Photograph your obsessions, and I like images of competition. I spent a quirky year and a half on the American High Plains photographing every high school football field, 72 in total, found on US Highway 83, stretching through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Along the way I drank a lot of free beer. 

US 83 is a mostly two-lane road passing through a series of small rural burgs, all resembling the last one; a clutter of shops and markets that have somehow found a 21st century Walmart proof niche of survival. The pace is slowed by a diabolical stop-light system that funnels traffic in intermittent jerks, but a blessing when seeking a local watering hole, the best always found on the town square. My barroom conversations became a major source of the only book I ever published that a respectful number of literates actually bought. 

Driving Highway 83 from the Canadian border to the Mexican border is as unvaried as a drive across Kansas – only north and south and four times as long. Like my love of faded old polaroids, if I try to rationalize it, the magic disappears. So, I do not - I just accept that is how I am. I made sure Shawna knew of my Highway 83 problem before she agreed to marry me.

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A Fleeting Moment in a Floating World: a picture looking for a story.

A fleeting moment in a floating world, a picture looking for a story. 

I don’t tolerate inactivity well. I am busy with our business from January through August, but by December I get very stodgy. I drink too much coffee, read and re-read old books and wait for the year to end. Shawna, this time of the year, runs lots of errands. 

To add purpose to my daily routine (and maybe to make myself somewhat tolerable) several months ago I began sorting through the storage boxes in my basement. I found lots of old photos in need of a story. Even the most mundane ones can suck you back into a moment.

Photographs are a lot like favorite hit songs from our youth. Everyone has a song that got them through a bad breakup (Separate Ways) or made you feel like you wanted to go out and raise hell with your friends on a weekend (The Boys are Back). Those songs still feel like that to me.

Our lives are a continual state of vanishment and when snippets of life have vanished there is no mechanism on earth which can make them come back again - unless someone took a snapshot. Then the memory becomes tangible. 

A photograph never grows old. Through all the months and years, we will change, but a photograph remains forever the same - a return ticket to a moment recaptured. Not every photo I sort through in my basement is epic. To be honest, few are - but the memories are.

The photo attached here is from a high school basketball game. I can tell from the background that the gymnasium is that of Festus, MO High School. The players are Phil Tessereau of Crystal City on the left and Alvin Riney of St. Pius. I can deduct from the picture the contest is played on a neutral floor hosting the Festus Tournament, a four-team neighbor rivalry packed event played, back then, on the last Thursday and Saturday of January. The other two schools entered were Herculaneum and the host team, Festus. All four high schools were within a five-mile radius of each other, making the tournament a must see for area fans. The Festus Tournament died years ago. 

Although I can find no documentation – a game story or a box score - in the Sunday January 27, 1974, edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I base my source for this blog entry on my memory. I was a junior that night playing for Crystal City, which would set the date as 1974. Phil was a year older than me. I recall we played St. Pius in the championship game and we won. In the 1974 CCHS yearbook we pose for our official team picture with the championship trophy displayed. 

The stylish confidence of both Phil and Alvin jumps out. Both ooze with the quality every 1970’s teenage boy strove for - the cool factor. Alvin with the perfectly symmetric Afro hair style, Phil with the long curls covering his ears and cascading over the collar. Both are young Alpha Males, pairing on the town’s main stage both their youthful charisma and athletic skills. If only life would remain so clearly scoreboard defined. 

In a millisecond the game will return to a blur of action, the picture now rudimentary. The ball and the players ricochet off each other, the passion of the contest driving the packed gym to a pitch of frenzy, destined for a winner and a loser.

It is good for the imagination that the conclusion of this momentary standoff has been lost to time. I am sure neither player can today recall this specific possession. Understandable. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of just such one-on-one duels between players in the evening’s 32 minutes of fevered action. So, let’s let reality reside in the eye of the beholder. I give Phil the liberty to recall a developing old-fashioned three-point play, Alvin the decisive delivery of an upcoming “in your face” rejecting swat. 

I one recent afternoon stopped and relished this simple black and white photo from over 50 years ago. The distinct and sweeping power in this monochromatic image triggers that same rush of exhilaration that defined me in 1974. 

High School, in general, and basketball, in particular, are both full of trash-talk and posturing - false attempts to impress peers and foes alike- a phony teenage pretense we all used at times to prop up our self-esteem. But at a time like this, all are stripped away in a “winner take all” moment, one shot at forever. Some who have never been there will say you will not remember who won the game. I say no way - I sure remember. And I bet Phil and Alvin do as well. 

In 1974 I was Phil’s teammate, and I knew Alvin from around town. Over the years, I have sporadically crossed life’s path with both. The onslaught of the new century’s social media helped. 

Phil started off his adult life as a full-time high school coach then relocated back home and moved into private business – but he stayed involved in the sport. Phil coached numerous area youth teams and was a part-time assistant at local schools. Several years ago, he took on, as a head coach, the much-needed rebuilding job of the Crystal City Hornets. Eventually his efforts produced a district championship season. For a “Once a Hornet, Always a Hornet” like me, still relishing the memories of the glory days, it was cool to see a teammate bring back to our alma mater some needed old school toughness.

