Ran Henry

March 28, 2015

Winning Hurt
By Ran Henry

To write a biography that could survive a mass book burning, the eyeballing of libel lawyers and SEC football fans, I asked all the right questions except one:
Coach, are you expecting me to just list the games you won, or try to tell what it’s like to be you?
“It’s going to be like seeing your life flash before your eyes,” I told Steve Spurrier, the Head Football Coach at the University of South Carolina, on an April morning in Columbia when he finally asked if he could read the biography I’d spent 17 years researching and writing.
He stood by his trophies, pictures, manly maxims, big-game footballs and the plaque he got for his first hole in one, five aces ago, showing me a new poster commemorating three straight eleven-win seasons at USC. That was far better than par for a school believed for over a century to be cursed -- by a governor, senator and lynch mob leader nicknamed “Pitchfork,” who begat South Carolina’s blood rival Clemson. Only a minister’s son could beat that kind of curse, I had to believe, remembering to watch my words. Really, even in the depths of books and rivers, does anyone’s life actually flash past?
Coach Spurrier considered my prediction with the stolid look he gives friends and foes, eyeing match-ups only he can win. We looked out at the field where he’d won 18 straight games, best home record of any college in the nation. “This is my author,” I could still hear him introducing me to a fellow writer on that field, after a sweltering scrimmage last August.
“I’ll let you read it in August,” I blurted out. That would put my version of his life before him as his team hit the Proving Ground for fall practice, a few weeks before Spurrier: “How the Ball Coach Taught the South to Play Football was set to be published by Lyons Press. His noncommittal nod made me wonder if a real gamesman would’ve made that move.
“It’s your book,” Spurrier would say, looking over the photographs I took during a season on his sideline and chose for publication. What does any reporter owe his subject in exchange for access, besides telling the truth? What man wouldn’t want to edit his life story?
For sure that brash promise wouldn’t please my editor, who feared a football coach’s power and planned to send Spurrier a published book “as a courtesy” in September.
Was it the imagination of someone who becomes someone else on the page, or just old-fashioned hubris, in that coach’s office, thinking he’d relish reliving his upbringing, relentlessly coached by his Dad to take on the big boys? When his elevator doors opened, splitting Carolina’s fighting rooster emblem in two, I dropped down to the parking lot with my own quest for greatness flashing past. Starting with the mad desire to do my job as well as my hero does his.

