The Crazy Kid: My Life as a Coach and Athletic Director in Garland, Texas

By Homer B. Johnson and Kenny Green

Homer B. Johnson has been a coach in the Garland, Texas, Indpendent School District since 1948 and the athletic director of the GISD sincd 1963. When you coach in one place for that long, you are bound to have a story or two to tell - and Homer definitely has one or two.

As Homer spins through one classic story after another in this book, you will see why he has had the cultural impact that he has had on high school sports in Texas. From a sideline fistfight that fired up future Baltimore Colts star Bobby Boyd, to University of Texas star Marquise Goodwin dominating the high school state track meet wo years in a row, all of Homer's favorite stories are told here in his down home, unassuming fashion, with some added insight and testimonials from his peers.

If you know Homer or have heard him speak, then you know that his storytelling ability is almost as legendary as Texas itself. If you have not met Homer or heard him speak, you are in for a real treat as you meet him for the first time and relive 60-plus years of Texas high school sports through his eyes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462054633

Homer B. Johnson

Homer B. Johnson is a graduate of Garland High School and of the University of North Texas, and has worked in the Garland ISD since 1948. He has been athletic director of the Garland ISD since 1963. He is a member of six Halls of Fame in Texas for his contributions to high school athletics. Derek Ray Johnson is a graduate of North Garland High School. He served as the sports editor for The Garland News for six years and has served as both an analyst and play-by-play man for Garland ISD football broadcasts on the radio. He currently lives in Rowlett, Texas, with his wife and two kids. Brian Honea is a graduate of South Garland High School. He wrote and edited for many newspaeprs in the Dallas area for 11 years, including four with The Garland News. He has previously published two non-fiction sports books, and he has a master's degree from Amberton University in Garland. He currently lives in Garland with his wife.

Book preview

THE CRAZY KID

My Life as a Coach and Athletic Director in Garland, Texas

Homer B. Johnson

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

THE CRAZY KID

My Life as a Coach and Athletic Director in Garland, Texas

Copyright © 2011 by Homer B. Johnson.

Cover photo by Kenny Green.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-5461-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5462-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5463-3 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 09/30/2011

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

Homer B. Johnson would like to thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed for the book and would like to thank Derek and Brian for taking the time to interview him and write the book. Homer would like to acknowledge his associates Don Buchholz, Mike Moses, Gary Reeves and Curtis Culwell, as well as any athlete or coach who has influenced his life in his 60-plus years as a coach.

Derek Ray Johnson would like to dedicate this book to his children, Ashley and Johnny; and to his mom and dad for giving him the passion to play sports as a youngster and to later write about it as an adult. Derek would like to thank Homer for sharing the story of his wonderful life and allowing him to express it into an autobiography. Derek would like to thank all of the current and former members of the Garland ISD for their contributions to this book. He would like to thank the city of Garland, Texas, and all of its past and present residents who played a big part in this book as they helped shape a small farming community into a town of more than 200,000 people. Most importantly, Derek would like to thank his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for none of this would be possible without Him.

Brian Honea would like to thank Homer for living such an extraordinary life worthy of a book of this length, and for trusting him to help put it into words. Brian would like to dedicate this book to the City of Garland, Texas, where he was born and has lived all his life; to his wife, Gloria; and to his dad for inspiring him to be a writer. Brian would like to thank Jay Jones and Homer for helping him get the book published, and he would like to thank everyone who participated with the book by contributing an interview or testimonial. Most of all, Brian would like to thank God for giving him the ability to write.

"Homer is a renaissance man. He’s had quite a career. We used to live catty corner to each other back when we were in school. He’s been a real fixture for the school district and he’s probably the oldest employee in any school in the State of Texas.

In Ruidoso, New Mexico, there are a number of retired coaches and school people from all over Texas who come to spend the summer. I’ve made it a practice, whenever I meet one of them, to ask them if they know Homer Johnson. And I’ve never met one that didn’t know him!

Don Buchholz

Garland High School Class of 1947

University of North Texas Board of Regents

Foreword

In Texas, when people talk about high school sports, one name always comes up—Homer B. Johnson.

No state in the union embraces or cherishes high school athletics more than Texas, and no person in Texas is more passionate about high school sports than Homer B. Johnson. His introduction to sports came as the water boy for the Frisco (Texas) High School football team in the 1930s. Today, he administers to a staff of five and supervises more than 300 coaches in all sports as the athletic director for the Garland, Texas Independent School District—a position he has held since 1963.

