Stat Daddy

By Kevin Taylor

Stat Daddy takes you on a whimsical sports journey from the late '70s through present-day social media coverage, linking old-school two-a-day football coaches with today's highly skilled prep athletes who would have run circles around star players forty years ago. Follow along in the oft-amusing and nostalgia-laced anecdotes from yesteryear. Stat Daddy covers it all, too--sports, movies, and music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638813729

Book preview

Foreword

‘He’s the kind of kid you’d like your daughter to date?’ Dad, I didn’t know that about you!

My nine-year-old daughter, Zoe, in 2020, happily read from a feature story by Kevin Taylor in the Conroe Courier from more than thirty years prior, and the proclamation from my high school principal in 1989 still made me proud—and now I could share Kevin’s descriptive writing with my three children.

Kevin, like most all of us sportswriters, probably long ago forgot penning that article about me as a high school basketball player at Oak Ridge High north of Houston long ago—but I have not and am appreciative to this day he took the time to share my story about having heart surgery before competing in high school sports.

People at the time, even some strangers who attended games, told me the story inspired them to press on through adversity, and I beamed in response.

Kevin takes his role as a daily historian quite seriously while still managing to have fun along the way. I know you will enjoy Stat Daddy, a colorful and fast-paced swing through sporting history in Texas and Arkansas, often leaving me chuckling out loud or exclaiming as a fellow Montgomery Countian, I remember that!

Back at Oak Ridge in the late 1980s, an unassuming Kevin had no idea this took place on his visits to our gym during practices to interview the great Coach Bob Deegan, but we were intensely aware of his presence, even trying to shoot a little better to perhaps catch his eye.

To this day, I have no idea what our end goal was in trying to get Kevin’s attention, maybe a fantastical line in the Conroe Courier for college scouts (lead footed six-foot guards weren’t really in demand) or high school girls to ideally absorb: Brent Zwerneman was shooting lights out during practice on Thursday as the War Eagles were preparing to play Willis.

After graduation from Oak Ridge in 1989, one hot summer day, I drove my old ’67 Mustang unannounced to the Conroe Courier and asked at the front desk to see one Kevin Taylor. Keep in mind this was before email or the widespread use of cell phones. Kevin seemed a little surprised when I showed up at his desk but immediately reached toward a file cabinet.

I bet I know why you’re here, he said with a grin, pulling out a couple of glossy black-and-white photos of the War Eagles in action.

Those pictures turned out to be just unexpected bonuses to an impromptu visit, and I still appreciate having them. In truth, I had just hoped to visit with Kevin about sportswriting because he had inspired me to perhaps one day share others’ stories—and try and have way too much fun with it along the way (like Kevin, I’ve been probably too successful on that front).

A pleased Kevin invited me to take a seat, and he settled in and began spinning tales about sportswriting. The rest is history, much like the vibrant accounts in Stat Daddy.

Kevin’s memoir offers oft-amusing and nostalgia-laced anecdotes from a largely uncluttered time, one thankfully Kevin preserved for digitally drenched future generations to learn a bit about the recent past from (really it was a whole different world) and, more importantly, just enjoy.

Brent Zwerneman

Sportswriter

Houston Chronicle

Conroe, Texas—population just near twenty thousand in the early 1980s—for a short period of time had two newspapers.

At Spring High School, twenty-five miles south on a then four-lane—two each way—Interstate 45, a sophomore, working with the boys’ basketball team that was in a rebuilding mode after the great 1980–1981 team led by Jack Worthington and split of the school to create Westfield High School, was busy producing statistics—complete with team and dead-ball rebounds—for a 7/25 team that mirrored those maintained at the collegiate level.

The Morning News’s Larry Bowen and the Courier’s Kevin Taylor were the beneficiaries when the Lions would come calling twice during the Tigers’ run-up to its 1985 UIL 5A state title appearance against the 39–0 Madison Marlins of Houston.

Bumping into Kevin at an Astros game—where he was on the field for pregame batting practice and I was sitting in third-row seats down the first baseline—produced opportunities for me to cover the Willis Wildkats for four years in the late 1980s to string for both the Conroe Courier and do in-game radio reports for AM 880 KIKR.