In the fields where we all need inspiration, guidance, coaching, even, is it really important to know what fuels our heroes’ fires? I believe it is. Knowing, of course, even the most accurate research and vivid prose can’t match what a man experiences inside his skull. Like other Americans who live by codes drawn up on locker room chalkboards I grew up reading sports biographies, thinking football makes anger socially acceptable.
My father had reason to be mad, after his 12-year-old self walked up to a campfire in the woods some boys had booby-trapped with bullets. One went off and took out his eye, Dad said, never telling me if he was targeted in a feud or innocently walking out of the dark. And he never would play catch with me. He just talked about how football players should be “mobile, agile and hostile” on Fall Saturdays and stayed on the gruff side of the TV.
Across the mountains and down the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, in Johnson City, Tennessee, the Lord forebade playing ball on Sundays, Reverend John Graham Spurrier taught his sons. But He did permit watching the Redskins play on TV. Out the window was Kiwanis Park, where a boy had six days a week to create “ball plays” that would befuddle defenders and uplift underdogs. Drawing Dad and me closer, over the years, as Spurrier grew from a Heisman Trophy winner to the coach of a Heisman Trophy winner. All of us living to send the other team home mad.
When Spurrier passed to set up the run, slamming his visor to the turf when his quarterbacks threw interceptions, finally winning Florida a trophy worth bragging about, not everyone could be happy.
“He acts like a maniac on the sidelines,” groused my editor at Tropic, The Miami Herald Sunday Magazine, hitting a Nerf Ball basket in his office overlooking Biscayne Bay as pelicans peered in. Tom Shroder was a former editor of The Alligator, the University of Florida student newspaper, who hated the way Spurrier represented his school, trophy or no trophies.
“Go up to Gainesville and find out what makes him look so pissed off all the time,” my writing coach ordered.
I rode into Gatorsville thinking I already knew. In Johnson City they said the All-State quarterback, kicker, shooting guard, shortstop and pitcher who brought home two state baseball titles for Science Hill High School couldn’t ever satisfy his Dad, the minister at Calvary Presbyterian who thought he was a coach. Of course the people in Johnson City cheered for the Volunteers. And Spurrier had turned into a reptile at Florida, his Gators taking championships from Tennessee almost every season.
The mystery deepened. The Ball Coach couldn’t be explained in a sunday magazine story.
“I’m writing a book about Steve Spurrier,” I told my Dad, back in the hills.
“You’ll never do it,” Dad said. Wanting to spur me on with a fatherly challenge, or frustrated by a goal he couldn’t see.
I held his hand while his good eye lost life on a foggy August night when Spurrier was the coach of the number one Florida Gators, I was a hero as a caregiver and my father was a prophet. No biography of Spurrier had appeared. I kept working on it, to please or defy Dad, not sure which. Getting inside the mind and heart of one competitive man could be a life-long mission.
Looking up at the coach’s office atop South Carolina’s stadium, I had to decide who to try to please. Against my editor’s entreaties I shared the manuscript with Spurrier in July, before another pressure-packed football campaign got underway. Imagining him inspired by an extraordinary story his fans only thought they knew.
His great-great-great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Spurrier, was the stonecutter in Winnsboro, South Carolina, just north of Columbia, until General Sherman marched through, I discovered with the help of New York genealogist Susan Olsen – both of us stunned that Spurrier took the job of coaching the losing-est college football team on earth without knowing where his father’s people were from. Wondering anew, as August dawned without a word from Spurrier, how a biographer could presume to know more than his subject.
On a quest to win an unprecedented SEC Football Title for South Carolina, beat the curse of Pitchfork and get the intolerable Confederate flag taken down from the State House grounds, Spurrier had no idea he had kinfolk in the fight. He just instinctively defied his great-great-great grandfather the slave owner.
“Too busy making history to worry about the past,” his mother told her oldest son Graham, who knew all along why his little brother should endure death threats in South Carolina for taking a stand against the Confederate battle flag. Begetting one twisted thought:
Would it make us football-talking men soft, if we had nothing to prove to our Dads? Shouldn’t I have realized while my father was still alive that he couldn’t see well enough to play catch?
Surely Spurrier could see he was a hero in my book.
He finally called during Gamecock Football Media Day, ignoring all the reporters at his stadium, saying parts of the book were “real good,” but not the portrayal of his father provided by his family and friends.
“My Dad was a loving dad,” Spurrier said.
Indeed he was, Coach, I had to agree. Reverend Spurrier did everything in his power to make the smallest, slowest boy on the field the biggest overachiever on earth – the only man in the history of South Carolina who could overcome Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman’s racism, or refute 17 years of research.
Riding the elevator back up to his office to talk about his father’s coaching, man to man, I ran into his boss the Athletic Director, and USC’s lawyer. Spurrier said he called them in because, “My daddy is in heaven, and I’m here to defend him.” Knowing I teach Football Writing at the USC Honors College, and those men could have authority over me, too.
When I told them all I wouldn’t rewrite the book, or history, even if Coach Spurrier denounced me on Sports Center, he cursed -- which doesn’t happen to his most wayward quarterback, take it from his biographer – and walked out of the meeting room overlooking Carolina’s north end zone. Then he did his best to see that I’d never publish that book.
Former USC quarterback Todd Ellis, “the voice of the Gamecocks” in the broadcast booth and Spurrier’s personal lawyer, failed to find a libelous word in my manuscript, while I sweated out August. The coach and his lawyer realized they could deny permission to publish the photographs Reverend Spurrier gave me for the Miami Herald Sunday Magazine story in 1997, for which my book publisher had not obtained new permissions. Lyons Press attorney Dennis Kelly and editor Keith Wallman said the first editions of Spurrier, boxed for book stories, made one big fire.
Jed Lyons, the CEO of Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, bought Lyons Press, grilled me about my research and reporting and stood by my book. Through a battle of father figures, Lyons Press would publish my book in November, 2014 -- the weekend Spurrier went back to Gainesville as a Gamecock and went up against his old school.
Football can be like that. Heroes change uniforms. As kick-off approached for the book and the game, Ellis called and threatened to “take two hundred grand out of your ass,” then rang up my editor.
“Anything scandalous, or libelous, in the book?” Wallman said he asked Ellis.
“No,” Ellis told Wallman, “but we might sue anyway.”
How does that work, I wondered.
“If they want to draw attention to Spurrier’s father they’ll persist, we’ll resist, and articles will appear about Spurrier’s father that otherwise wouldn’t have,” veteran publisher Jed Lyons reassured me. Neither of us imagining the description of my book on the reprinted cover hadn’t been changed from “authorized” to “definitive,” giving Spurrier another way to squash his own story.
Biographers try hard to share their subjects’ views. Feeling bad for the writer and the hero, I had to realize reliving challenges can be so painful the biography of a living subject should be classified as vivisection. I have lived through Coach Spurrier’s challenges, a seemingly necessary but not happy chapter.
He finally admitted to media reporter Bob Gillespie in an interview with The State newspaper in Columbia that the book can’t legally be challenged, “since there’s nothing libelous in it.” Satisfied his offensive strategy killed sales. Living proof our fathers goad us from beyond the grave.
The Ball Coach, who is turning 70 in April, has decided not to hang up his coaching visor, despite suffering his sixth loss of the 2014 season at Clemson. Making me wonder if seeing his childhood crawl past on the page aided and abetted Pitchfork’s cause. I stand before Spurrier on his newly-sodded field in Gamecock Park after the first practice of the Spring, expecting punishment.
“They let you in here?” he asks, rolling up in his Gamecock golf cart.
“And they should have,” I say, nodding at a man words can’t really describe.
“Not after what you wrote. Bunch of lies, bunch of lies,” the coach says, gunning his golf cart. Still fuming at his father. Thinking he’s drowning me out.