He has held that position for so long that two men he originally hired as teachers and coaches in the Garland ISD years ago, Curtis Culwell and Gary Reeves, are now his superiors as the superintendent and assistant superintendent, respectively.

If you don’t know Coach Homer as a friend, you probably know of Homer B. Johnson Stadium, one of the most popular high school football stadiums in Texas. Located in Garland, a large suburb to the immediate northeast of Dallas with a population of well over 200,000, this 15,000-seat capacity stadium has been the site of many hundreds of regular season and post-season high school football and soccer games since it opened in 1974.

Even though Homer is over 80 years old and has been coaching for more than 60 years, he never slows down and is an involved, hands-on athletic director. He is in his office every day at 5:30 a.m. and holds court with donuts and coffee at 6:30. During football season, he usually does not get home before 11 p.m. He champions all sports and frequently attends football, baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, track and field events, golf matches and softball games within the Garland Independent School District.

He is not the retiring type—in fact, he could be making more money by collecting retirement benefits, so he is actually losing money by continuing to work. He does not hunt, play golf, or fish. His life is working as the Garland ISD athletic director and attending his school district’s sporting events. Anytime he is approached at one of those events and asked how he is doing, he always enthusiastically responds, Fine!

Some might say that Coach Homer has not led a glamorous life, but it’s not as if his life has not been important and influential. He has been an assistant football coach, a head football and baseball coach, a combat infantryman during the Korean War, a husband, a father and a school district athletic director. The lives of many thousands of young athletes have been touched by Coach Homer, and he continues to touch thousands more.

Many student athletes who have passed through the Garland ISD over the years and gone on to fame in the pros have been taught, coached or mentored by Coach Homer in some way. Some of these names might sound familiar: Bobby Boyd, Ricky Pierce, Marquise Goodwin, Randy Love, Denard Walker, Quincy Morgan, Ike Diogu, Derrick Dockery, Uzooma Okeke, Melvin Bullitt, Jacob Lacey, Joe Walter, Mike Gandy and Herkie Walls, just to name a few.

Coach Homer’s storytelling ability is famous, and he loves an audience. It is obvious from listening to these stories why former Highland Park High School football coach Thurman Tugboat Jones used to refer to Coach Homer as The Crazy Kid. Having coached in the same place for more than 60 years, he has quite a few legendary anecdotes involving the athletes and coaches who have surrounded him in Garland. From an infamous sideline scuffle in 1955 with future Baltimore Colts superstar Bobby Boyd that fired up the Garland Owls, to the school board giving him a carte blanche for hiring football coaches, to the fabled back-to-back state football championships in the 1960s for Garland High School, to world-class sprinter and jumper Marquise Goodwin leading Rowlett High School to two track and field state titles… it’s all told here in this book in Homer’s own words with some added insight from Homer’s peers.

Coach Homer has been recognized all over the State of Texas for his achievements and influence on high school athletics. In addition to having a stadium named in his honor, Coach Homer has a street named after him in Garland. He is a member of six Halls of Fame across Texas—the Garland Sports Hall of Fame, the Fannin County Hall of Fame, the Texas High School Coaches Association Hall of Honor, the Texas Athletic Directors Hall of Fame, the Oil Bowl Hall of Fame and the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame.

When he graduated from North Texas State College in 1948, Coach Homer was presented with a choice—either become the head football coach at Forney High School, about 15 miles southeast of Garland, or take an assistant coaching job at his alma mater, Garland High School.

He chose Garland, and the rest—well, read on. Let The Crazy Kid tell his story.

Derek Ray Johnson and Brian Honea

Garland, Texas, September 2011

My favorite story about Homer Johnson took place at an administrative retreat many years ago when Dr. (Jill) Shugart was still the superintendent of the Garland ISD. Steve Knagg and Reavis Wortham did a little skit about Dr. Shugart. It talked about ten things you need to know about her. When they got down to number two, the comment was made that there were two people Dr. Shugart couldn’t fire. One was God and the other one was Homer. That made a lasting impression with me. I realized what an icon Homer was and is in this community/state. He has always been a dear friend and supporter. I truly appreciate him. He is certainly one of a kind in many ways.

John Tucci, Principal, O’Banion Middle School

Chapter 1

Garland High Adopts a Nickname and School Colors in the Same Season

These days, every high school team is identified by a nickname, but it didn’t used to always be that way, especially in the early 1920s.