Late Friday night sessions at the Courier to get the paper out with editor J. C. Deavours, Kevin, and the late Scott Kaiser often morphed into the late morning hours at the Village Inn restaurant and was repeated week after week during football season.

That’s how I drew the long straw here.

As Kevin wrote in a 2019 Fort Smith Southwest Times Record column eulogizing one of the greatest writers ever to cover high school sports in Texas, Bill McMurray, he listed a few of his influences, which included Bowen, who joined the Courier before moving on to a long career with the Bryan-College Station Eagle, the Houston Post’s Ivy McLemore, and former Courier editor Mark Rosner, who had a thirty-year career with the Austin American-Statesman.

Some of the other great ones that you could be hearing from could include Chuck Cox, Buck Ringgold, or if they were still with us, the aforementioned Kaiser or the late Brian Williams.

The thing is, to cover high school sports well—and to do so for a long period of time like Kevin has—there’s a different gift—and love—that one must possess, cultivate, and nurture.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with an accomplished scribe’s desire to grab bylines above the fold and at some of the biggest newspapers in the land, but the most intrinsic joys that come as a writer is recognizing and telling the story of an athlete, coach, official, administrator, or supporter that will forever live on the icebox or in a scrapbook.

We’ve all heard the grizzled coach say, Those that can’t or couldn’t play the game cover it. I would, in my best Stat Daddy impersonation, say, No, Hoss, we’ve just got different skills and abilities—both good in their own right.

Really it is no different than the coach or the athlete that draws up or executes a play to win a contest than the ability to tell the story in such a way for the reader to connect with the same emotion, feeling, and intensity as those who performed it.

Jon Walk

Sportswriter

Houston, Texas

Stat Daddy! The Lede

The glow of the orange sun is sinking behind the treetops north of the Booneville High School football practice field. Darkness has befallen the sprawling Logan County campus at 5:01 p.m. The grass is yellow; there is a nip in the air.

High school football practice on Tuesday before Thanksgiving brings a sliver of a smile to the face of Coach Scott Hyatt, the usually stoic Bearcats coach who won not one but two state titles during his thirteen seasons as the team’s head coach.

There are no AstroTurf practice fields adjacent to Bearcat Stadium. The parking lot includes some late-model 1990s and early 2000s pickup trucks, including a black Ford with a faded Go Cowboys bumper sticker on the tailgate.

Booneville, Arkansas, isn’t the type of place everyone’s trying to get to. But those who call this home, and most, if not all, bleed Bearcat purple and love the same things most Arkansans do—their high school team, the Dallas Cowboys, the Arkansas Razorbacks, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Cowboy bumper stickers on the tailgate of beat-up pickup trucks? Absolutely.

The only color to be found on this chilly early-winter evening is the purple Bearcat insignia stamped in the center of the football field—facing the home fans, of course, which is proximate to the practice field.

By morning, the dew-covered practice field will be as lonely as the pine trees swaying in the breeze beyond the makeshift benches where dreams are born, realized, and come to die. For now, though, illuminated by a pair of light poles, asymmetry of huffing and puffing football players are wrapping up practice in preparation for Friday’s showdown with Pea Ridge. The temperature has dropped below fifty degrees.

In the throng of players running post-practice wind sprints, Bearcat defensive standout Noah Reyes is all smiles, his curly black hair protruding from his helmet. The sixteen-year-old has plenty of reason to celebrate this week over a plate of turkey, green bean casserole, and mashed potatoes slathered in giblet gravy.

A week shy of his seventeenth birthday, Noah Reyes didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth. There were parents and siblings, and there were love and understanding.

But stability often eluded him.

I can ride around town and point out fifty different houses I’ve stayed in, Reyes told me as we talked next to his locker.

Reyes spoke that day in a past-tense tone, afraid to believe his current situation wasn’t some sort of dream. But first, as I’m waiting for the last Bearcat to finish their wind sprints, Hyatt is giving me Cliff’s Notes version of young Noah’s life.

It’s complicated.

Sort of like sportswriting.

Half an hour later, I’m standing in line at the Booneville McDonald’s, one of those half-filling station, half-grocery stores, half-burger joints on the main drag, Highway 10, a stretch of road that connects Highway 71 in western Arkansas with Interstate 430 in west Little Rock. There are colorful people in line, too, including a woman with a giant tattoo of a dragon covering most of her left arm, a guy in a 1978 truckers’ baseball cap, and a man in overalls and white tennis shoes.

