you been?” we’d yell at him, when he finally came back inside.

“Nowhere” he’d say. “What happened?”

In those days, LSU games rarely appeared on television more than a couple of times a year. And so we were dedicated listeners to the radio broadcasts and play-by-play announcer John Ferguson. We listened while my mother made potato salad in the kitchen and Daddy barbecued outside on the patio. He’d sit there in a lawn chair, lost in concentration as his chicken burned, a purple-and-gold cap tipped back on his head. His arms, legs, and neck glistened with mosquito repellant, and he sipped from a can of beer wrapped in a foam hugger advertising a local insurance agency. Not far away from his smoldering pit, on a narrow piece of finely manicured St. Augustine, I acted the game out with neighborhood friends, some of us dressed in Little Tiger uniforms. We played until somebody ran into a ligustrum hedge or got clotheslined by a real clothesline, and my father called for an end to the rough-and-tumble and sat me down next to him.

“Settle down now,” he’d say. “LSU’s on.”

In his mind, the football team represented the entire state of Louisiana, and the way the team performed gave the rest of the nation a snapshot of what kind of people we were. Notre Dame’s boys might be bigger and stronger than ours, but we weren’t afraid to line up against them and see who wanted it more. USC might have better talent—okay, he’d concede that—but you needed more than talent to beat LSU. The Tigers often were underdogs, just like the state of Louisiana. Our players scrapped and hustled and always showed good sportsmanship, never more so than when they lost. On defense, they fought off larger opponents, swarmed to the ball, and made spirited gang tackles, and on offense, everyone gave a second effort, including the quarterback, who wasn’t afraid to lower his shoulder and block a player twice his size if that was what it took to win.

Daddy had no use for showboats and loudmouths. He believed that humility was equivalent to class in a man, and nothing pleased him more than to hear a player deflect the praise he’d earned and credit his teammates instead. Players who danced in the end zone after scoring were buffoons. Those who calmly handed the ball to an official were to be admired.

Opelousas produced few athletes who went on to play in Baton Rouge. Those who did carried a large part of my father’s identity with them. I remember when John Weinstein and Skip Cormier played on LSU’s defensive line in the early 1970s. Both made big hits in important TV games that we watched as a family. Every time the announcers mentioned either Weinstein’s or
Cormier’s name, Daddy turned in his seat and faced his children. “He’s from here,” he said.

When Jeff Sandoz, a football and track star at Opelousas High, signed a scholarship with LSU, my father drove me to his house one day after school and parked by the curb in front. We sat there a minute looking at the place, even though we’d seen it a thousand times before. I didn’t have to ask him why we had stopped there. When we returned home, he had me go inside and get a football. We spent the rest of the afternoon throwing passes in the yard.

There were great Americans who came from Opelousas, but in my father’s mind, none were greater than the town’s football players. Alamo hero Jim Bowie, for instance, spent a large part of his childhood in Opelousas. He invented a knife that was good for gutting wild game, but remembering him would’ve been easier had he played on Saturday in Baton Rouge. Rod Milburn, the track star who won a gold medal in the 110-meter hurdles at the 1972 Munich Olympics, grew up in Opelousas and returned home for a parade in his honor. Daddy enjoyed watching Milburn run, but I’m sure he’d have liked him even more had Milburn used his speed to haul in long passes from quarterbacks in yellow helmets. Paul Prudhomme, the Cajun chef, was another Opelousas boy. In the 1980s, Prudhomme’s signature creation, blackened redfish, became so popular that the redfish population in the Gulf of Mexico was threatened with annihilation, prompting the state of Louisiana to impose limits on harvesting
it. Prudhomme was a student at Opelousas High when my father was coaching there. One day I asked Daddy what he remembered about the man, and he said, “Well, he wasn’t a cook then. And he wasn’t a man. Everybody called him Gene.”

“That’s what you remember? That he wasn’t a cook or a man and his name was Gene?”

He shrugged. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“What kind of person was he? What was he like?”

“Like any teenager. I don’t know—he was a young kid.”

“So he was Gene, a young kid who wasn’t a cook or a man yet. That’s what you remember?”

“Don’t get smart with me, boy.”

There was another Prudhomme from Opelousas who went on and made everybody proud. He was Paul’s cousin, Remi Prudhomme. At LSU in the early 1960s, Remi earned three letters as an offensive guard. He later played with the Kansas City Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills. In 1970, when the Chiefs faced the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV, my father pointed out Prudhomme with a finger as he lined up to cover on a kick. I kept one of my own fingers on Prudhomme as he ran down the field trying to make a hit on the return man. When I removed my finger, there was a thin trail in the dust moving west to east, perfectly bisecting the TV screen.

