STEVE YARBROUGH is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, and Prisoners of War, which was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/ Faulkner award. His most recent novel is Stay Gone Days. He teaches at Emerson College.
One Friday evening in October 1975, I found myself standing on the sideline at a Mississippi high school football game alongside a former coach of mine named Johnny Parker. I was in my first year as a scholarship football player at Delta State University, Parker in his first season as the head coach at Tunica Academy. He had called me the day before and asked if I could drive up to Tunica, about 75 miles away, and “help out” during a pivotal game against North Sunflower Academy. Prior to kickoff, he led me into the locker room and introduced me to his team, telling the players that though I wasn’t born with a lot of natural ability, I had worked hard in the weight room, gotten stronger, developed good technique, and always played to the final whistle. As a result, he said, football had earned me a college education I otherwise might not have been able to afford.
At the time, Parker’s team had a record of four wins and three losses. The three losses, I suspected, must have all but killed him. A couple of years earlier, when he was serving as strength coach and defensive coordinator at Indianola Academy, where I was his starting left defensive tackle, we had won a championship at the end of an undefeated season. Over the two years that I played for him, our record was 20 wins and one loss. Parker once told us that the problem with baseball as a sport was that it required you to learn to live with defeat (even reasonably good hitters fail at their task 70 percent of the time), and losing was something Parker seemed to regard as worse even than death.
After we won that championship, the legendary University of Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant offered Parker a position on his staff as a graduate assistant. But before he could pack up and head for Tuscaloosa, he received another offer, to run the strength and conditioning program for head football coach Paul Dietzel at the University of South Carolina. He accepted that job, but after only a few games, Dietzel announced his resignation, effective at the end of the season. Unwilling to work for the new head coach, and unable to immediately land another job at the university level, Parker returned to Mississippi.
That evening in Tunica, he handed me a clipboard and asked me to diagram the opponent’s blocking schemes after each offensive play. This would have been a difficult enough task if I’d been in the press box, with an aerial view of the action. From the sideline, it was impossible, leading me to suspect the real reason he wanted me there. He must have known that I had quickly fallen out of favor with the Delta State coaching staff and was serving as nothing more than scout-team fodder. He had always thought I might make a good coach myself and was probably trying to give me some on-thejob training. He did things like that. The previous spring, after the job at South Carolina played out, he’d insisted I meet him three afternoons a week at Indianola’s Legion Field so that he could conduct the personal conditioning program he had devised for me; he had heard rumors, unfortunately true, that I’d been enjoying too many senior parties and putting on the wrong kind