It’s 6:14 p.m. as I begin my journey home, a forty-nine-mile jaunt that shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes. Following curvy Highway 23, a two-lane blacktop Arkansas football fans long ago nicknamed the Pig Trail, which winds its way from Highway 71, just north of Waldron, through Booneville and Ozark, and eventually runs into Highway 16 for the final leg toward Fayetteville, my 2007 Ford Explorer swings around the Booneville reservoir before jutting north toward Corley Farms.

Waylon Jennings’s upbeat tune, Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line, with a great guitar riff at the beginning, is blaring over the speakers. I’m sipping sweet iced tea and nibbling on salty McDonald’s french fries. I’ve already formulated the lead to my story before crossing Highway 22 in Caulksville toward an unincorporated piece of land called Etna.

I’m still half an hour from pulling into my driveway, yet the story I haven’t yet written already has legs—and a line in the story that will include mashed potatoes and giblet gravy.

What a life.

Now close your eyes, if you will, as we drift back to 1978. Donna Summer, Peter Frampton, Willie Nelson, Stevie Nicks, Charlie Pride, the Bay City Rollers.

Foosball, Boones Farm strawberry wine, pinball machines, Lone Star beer.

Curt Gowdy, Howard Cosell, John Facenda, Pat Summerall, Mel Allen. (Phyllis, Brent, Irv, and Jimmy, too!)

Grease, Animal House, Shaun Cassidy, Robin Williams. And me.

I had floppy hair, more pimples than I care to remember, and a brown briefcase that looked like the one James Garner carried with him on The Rockford Files. For my sportswriting necessities, of course.

Which, in the fall of ’78, consisted of a hand-held tape recorder, the binoculars my dad had given me for Christmas from Oshman’s Sporting Goods store on the Gulf Freeway the previous year, two 8 1/2 by 11 3/4 yellow notepads, and three ink pens. Sorry, no pencils allowed.

I spent my weekends cooking tacos and snacking on Bonus Jacks at Jack in the Box, located at the junction of Highway 105 and Interstate 45, a few miles west of downtown Conroe, Texas. I was actually branded too slow to cook, which gave me a chance to enhance my people skills with the public.

As my squeaky, sometimes crackling voice rattled over the loudspeaker—Hi, welcome to Jack in the Box, may I take your order?—I mostly worked the drive-thru. I loved every damn minute of it.

When I wasn’t serving tacos and munching on that tasty Jack Sauce between coffee breaks, I was covering sports—usually a basketball or football game. My path was set in motion thanks to a stringer gig at the Conroe Courier—and gas money earned from Jack in the Box.

I wore khaki pants and bright yellow and blue-striped Izod shirts and reeked of sweet-smelling English Leather cologne. I was 17, unafraid to talk to strangers—a cross between Theodore Cleaver and Richie Cunningham.

That fall, as the crisp autumn air engulfed the tall pine trees surrounding my childhood home at 407 Oak Hill Drive in Conroe, the epitome of small-town America, forty miles north of Houston on a stretch of interstate connecting Houston with Dallas, I nervously climbed the steps toward the old press box in Montgomery, Texas.

Nothing more than a dot on the map in those days, Montgomery was the starting point of my sportswriting career that spans five decades, linking the ’70s with the new millennium.

The 2018 version of my job as a sportswriter was still basically the same as it was in 1978: jot down stats, take notes about key plays, figure out the lead to my game story, and make mental notes for potential feature stories.

Of course, today’s players would have run circles around those guys from the ’70s. There were no team camps, no 7-on-7 football tournaments. There were no iPad Pros used to devour hours of film study via Hudl. Coaches didn’t hit send on their laptops; they drove four hours to whatever gas station they could find to trade game film with opposing coaches—sometimes at one or two o’clock in the morning.

Poring over video in 1978 meant sitting in dimly lit rooms that doubled as high school health classes. With the flip of a switch, Conroe football coach Mike Barber’s health class became a video room with an assistant coach’s cigarette smoke causing a bluish haze like as it wafted toward the ceiling.

The 1970s, man!

