As time passed, and my mother returned to her old self, my childhood adoration of Coach Carr morphed into a different kind of reverence. I still mostly saw him as Lucy’s dad and a close family friend, really the only man in my life, except for my mom’s occasional boyfriend. But at times, especially during the football season, my affection for him verged on hero worship.
When I got to college, I was shocked to discover that Coach Carr had groupies—some of them my age. Girls would talk about how hot he was and literally tremble when he passed us on campus, swooning as he stopped to ask me how everything was going and if I’d heard from Lucy. Although he seemed not to notice the adulation, their giddiness still annoyed me. I chalked it up to the usual disdain I felt for silly sorority girls, but, deep down, I think I felt a little territorial about my longtime idol.
After graduation, when I went to work for my alma mater, I no longer gave the subject much thought. I took for granted that Coach was the sun, and that everyone else, myself included, orbited around him. It’s just the way it was in Walker, Texas.
Then, about three years ago, Sports Illustrated did a big cover story on Coach Carr titled “The Little School That Could: How Walker Runs With—and Beats—the Big Dogs of College Football.” In the piece, Alex Wolff talked about our quiet and quaint campus, our small and homogenous student body. Considering that we had the fourth smallest student body of any Division I school—ahead of only Tulsa, Rice, and Wake Forest, none of which were synonymous with football—Wolff marveled at our ability to land players from lower-income areas around the country, given our high academic standards, preppy students, and location in a sleepy town with more churches than bars, halfway between Waco and Dallas. He threw out some of the usual theories about our huge endowment, state-of-the-art facilities, and idyllic red-brick campus, but ultimately chalked it up to Coach Carr’s charisma and recruiting “wizardry.”
I knew from watching Coach in action that he actually embraced our Achilles’ heel, finding a way to spin the negative into a positive with parents of his recruits, especially the mothers, who in most cases made the final decisions about where their sons would play. It was a central part of his pitch. After charming everyone in the living room—and often the entire neighborhood—he’d explain, usually once the kid was out of earshot, that there was plenty of fun to be had, but not so much that a kid could get himself in trouble. He’d then highlight Walker’s staggeringly high graduation rate and the fact that it was virtually unheard of for any of his players to end up on SportsCenter for anything other than football. In Coach’s entire tenure as head coach, there’d been no scandals—only a smattering of honor code violations, a couple of pranks gone wrong, and a few DUIs. Walker was a squeaky-clean program where Coach Carr turned good kids into even better men. And he did all of this while winning, season after glorious season. As Wolff so eloquently explained: If a kid signs with Walker, odds are he is going to leave with a diploma, some bowl-game hardware, and more than a fair look from scouts, an irresistible combination from Clive Carr, the beloved coach straight out of central casting. The Knute Rockne of our generation, as rugged as Clint Eastwood, eloquent as Perry Mason, and handsome as George Clooney.
I remember reading that paragraph, then staring down at the photos of Coach Carr—a candid shot of him standing stoically on the sidelines with his headset and hat, and another more styled, staged portrait of him on the Magnolia Quad—and thought, Oh, please.
Everything Wolff wrote was true, but I still felt a familiar stab of annoyance that I had to share my idol, my coach, with the masses. I remember rolling my eyes, then shoving that magazine into a drawer, along with coupons and paper clips and wedding invitations I’d forgotten to RSVP to.
Right before I slammed the drawer shut, I spotted Miller’s number on a cocktail napkin that he’d given me the week before, on another drunken night out. I’d blown him off after Lucy labeled him a loser, and I decided she was probably right. But that morning, right after I ate a bowl of grits and a greasy biscuit, I picked up the phone and called him. He answered on the first ring, we went out that night, and we’d been dating ever since.
Only now, with Mrs. Carr’s death as a wake-up call, I realized just how stuck I’d become, how much of a rut I was in. Something really had to be done. I had to find a way to mix things up. Move forward.
I was thinking about all of this one afternoon as I took a long walk around the Walker grounds. Although I was on campus virtually every day including the weekends, I typically only passed between my office in the old field house and the student union center, where I picked up my lunch. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had strolled without purpose, maybe since I had been a student myself a dozen years before. I did an entire loop around the tree-lined grounds, from Wait Chapel on the quad, down to the dorms, over to the science and business centers on the banks of the Brazos River, then past the pillared mansions on Greek Row. I walked and walked, thinking about Mrs. Carr and Coach and Miller, my job and my life.