The next time the Chiefs kicked off, we watched as the Vikings’ returner fumbled the ball and Prudhomme fell on it. I gave a shout and danced around the room, but my father showed
no emotion. The recovery had set up good field position for the Chiefs, who later would score. “He’s from here,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” Daddy answered, failing to register that I was being smart with him.

“Went to the high school.”

He got it finally and flicked a finger against the top of my skull.

A year or two later I rode with him one Saturday afternoon to pick up something at Jimmy’s Cash Store on the Old Sunset Road. You crossed some railroad tracks and the little package store was there on your left, directly across the blacktop from where Mr. Alfred Lagrange had his yam kiln. Parked out on the white shell lot in front of Jimmy’s was a shiny new car growing less shiny by the minute. Every time a vehicle passed down the road dust rolled up and tumbled over in a cloud. It was fine for my father’s truck to get dirty—it was a 1963 GMC with rust holes in the bed and dents in the hood—but it was hard to watch it happen to something as pretty as that car.

I waited outside. The store had plate glass windows plastered with white butcher’s paper advertising sale items in black and red ink: pork chops, boudin, hogshead cheese, a four-roll package of toilet paper, a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells. Tired of waiting, I let myself out of the truck and went in. I could hear my father’s voice coming from the rear of the store, back near the beer cooler. I found him talking to a huge, muscle-bound man wearing a black shirt and blue slacks. “John Ed, come over here, I want you to meet somebody.”

It was Remi Prudhomme. He had dark, curly hair kept in place with Brylcreem or some other such product and his face was burned by the sun and showing black stubble that tracked downward to the bottom of his neck and upward to within an inch of his eyeballs. Daddy told me to step closer and have a look at his Super Bowl ring. Remi Prudhomme held his hand out. “You want to try it on? Here. See how it fits.”

It was a gaudy thing that sparkled and flashed when you moved it against the ceiling lights. He pulled it off and handed it to me. I could’ve slipped two fingers into the ring. “You gonna play football when you get older?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who you gonna play for?” “LSU Tigers.”

And then he did what they all seemed to do. He gave the top of my head a shake.

I got another look at Prudhomme as he was leaving the store. He was carrying a flat of beer with one hand up by his shoulder, the way a waiter carries a tray. He slid the case into the front seat of the sedan then got behind the wheel and started the engine. I watched as he lit a cigarette and took a long drag that boiled in his lungs awhile before issuing from his nostrils in fast-moving parallel streams.

“I thought you said football players weren’t supposed to smoke?” I said to my father. We were heading home now.

“They’re not. Cigarette smoke cuts your wind. Come the fourth quarter, your lungs feel like they’re about to explode.”

“How about beer? What does that do?”

“Nothing good, either.” He seemed to anticipate my next question. “Remi’s not thinking straight today, John Ed. He’s got a lot of God-given ability, but he must’ve left his thinking cap back in Kansas City.”

We went down the road a ways, headed for Delmas Street. “I don’t really like the Chiefs,” I said.

“You don’t like Lenny Dawson?”

“He’s all right, but I don’t want to play for Kansas City.”

“I don’t blame you.” He shook his head. “What did you think of Remi’s Super Bowl ring?”

“I don’t like jewelry, either,” I answered.

“Neither do I,” said my father, “especially on a man.”

The earliest indication that I might have a future as a college football player came in the spring of my sophomore year at Opelousas High. The fantasy had long been there, of course, but so few boys from my school received scholarship offers that I was certain I’d never get one. This belief was based on many factors, not the least of which was a strong personal conviction that I wasn’t any good.

At six-foot-two and a hundred and eighty-seven pounds, I was hardly the bulky Neanderthal recruiters envision for the
center position, and I didn’t run particularly well, either. The year before, in a postseason bowl game with a small school from the parish, I replaced the starting center at the beginning of the second half and promptly gave up two sacks. That I gave up no more the rest of the afternoon had nothing to do with my ability to rebound from adversity. Desperate to neutralize a nose guard who threatened to single-handedly wreck our chances to win, head coach Mickey Guidry schemed to have both guards help me out in passing situations. When our quarterback dropped back to throw, three of us were assigned to block one man, and while this left the lanes on either side of me open for blitzing linebackers to exploit, the defense was committed to dropping back to protect against the pass. I got a lucky break that day. Had the other team seized the opportunity and rushed its linebackers, I would’ve given up more sacks in one half than the average lineman does in his entire high school career.