I’ve covered no-hitters, witnessed jaw-dropping ninety-three-foot one-handed basketball heaves that caught nothing but net, and witnessed stunning game-winning field goals in state championship football games.

Once, in 2001, I covered a baseball game that never took place; the visiting team’s manager and an assistant coach were both ejected before the first pitch. The team I was there to cover won by forfeit.

One Saturday in 1995, I sat front row and center as beholder to the greatest game I ever covered—LaPoynor’s (Texas) stunning 60–56 win over Maypearl in the Texas 2A state basketball championship game.

When the game was over, as the players hugged one another while wiping away tears of joy, I stood in awe, knowing I was about to write about a basketball game no one could ever have imagined. This was my Hoosiers moment.

Interviewing LaPoynor players in the locker room, the glee in their eyes as pure as the white cotton that’s farmed thirty-plus miles east of Austin’s Erwin Center, it’s a moment etched forever in my mind.

I’ve written about golfers, sprinters, pitchers, and setters. I embraced every minute of it.

I clung to an old yellow Adidas T-shirt I wore in the 1970s. I told anyone within earshot the same thing I proclaim now:

Adidas stands for All Day I Dream About Sports.

Summer of ’76

I’m bouncing in the cab of Fred Bull’s 1973 Chevy pickup. It’s the summer of 1976. Chicago’s Old Days is blaring from the speakers as we head toward a fishing cabin on Lake Livingston, a man-made reservoir deep in the East Texas Piney Woods. The windows are down as a blast of humid air sweeps through the cab, the leather seats sticking to the bottom of my khaki JC Penney’s shorts.

I am not yet fifteen.

The cab of Bull’s truck has a distinct fragrance of sweat (body odor), spilled beer (and coffee), and stale cigarettes. God, I miss that smell.

We are paralleling the old Missouri Pacific railroad tracks just north of New Waverly, Texas. We’re humming along in southern Walker County, a tranquil parcel of land dotted with old homesteads and single-family trailers.

It’s hard to tell if it’s 1976 or 1926.

Fred Bull lived across the street from my parents’ house on Oak Hill Drive, a neatly manicured yellow house, with white trim that was a hop and a skip away from Bull’s driveway. Laura Curtis, a famed Golden Girls drill teamer, lived on one side of our house and the Hartmans on the other. The Keelings and McCartys lived down the street.

A pretty brown-haired girl a year younger than I named Susan Kendall lived across the street.

Propped up against the back of that blue Chevy, cigarette in one hand, a Miller Lite in the other, Fred Bull was holding court. An air traffic controller at Houston’s Intercontinental Airport, Fred smoked Kent cigarettes and could outdrink any sailor without even a snippet of being tipsy.

Our subdivision, a block from Conroe High School, was relatively small, connecting Wilson and Longmire Roads with rows of nicely built houses, tidy yards, and clean driveways. My dad, Tommy Taylor, and neighbors Fred Bull and Ken Hineman (Fred’s next-door neighbor) spent countless hours leaning on the back of Bull’s Chevy chewing the fat and breaking down the economy.

When they weren’t pressed up against the back of Fred’s truck, they were sitting in lawn chairs on Bull’s back porch listening to Gene Elston call Houston Astros’ baseball games.

I was there, too, sight unseen.

Fred Bull wasn’t family, but he was pretty damn close.

Fred and Jimmie Bull were older than my parents, Tommy and Dorene, though they called each other by a different name—Jimmie called Fred by his middle name, Cecil, and Fred called Jimmie by her given nickname, Sparky.

A short woman, Sparky, was a milkshake shy of five feet tall. She was an immaculate housekeeper, too. And she was tough. (Guess that’s why Fred called her Sparky.)

Fred and Sparky’s only child, Lisa, was a bubbly blond who my brother, Jeff, and I thought of as the sister we never had. (Still do.)

Fred had a stubby Dachshund with short legs named Honey, whom he often referred to as Gut-Gut or sometimes just Gut. Fred would ask Gut if she wanted to hunt for alligators in the front yard.

For the longest time, I believed there were alligators amid the lush green Bermuda grass growing in Fred Bull’s front yard.

Life was simple that summer. I pedaled my blue ten-speed bicycle up and down Oak Hill and around the sidewalks circling Conroe High School—a five-minute