When I hear those old stories and I look back on all those old pictures where a smile covers your entire face, I presume you were born with a natural propensity to overcome diversity and smile through the struggles, but life loves to beat those characteristics out of us doesn’t it? Beating it out of us isn’t enough though, it desires complete submission, and wants us to forget the best parts of ourselves that were gifts from God from birth. Sometimes I fear that you don’t know all this about yourself, so I wanted to remind you, and hope you can catch a glimpse of what I’ve seen my whole life.
As a teenage father who did third shift factory work myself, I know how hard it was and how quickly it ages you, but I’ve never been more inspired than by watching you start at the bottom and climb to the top in your job, only to lose it all because of a global economic collapse in your fifties, and have to start all over and do it all again. You could have given up but instead you went to work and found another path within yourself and your natural charm and work ethic propelled you to success. I don’t know that you’ll ever be able to appreciate the impact that attitude — which I got to witness firsthand in both you and mom — had on the boy who wanted to be just like you. I know there was a time when you longed to be a preacher, and I know you would have been a very successful one for all the reasons mentioned above, but again, life tends to get in the way of living your dreams and sometimes you have to choose what your family needs over what you want. I hope it is some comfort to you that your son became what you wanted to be, and then a grandson too. Like David and his son Solomon after him, sometimes fathers only get to lay the foundation and provide the resources for their children to build upon.
I was never prouder than when they wrote about your coaching prowess in the local paper. It filled my heart with joy to observe others bearing witness to what I saw from the first row. I’m a fifty year old grandfather myself now, but I still tell the stories of your unprecedented run of championships in youth baseball and a little league winning streak that spanned three seasons and resulted in an undefeated season. When I talk great sports dynasties with my friends — Alabama 2008 to 2024, Brady/Belicheck Patriots era — I always include the story of how you coached me from T-Ball to high school and during that stretch we won our league championship every single year. Lest anyone reading this think that you were one of “those” dads who tried to relive his glory years through his child and made sports a religion, I loved every second of it and always felt like you and I were a team unto ourselves.
No doubt sports have always been one of the most natural ways we’ve bonded, but there are plenty of others. As recently as last week I had a conversation with a much older man who was quite impressed with my musical knowledge and interest. He wasn’t accustomed to talking The Stanley Brothers or Little Jimmie Dickens with a Gen X’er. I’ve seen this reaction more times than I can remember through the years and it always opens the door for me to tell them about how my dad introduced me to music from “the good ole days” from my youth. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can put myself back in that beige Chevy pickup or the little blue Ford Ranger, after school, riding home listening to 50’s music or Clint Black or Keith Whitley. Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” and that is true in our lives in so many ways. In the days before you were parents you would sing Charlie Pride songs to my very rock and roll mama on your dates, and 18 years later I would sing Elvis, Conway Twitty and George Jones to my hippie chick on our dates, which were at the same spot where you and mom would go, after I would get off work at the grocery store where you were working when you started dating mama. History rhymes.
If you ever think that you weren’t a perfect father, remind yourself that you were the perfect father for me. There is no one right way to raise a son, but there are a million wrong ways, and somehow you managed to navigate that minefield though barely past boyhood yourself. Through endless hours in the backyard or on the ball field or the golf course, you spoke my language and connected with me on an emotional level through the laurels and losses of countless ball games. In the rare seasons and sports you weren’t coaching me, you were always my biggest fan. When I was a senior in high school, I hit a home run out of Sam Davis Park, something I never dreamed I’d do, but what I remember most was rounding third base and seeing you outside the fence, matching me step for step, jumping and screaming like I’d just won the World Series with a walk off home run. It may seem strange to some, but memories like that are what instilled in my heart the certainty that my daddy would always be on my team, not just in sports, but in life. You always celebrate my greatest victories and coach me in my biggest failures.
Getting through to a teenage boy is a near impossible goal, but you always managed to do it, even when the fruits of your labor weren’t obvious on the surface. Those seeds were planted deeply in my heart and they were growing day by day as you watered them with your involvement in my life. I literally couldn’t count the number of ball games we’ve watched together, of every sport and competitive level, even when the team you were taking me to root for was a team you couldn’t stand. It took becoming a father for me to finally recognize what all you did for me. There is still, and will never be, anyone I’d rather sit down and watch a ball game with more than you, and boy we’ve seen some good ones, from Nashville to Atlanta, to Knoxville, to Gainesville, to Memphis, to Tuscaloosa, to Chicago, to Boston, to Birmingham. Two of my greatest memories come through those ballgames. One of my favorite days in my whole life was me and you picking up Dreamland BBQ ribs at the original restaurant with the dirt floor in Tuscaloosa. We parked close to the stadium before a Tennessee/Alabama game and sat on the tailgate eating ribs and white bread on a perfect fall afternoon. That was a day where everything was right. For you and me, a good game and a good meal always meant a good day. Another of my favorite days may surprise you. Despite being on opposite sides of the field as fans, we have watched most every Tennessee/Alabama football game together. That game has a tendency to be streaky and Alabama got the best of Tennessee for a loooong time. Then in 2022, we watched together as Tennessee bested them in Knoxville, ending a fifteen year losing streak, and as bad of an Alabama fan as this makes me, I actually was glad Tennessee won because it gave me a front row seat to my 65 year old daddy acting like a seventeen year old boy again. If you saw tears in my eyes that night it wasn’t because my team lost, but because my daddy won, and to borrow a phrase from Bear Bryant, in my heart, “you ain’t never been nuthin’ but a winner.”
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