A Coach For All Seasons by Lou Neal

When my parents moved our family from Warren County to south Louisville in December, 1956, I was six and one-half years old, half way through the first grade. I remember sitting between my ------ and a thin, unshaven driver in overalls and a plaid shirt as we bounced along in an old white moving van up Highway 31W through the little towns of Horse Cave, Mundordville, Bonnieville, Upton, and Elizabethtown (I thought it was funny that the driver called it E-town), leaving my little world behind forever. The best part of the trip was when we stopped for gas at a little place in Upton, and Momma went next door and bought me a hamburger and a Coke. It was my first hamburger, ever, and it was magical. Then, we got on the road again, headed north to a place I could not even imagine. Louisville was so big, I could not believe it. The city seemed to sprawl out like a big quilt laid over the landscape. By the time we got into south Louisville, the sun had already gone down, and the city’s lights appeared like fire flies as far as the eye could see. I was mesmerized at the sheer size of it all. I had never before seen a high rise building, or a commercial airplane in flight, or a football field. We didn’t have a football team at North Warren High. I don’t remember thinking much about football until the fall of 1961. I was turning the ---- on our black-and-white television set, flipping between the three channels we had in Louisville when I found this football game. The Chicago Bears were playing the Eagles in Philadelphia. I don’t remember much about the game itself, only that the Bears lost, but I was hooked on football forever. The access we had to sports in those days was extremely limited. In basketball season, we got one college game on Saturdays and one pro game on Sundays. The New York Knicks were a terrible team at that time, but they were on television a lot, so I watched, and became a fan. Summertime meant baseball. I loved baseball back then; it really was America’s game. I was lucky enough to see Mickey Mantle, Moose Skowron, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Warren Spahn, and so many more in their prime. Then, pitchers like Dodgers Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, and Bob Gibson of the Cardinals changed the game in the late sixties. The pitchers were overpowering, and games were low scoring for the most part. The thing about baseball was it seemed to last forever, like the universe, in a way that made everything seem right. There were other sports that I came to love, like track and field, and boxing. What kid growing up in Louisville during the 1960s did not love boxing? We were all so proud of Cassius Clay when he won the gold medal in 1968, and so confused by his name change and his refusal to be drafted into the army. What courage that young man had to stand up to the United States government in that day and time! We didn’t understand it back then, but he was a real game changer. Anyway, I was always the kid on our block, the 1200 block of Tennessee Avenue, who organized sports. I was the team captain in baseball, and I organized track meets in the spring. And I was always quarterback when we played football. Football came to be more than just a game. Something about it made a difference. In other sports, it was the stars who played the game that seemed important, but in football, it was the game itself that I loved. The first football game I saw in person was at Manual Stadium in September, 1963. The stadium, built in 1924, was the biggest high school football stadium in the state. My next door neighbor was a sophomore at Flaget High School, and we went to the Flaget versus Male High game together. Flaget didn’t have a home field, so they used the Manual Stadium for their home games. I could see myself playing in that stadium in a couple years. After all, I planned to go to Manual myself. They had a powerhouse football program in the early sixties. I was going to be a star player, for sure. It was not to be. I had some health problems that kept me out of football all through high school. It devastated me. I still went to all the games, all the pep rallies, and all the parties that revolved around the game. The Male – Manual football rivalry is the oldest high school football rivalry east of the Mississippi River. It has been played over 120 times. And I missed my chance to play in it. For several years, after high school, I forgot about the game for the most part. I joined the Louisville Division of Fire, and that kept me busy. I was okay without football. I still played sports, and I was still a leader in organizing things. Along with three other firefighters, I helped establish the Firefighter’s Athletic Club. We organized several softball teams, a golf team, a bowling team, even had an annual track meet at Parkway Field for several years. Eventually, we even formed a football team, and played police departments in the area. We even played police teams in Tampa, Florida and Oklahoma City for several years. But that’s another story. In August, 1974, I was at the firehouse on a hot, sunny afternoon when a friend of mine, another fireman, came to me and asked if I would like to coach a youth football team. I didn’t think twice, and I didn’t ask nearly enough questions. I jumped at the chance. I didn’t find out until a few days later that the team I was going to coach was made up of ‘leftovers’ from the draft when the league formed. No one wanted to coach the team because, well, let’s just say the leftovers didn’t look very much like a football team. It seems their sole purpose was to allow the league to fill out the schedule with an even number of teams. They were to be fodder for the good teams. It didn’t matter. I was back into football. I was the new coach of the 1974 Wyandotte Park, YMCA, 8 to 10 year-old Football Cowboys. I began to go to the library, and read Bud Wilkinson’s series of football coaching books. The first book was about how to teach the Wishbone offense. Coach Wilkinson, a national champion coach at the University of Oklahoma, wrote a whole series of books for Sports Illustrated. One book in particular got my attention. It was called Football: Winning Offense. I must have read it fifty times. I poured over every drill, every scheme, each word and phrase. Then I got the defensive book, and did the same thing. I searched for playbooks, and football histories, and anything football. I conned a couple of other firefighters into helping me, and we soon found ourselves at practice. We got permission from the principal at Southern Middle School to practice on their athletic field. It didn’t have so much as a goal post, but it was mostly level, so we got to work. We scrounged around the neighborhood for anything we could find that might help. We got the Army-Navy store to give us some duffel bags, and a local furniture maker filled them with sawdust for us. We had our blocking and tackling dummies. I made up some offensive line markers out of old fire hose, so the linemen could get lined up correctly. A few old tires and a little rope for hanging the dummies up, and a few footballs, and we were in business. Our first game was a 6-0 loss to the Saints. Not bad for a start. The next week we lost to the Chargers 33 to nothing! Then, we lost 27-0 to the Raiders and 20-7 to the Vikings. But, hey, we finally scored. Our fifth game was an 8-6 loss to the team that would become our biggest rival over the next few seasons. We were winless half way through the season. I was devastated and depressed, but only for a few hours. I went home and pondered how I was going to handle the rest of the season. In the end, I simple decided that I was going to get this done, and I was going to get it done now. There it is! That’s the very thing that makes football so important. It is not that you get your ---- kicked that defines who you are in football, or in life. It is how you react to getting your ---- kicked that makes you a winner. I already found that out when I couldn’t play ball in high school. The next day, I told my assistant coaches that we were going to win next week. Then I told the players. I must have said it a hundred times in that first practice. I’m sure they thought I was crazy, but they fought hard alongside me, and we beat the Dolphins 14 - 8 on Saturday. We never lost another game that year. We finished 5 and 5. And I was becoming a football coach. Early this fall, I will coach in my 500th football game! I never coached in the pros, or in college. My name isn’t on any list of future hall of fame coaches. I did win a bunch of games, and a few championships. I even got to coach at Manual High School, and watched two of my sons play there, and go on to play in college. But the most important thing I ever did in football was to be there, every day, in good weather and bad, no matter what, for hundreds of boys who were trying to become men, to help show them the way. I hope I’ve made a difference. Did I say how much I love football?