I have interacted with Alvin a few times over the years at my summer basketball camps. He, mirroring Phil’s adult path, has served as a part time assistant coach for several area high school programs, both boys and girls. He was, in our few camp interactions, engaging and warm. It was apparent to me he was well liked by his players and effective through his passion for the sport. He still had that cool factor. Over the years, from media accounts I read, I know Alvin as a long time both vocal and respected community activist. 

Alan Ginsberg wrote the poignancy of any photograph comes from a "visual memory clue of a fleeting moment in a floating world." The transitoriness is what creates the sense of memory. Then life moves on. 

Both Phil and Alvin would move on from this still shot and beyond this school kids’ game of basketball to become the successful adults they are today. Over the last half century both have created ripples of positive change, payback to the hometown that educated them. 

Society invests a lot of resources in education. The main goal should always be to produce tomorrow’s leaders. Athletics play a role. I have built my life’s work on that premise. We claim to teach leadership, and leadership is not about being the best, it is about making those following you better. One team in this picture did not win. One did. But the young men on both benefited. 

But forget all that heavy stuff. Take a winter afternoon to find an old forgotten picture stored in your basement and just soak it in, capturing the sentiment and emotion. The good ones tell a story maybe only you know, a scene that defines certain times in your life. Then bounce up the stairs and share. 

Mery Christmas 2025.

Mr. Herbert

Time, and lots of it, have marched by since I graduated high school. This is a slow time of the year for me, and I have spent several recent early winter afternoons gathering my thoughts and memories about my high school coaches and posting them on my social media.

I had four coaches at Crystal City, MO High School, from where I graduated in 1975: Coach Arvel Popp, Coach Dick Cook, Coach Rodney Mills; and my first high school coach, Mr. Rolla (Duke) Herbert. I have posted recently about the first three, and now Mr. Herbert.

I have never called him Coach, always Mr. Herbert. I have no idea why. He taught me a lot about coaching.

Mr. Herbert did not set out to be a coach. When November basketball tryouts rolled around in 1971, my freshman year, CCHS did not have a freshman coach. After over a decade in the classroom, the school administration talked Mr. Herbert into trying his hand as a basketball coach. It was a fortuitous choice. Mr. Herbert had a long and storied coaching career. Eventually, Mr. Herbert succeeded Coach Popp and became the varsity boys’ basketball coach for the 1976-77 season.

Mr. Herbert, a 1953 CCHS grad, was a good high school history teacher. I also became a high school history teacher and a basketball coach. To this day I recall fondly the lively but never livid discussions in his class.

Mr. Herbert was a Republican in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era when being Republican wasn’t considered cool, especially to a classroom of longhaired 15-year-olds, all of us conforming to non-conformity. He was a congenial but rigid advocate of conservative arguments. Mr. Herbert was an adept provocateur but sophisticated enough to appreciate both sides of almost any argument. “You can disagree without being disagreeable,” was the social message his behavior displayed and mentored for us. In Mr. Herbert’s classroom, everyone had a right to their opinion and respect was mutually demanded of us by him.

For one hour a day I saw him not as a basketball coach, but as a teacher who made me think. When Mr. Herbert was at his lectern in front of our class, he seemed more interested in what Nixon “knew and when he knew it” than the March Madness bracket. He was hard to get off topic.

I chuckled when in 2000 I received from the outspoken conservative Republican Mr. Herbert a handwritten note: “Almany, you need to get out and support Bill.” CCHS grad Bill Bradley, a staunch liberal, was that election cycle’s front runner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. I dutifully placed the “Bradley 2000” sticker he sent me on the bumper of my manual stick Ford 150 pickup truck. However, I doubt it swayed many of my Ozark neighbors (who poked fun non-stop at my little truck) to vote for a liberal Democrat. But I was impressed, but not surprised, that Mr. Herbert had placed hometown over party.

For many years, prior to picking up a coaching clip board, Mr. Herbert was a driving force behind CCHS’s popular and successful debate team.

Over the years after high school graduation, I had sporadic face-to-face contact with Mr. Herbert. But four high school basketball teams I coached played in state tournaments and each subsequent spring I received a congratulatory handwritten note from Mr. Herbert. I still have them.

Mr. Herbert had a gift for expressing his wonder – both the simple and the complex – for the masterpiece that he saw as the game of basketball. He loved sharing his delight. That impressed me as a 14-year-old playing on his team. Even in my adolescent brain, I sensed the man knows what he is talking about. His hip young connection to us was perfect to plant in me the seed for a lifelong passion for figuring out the intricacies of the game, but more important, positively leading young people.

Mr. Herbert had an instinctive feel for basketball. All good coaches do. During his career he developed the reputation amongst his peers as a good manager of the ebb and flow of a game. He was good at game strategy. A late five-point Hornet lead in the pre-shot clock days Mr. Herbert coached was the equivalent of a ten-point lead in other hands. His teams ran a tightly disciplined offense, making opponents play defense longer than they were used to.