In 1922, the Garland High School football team traveled to Greenville, about 45 miles northeast of Garland, to take on one of the top high school teams in the state. Back in those days, Garland High School was just Garland. They didn’t have a nickname and the only uniforms they had back then were some old red and white practice jerseys. It was the 1922 Garland football team that changed all that, however. Little did they know that their trip to Greenville would be an historic event that would forever change the landscape of Garland football.

Greenville was always known for having some of the best football teams in the state back then. They scheduled Garland that year in a game that was supposed to be an easy victory for them.

Fortunately, Garland had a running back by the name of Choc Sanders, who was one of the original inductees in the Garland Sports Hall of Fame in 1987. Choc was one of the best football players to ever play in Garland. I never got to see him play, because he was still a little before my time, if you can believe that.

Garland traveled to Greenville and Sanders ran wild in the first half. He scored a couple of touchdowns, but both were negated by penalties. Back then, they had hometown people officiating football games. Well, each time that Choc broke loose and was on his way in for a score, they would throw down a flag and say that either Garland was offsides, or there was a running back in motion, or something of that nature.

Garland played Greenville toe-to-toe in the first half and both teams went into the locker room deadlocked in a 0-0 tie.

For some reason or another, the Greenville coach had it in his head that the real reason Garland was playing better than his team was because the Garland players were wearing the same red and white jerseys as the Greenville players. Their coach happened to have some old black and gold practice jerseys, and he talked Garland into wearing those as game jerseys once the second half began.

Meanwhile, Garland smartened up in the second half. Anytime Garland would cross midfield, Sanders would instruct all of the linemen to stand real still, while he would drop kick a field goal.

It was a crazy strategy, but Choc did it in order to keep their hometown officials from throwing a flag like they had been doing in the first half. Choc went on to drop kick two field goals and Garland beat Greenville, 6-0. At the time, it was considered to be the biggest upset in Texas high school football.

Garland felt so good about their accomplishment, they adopted black and gold as the official school colors after that game and would soon come up with a school nickname later that season.

Many people considered Garland to be the best football team in the state after their remarkable victory, but there was a high school team from up north that wasn’t impressed at all. In fact, it was a high school team from Toledo, Ohio, that thought they were not only the best team in their state, but in the entire nation. The Garland football team caught wind of this and wanted to do something about it. Garland thought they had the best team in Texas and wanted to settle the score on the field.

There’s always talk of a mythical high school national championship game even today, but the game nearly became a reality when the team from Toledo sent a telegram to Garland requesting that they come up there to play them in a game sometime around Christmas.

The buildup of the high school national championship game was on in full force. The Garland football players soon learned that the Toledo squad had a nickname like Tigers or something like that.

Garland didn’t have a mascot at the time and the football players wanted to adopt a nickname. There was a big meeting that took place with the coach, the superintendent and just about everybody involved with the football team.

A lot of the Garland football players were farmers in the 1920s and wouldn’t even come to school except during football season. Those kids would go hang out down around the area of Southern Methodist University in Dallas the night before their football games and would stay up all night chasing co-eds. The kids on that football team wanted to be known as the Night Owls, but that didn’t go over too well with the coach or the superintendent.

They wanted nothing to do with the team being referred to as the Night Owls, so they all settled on Owls, and that’s been Garland’s mascot ever since.

Unfortunately, the game against Toledo never took place because Garland couldn’t raise enough money to get on a train to go up there, but the mere buildup of the game launched the school mascot that still exists to this day.

This word gets overused, but Homer is really an icon in the business. When you stop and think about it, the Garland ISD has really only had one athletic director.

Bob Price, former coach in the Garland ISD

Garland High School principal, 1981-2001

Chapter 2

Garland ISD Football Players Who Went Pro

Garland High has produced several players who had outstanding careers in professional football over the years. It all started with Fred Harris, a 1937 graduate of Garland who played college football at Southern Methodist University and played for the New York Americans of the American Football League in 1941 (this AFL is not to be confused with the AFL started by Lamar Hunt in 1960). Fred was a 6-4, 225-pound tackle and team captain for the Owls and was a state champion in the discus throw for Garland.

In the early 1950s, there was Carl Brawley, who was an all-distict junior tackle on Garland’s 1949 state semi-finalist team. Brawley signed a contract with the New York Giants, but unfortunately he died in a car accident in 1957 before he could report to the Giants’ training camp.

