Playing for the Pope

Dr. John Inman ’73 Remembers Coach John McKissick ’51

I first saw him in 1965 when I was in the eighth grade, and new to the South. A friend and I were walking home after “C” team football practice. John McKissick was wheeling his new Highland Green Mustang convertible out of the school parking lot. The top was down, and he was wearing sunglasses in the glare of the late September sun, his tanned face unsmiling. But it wasn’t the car or the person I remember most vividly: It was the reverence in my friend’s voice as he stopped and pointed, “That’s Coach McKissick.” I remember saying, “So who’s he, the Pope?” As I was to find out, indeed he was. Pope John, and football was the religion.

Coach McKissick, then head coach at Summerville High School, at his desk.

Photo by: Gately Williams

Football was woven into the social fabric of Summerville, South Carolina like cotton in a polo shirt. As a transplanted Hoosier who thought a football was just a very difficult ball to dribble, it became my ticket into that society, and John McKissick the conductor. And it still amazes me how great an influence the sport and that man has had on my life, particularly at my critical junctures, points at which things could have turned out differently.

Ask about how he achieved such success (more wins than anyone) and you hear words about superior training and dedication to a cause at a level you find only in the Marines. But at the heart of it, it was all about the praise. And the truth is, aside from the routine radio or TV interview where he always credited the players with outstanding efforts, he rarely praised us on the field, urging us on to greater heights, turning the exceptional effort and performance into an everyday expectation.

Given that absence, we sought his tribute like hounds at the master’s table. Perhaps his greatest insight was knowing when and where to administer the rare praise, when to place his holy hand on a sagging shoulder. I once received his praise, and it became a defining moment in my life. As a 15-year-old at my first football camp (a twoweek “retreat” into the North Carolina mountains), I was one of the youngest and least experienced members of the squad — easily the lowest player on the charts. I was assigned to the “cob squad,” the team which held blocking bag dummies at practice sessions. Coach McKissick had gathered the cobs together the first day of camp and told us how important it was for us to hold those dummies “to stand tough in there,” make the offense work to move us. I accepted the remark as a command, and like most of the players, I believed every single thing John McKissick said.

The first day at camp I held a dummy at the left defensive tackle position, a critical distinction for we were running traps, where the offensive lineman from one side of the line pulls and “takes out” the defensive tackle from the other side. Since the two linemen are usually very large, and the offensive lineman has a head of steam up, the collision is really quite spectacular, in the raw, powerful way of a tractor pull or a heavyweight bout. However, since I weighed only 155 pounds and the law of conservation of momentum being what it is, the trap was really a slaughter. The padding in the dummy quickly settled to the bottom and I was literally left holding the

bag as the 250-pound behemoths roared down the line at me. After most of the traps, the bag would remain standing and I would be somewhere in the defensive backfield.

At first my teammates were fascinated and amused by my ordeal, laughing when my helmet was knocked off or at how far I traveled in the air. But gradually, as I became more punch drunk and unable to protect myself, the collisions took on a sickening sound: the hard smash of flesh and plastic and bark of wind as it was driven from my chest. All turned their heads and grimaced.

“Don’t stand in there. Back up,” one of the offensive linemen whispered to me as I lay crushed beneath him.

But I could hear in the back of my mind McKissick talking about hanging “tough in there,” so I stumbled back to the bag and braced myself as best I could as the first, second, and third strings ran the same play over and over.

Then, after one particularly brutal trap, the worst of all catastrophes occurred. Tears began to roll down my cheeks, where they intermingled with the blood from my nose and lip, and the red stream began to drip onto my white jersey, where it widened into a pink stain. The tears were tears of pain, the type that well up when you smash your finger, and they spilled out even though I desperately wished them not to. Mortified and embarrassed, I hung my head so that no one would see.

It seldom happened, but once in a great while John McKissick would stop the entire practice session to make a point. He did that now, and I was the point. He called for attention, laid his clipboard down, walked up to me, and taking hold of my facemask, he tilted my head back so they could all see my wet, bleeding face.

“Look at his face,” he commanded.

I closed my eyes to avoid their stares, and I felt the hot tears roll out like water under a squeegee.

“Look at those tears,” he said. “But, you know, he’s not crying - he’s just hurting. And he’s hurting because he’s doing exactly what I told him to do.”

He released my facemask and turned to the semicircled crowd.

“And you know, he’s a pretty lousy football player right now, but by God, if I had 11 like him, we’d take the state title.”

I’m sure John McKissick wouldn’t recall the incident. He probably forgot about it by the next day, but he had, in that instant, created a follower. I became his boy, a zealot, a soldier who would not only storm the fortresses, but also carry the banner in clenched teeth.

At that moment there were probably things I would not do for John McKissick, but I’m sure they didn’t come to mind. It’s a strange feeling to be under someone’s influence so completely. When I consider Henry the Fifth rousing his English peasants to a crushing defeat of the superior French forces at Agin Court, Dietzel’s Chinese Bandits’ phenomenal performances, or for that matter, the masses burning at Waco with David Koresh, I understand that dynamic.

I’m quite certain nearly everyone who played for John McKissick could relate similar stories. I know we all shared the same feelings. I saw it demonstrated the last game of my senior year. We had just steamrolled a rival at their home field and were coming out of the locker room. The contrast was striking. The other team was celebrating the final game, even though it was a loss, by smoking cigars and whooping it up. We seniors, to a player, were unabashedly crying and embracing. Contrary to team rules, we wore our uniforms home on the bus that night — just one more hour in the sacred cloth. Sometimes I think about how I entered the team in tears and left it the same way. Funny how often life’s that way, too.

In a way it’s sad, but playing football for Summerville was the high-water mark for some of us. Many of us probably remember our games more vividly and speak of them more frequently and reverently than the birth of our children or other accomplishments in our lives. Some still live in that gray mist of memory and legend, reliving those days, not realizing there was no magic, no aura, no divine guidance, that hard work and dedication in any situation will see you through. And that is really what John McKissick was about. No mystic Pope, but a disciplinarian with the ability to mete out honest praise to young men who sought it more than life itself. At times, though, I’m convinced the lucky ones died in that mist. I’ve tried to explain this to those closest to me, my wife and daughters, all former athletes.They smile and nod, but there are unsettled glances shared, an awkwardness which reinforces my fear that the mist may be creeping in on me. But I go on, always looking ahead, but glancing back sometimes, wondering if I’m still standing tough in there.

– Dr. John Inman '73 is the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Biology.