In the 1960s, Bobby Boyd was an all-pro cornerback for many years with the Baltimore Colts; we had Chuck Dicus, who played three years as a receiver for the San Diego Chargers in the early 1970s; and in the 1980s, former Garland Owl Randy Love played seven years as a running back for the St. Louis Cardinals. Also in the ‘80s, another Garland High alum, Herkie Walls, played three years for the Houston Oilers and a year for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a wide receiver and kickoff returner. Herkie also played six years in the Arena Football League for the Orlando Predators. John Washington, a 1971 graduate of South Garland High School, played for the Los Angeles Rams in 1975 and for Saskatchewan and Calgary of the CFL in 1976-77.

Garland High also produced offensive lineman Uzooma Okeke, who played 13 years in the Canadian Football League. Uzo was an offensive lineman for the 2002 Montreal Alouettes team that won the Grey Cup, which is the CFL’s equivalent of the NFL’s Lombardi Trophy for winning the Super Bowl. Johnny McCoy, who graduated from Garland High in 1977, played in the Canadian Football League for one year and in the United States Football League for one year. Johnny played for the Michigan Panthers in the USFL, which won the championship in ‘83, the year he played. But he missed out on the championship because he left the team in the middle of the season after a contract dispute!

To this day, Bobby Boyd remains the career leader in interceptions for the Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts franchise with 57! The closest guy on the list who is still active had only 12 though the end of the 2010 season, so that record is going to stand a while. That total of 57 also ties Bobby with four other players for 11th on the NFL’s all-time interceptions leader list. One of those four he is tied with is longtime Dallas Cowboy Everson Walls, Herkie’s cousin, who played high school ball at Berkner High in Richardson just north of Dallas.

More recently, Garland High alum Mike Gandy was a standout on the offensive line for Notre Dame and later played for the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII against the Pittsburgh Steelers in January 2009. Gandy has had a long career in the NFL in which he has also played for Chicago and Buffalo.

Richmond McGee, a 2001 graduate of Garland High, was a punter for championship teams in both high school (in 1999 with the Garland Owls) and college (2005 with the University of Texas). In the NFL, McGee has been a member of the Philadelphia Eagles’ practice squad and has also been a member of the Chicago Bears.

We had some football players from the Garland ISD who were successful at the professional level before the 1990s, but nothing like what we’ve had since then. Starting with the mid-1990s, the other Garland ISD schools began to produce some professional football players. Denard Walker, who was a star at South Garland High School, went on to play at Louisiana State, was drafted by the Tennessee Oilers in 1997 and had a nine-year career as a safety in the NFL. A few years later at South Garland, we had Quincy Morgan, who played at Kansas State and played six years as a receiver and kick returner in the NFL. He played for the Cowboys in 2004. Quincy was a very good basketball player, too.

In May 2010, the 6-8, 301-pound former South Garland Colonel offensive tackle Nick Richmond signed as a free agent with the San Diego Chargers. In addition to being named all-district in football, Nick lettered in tennis and track and field at South Garland before graduating in 2005. He played his college football at Texas Christian over in Fort Worth.

Lakeview Centennial High School had Keith Mitchell, a linebacker who played college ball at Texas A&M and played for seven years in the NFL and was a pro-bowler with the New Orleans Saints in 2000; and Derrick Dockery, an offensive guard who played at the University of Texas and has enjoyed a long NFL career with the Redskins and Bills starting in 2003.

Naaman Forest High School has also produced a few of NFL players since the start of the new millennium, two of which have played for the Indianapolis Colts. Safety Melvin Bullitt was drafted by the Colts in 2007 out of Texas A&M, and cornerback Jacob Lacey was drafted by the Colts in 2009 out of Oklahoma State. Offensive guard Uche Nwaneri was drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2007 after starring for Purdue (Uche’s cousin, Ike Diogu, played football and basketball at Garland High and played in the NBA).

North Garland High School has produced a couple of NFL players. In 1985, Joe Walter was drafted in the sixth round by the Cincinnati Bengals out of Texas Tech. Walter played for the Bengals for eight years and was a starting offensive tackle for them for much of that time. In 2007 and ‘08, Eric Bassey saw some playing time at safety for the St. Louis Rams. Bassey had been drafted by the Bills in 2006 and spent two years on their practice squad after an impressive college career at Oklahoma.

We’ve had a few players who have played on the team that lost the Super Bowl. Bobby Boyd’s Colts team lost to the Jets in Super Bowl III (January 1969) in his last year to play, but two years later he was an assistant coach with the Colts when they beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl V with a last second field goal. Joe Walter was with the Cincinnati Bengals when they became the victims of the famous drive by Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl XXXIII (January 1989). Denard Walker played for the Tennessee Titans in Super Bowl XXXIV (January 2000) when they lost to the Rams; and Mike Gandy was a member of the Cardinals, who lost to the Steelers in Super Bowl XLIII (January 2009).

‘The Truth’

As of 2011, we’ve only had two former Garland ISD players who have played on Super Bowl champion teams. Quincy Morgan was a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers when they defeated the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL (January 2006), and Karl Williams, a former Garland Owl, played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl XXXVII against the Oakland Raiders (January 2003).

Karl Williams played for nine years in the NFL—eight years with Tampa Bay and one with the Arizona Cardinals, then he went on to play in the Arena Football League. But he sort of flew under the radar as a player both at Garland High and in college. On one occasion a Dallas Morning News reporter called me and said, Homer, do you know Karl Williams? I said, I sure don’t. He said, He’s gonna start this week for Tampa Bay against the Cowboys. And he played at Garland High School. I said, If he played at Garland High School, I don’t know anything about him.

So I told him to give me a few minutes and I called over to Garland High School, and they told me, Yeah, he played here, but he hardly played. In fact, I’m not sure if he ever caught a pass. But what happened was, the kid just kept coming. He walked on at a junior college and got better, but he still didn’t get an offer from a four-year college. So he walked on with Texas A&I and got a really, really good receivers coach. That coach later was hired by Tampa Bay as the receivers coach, and at the time he wasn’t very happy with his receivers that he had with the Buccaneers. So he told the Buccaneers’ head coach at the time, Tony Dungy, I’ve got a better receiver down here at this little college. Dungy said, Ok, let’s bring him down here. So they drafted Karl Williams in 1996 and he got a Super Bowl ring a few years later!

Karl’s nickname was The Truth in the NFL. He didn’t start very often for Tampa Bay, but he had a pretty impressive career with 124 receptions and seven touchdowns. He was also a pretty good kickoff and punt returner over the years, with five punt returns for touchdowns. He returned a punt for 25 yards in that Super Bowl game for Tampa Bay against Oakland to set up the Buccaneers’ first touchdown.

There were several factors that contributed to the increase in the number of professional football players the Garland ISD turned out. During the ‘90s, we got a lot of things done that we had been wanting to do for a long time, but just could not do because of limited financing. For starters, we got all our weight rooms brought up to par for the high schools. We also encouraged the school board to build weight rooms for all the middle schools, which they did, and that was a huge factor. We renovated our Williams Stadium press box to be one of the best in the state. Our food service took over the concession stands, and that gave us more money to pay for the athletic teams’ travel. We added air conditioned buses that the athletic teams used.

These changes were made because the assistant superintendent for the Garland ISD, Gary Reeves, oversaw the logistics for the athletic department such as the transportation, food service and weight rooms. I had originally hired Gary in 1969 as the head baseball coach and an assistant football coach at Garland High, and by the mid-1980s, he was the assistant superintendent for the entire school district.

We had been wanting things like new weight rooms for a long time, but Gary had the power to get those things done. He also worked with the community to recruit sponsors who supported our athletic department to bring in money with advertisements in the stadiums and that sort of thing.

We also went from being the worst technology people in the state to the best overnight, because Gary hired the technology people to take over. We have the best technology people in the country now, and Gary was responsible for that.

A combination of all these things probably made us one of the top football districts in the State of Texas.

You all know Homer. You’ve been around him long enough. He’ll be around here another 30, 40 years, probably. I’m going to retire. I don’t know about him, but I’m looking to the day when I can retire. So I appreciate you, Homer, hanging in there and giving me inspiration. I hope I can make it a few more years.

Lance Todd White

Former South Garland and University of North Texas

football player

During his Garland Sports Hall of Fame

acceptance speech, 2007

Chapter 3

Destined for Sports

I came to the realization as a youngster growing up in Frisco, Texas, that I was pretty much destined to have a career in athletics.

I was born November 28, 1927, in Frisco, which is about 30 miles north of Dallas. My father was a pipeliner who worked all around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. He worked in Rockwall, Greenville, Garland and Wylie. He didn’t