During the 1981-82 season Crystal City lost by 33 points in a Christmas tournament to Brentwood. Both teams would be in the same March district tournament field at Brentwood, so a post-season rematch was likely. Brentwood would go through the entire regular season as the state's top ranked team. The challenge of beating such a juggernaut on their home court would be steep.

In 1982 I was a second-year assistant coach at Sullivan, MO High School and had a younger brother playing for Crystal City. I went to every game I could. There was back then, little, if any video VHS tapes to use for scouting. A sort of quid pro quo network developed amongst coaches We played CC rival Herculaneum in districts that year and Mr. Herbert helped us out. I owed him.

I offered to scout Brentwood’s semifinal district game, which was played right before the Hornet’s own semifinal game against Wellston. This would free Mr. Herbert’s full attention for his Hornet's must-win semifinal elimination game at hand. The Hornets beat Wellston by one point on a last second shot and secured their spot opposite Brentwood in the next night’s championship tilt.

I listened the next morning as Mr. Herbert went over his game plan for Brentwood. Turn the table from the git go, use the butt whipping taken just two months prior to attack what he assured his players would be an overconfident foe. Be the aggressor on both ends, explode to the hoop on offense and on defense play with your head up and on swivel, guarding as diligently as deputies escorting dangerous felons. And it would help to shoot like a dead eye Daniel Boone.

Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a great plan, “until I punch him in the mouth.” It went without saying, to pull off what would be a monster upset, a lot had to break the Hornets’ way. It would.

Brentwood lived by a smothering full court press that had destroyed the Hornets back in December. If they could figure a way to weather the backcourt defensive pressure with good floor spacing and crisp and aggressive passes and force Brentwood into a half-court game, they might have a chance.

Mr. Herbert had his team ready. Each time in the first quarter when CCHS broke Brentwood's defensive pressure, the packed side of a gym full of Hornet fans released a collective exhale. As the game progressed into the second half, and remained a close battle, louder excited cheers arose from a growingly confident Hornet faithful.

The Brentwood crowd seemed initially annoyed at the pesky little Hornets’ refusal to fold. By the start of a one-point separation 4th quarter, a WTF bewilderment of malaise had taken hold of the home crowd. The shifting momentum was cool and head shaking to witness; it is what high school sports are all about.

Brentwood led for the first 31:54 of a 32:00 game but could never break away. The Hornets took a one-point lead with six seconds remaining and watched a last second Brentwood 15-foot baseline shot rim in and out.

CCHS played practically a perfect game. They did everything the way Mr. Herbert had outlined, beating odds normally reserved for snowballs in hell or comradery in the D.C. Halls of Congress. It was the best example of a basketball team following a game plan I ever saw.

Mr. Herbert’s 1979 Hornets finished second in the state tournament and his 1982 squad third. He later was the head basketball coach at area high schools Herculaneum (where in the early 1960s he had filled the role of high school principal) and St. Pius.

But with Mr. Herbert what I fondly recall was NOT how strategically wise he was, it was how much darn fun it was playing for him.

I entered CCHS as a freshman who had been educated through 8th grade at the local Catholic school. I knew hardly any of my new classmates. I didn’t play football that first fall. My goal each school morning was to make it unnoticed to the 3 pm dismissal bell. I needed the basketball season to start, but first I had to survive tryouts. I did.

The only high school basketball team I was not a starter for was Mr. Herbert’s freshman team. I began the year as 6th man, and there I stayed. As the year went on, I played better and Mr. Herbert played me more, but never as a starter.

We had a good team. If memory serves, we lost only one game. One night, I hit four straight free throws in the final 10 seconds to ice a win. In the post-game locker room in front of the whole team - a group whose acceptance I sought, Mr. Herbert said, “Almany, I don’t care about starters, what I care about are finishers and you are a finisher.” There are a few searing memories we keep locked deep within the storehouse of our souls. For me, this is one. I am sure I blushed, then floated out into the winter night.

After that night, I would have howled with righteous indignation if Mr. Herbert had ever put me in the starting lineup. His lesson to me and the team was the basics of teamwork: success is a communal type thing, and when you win, everyone can be considered successful, and we move up together. So don’t be selfish, just fill your role.

That is good coaching. Better teaching.

Sometime in the early years of the first decade of this century, maybe around 2008, I was running a large summer basketball camp at Seckman High School in Imperial, MO when I felt a hard slap on my back. It was Mr. Herbert. “Almany, what kind of a gold mine have you got going here,” his voice boomed. I had not seen him in years.

Mr. Herbert said he had been talked into coaching his granddaughter’s summer team. A work in progress, he observed, with a smile. His basketball judging talent was still intact, I concluded after watching for five minutes his granddaughter’s group. To be kind, they needed to get a lot better just to be bad.

Didn’t matter to the man who had once resided on the top of the local coaching mountain, he had a team to make better, and all camp he rode them incessantly. Coaching and teaching skills are found in the ability to push adolescents out of their comfort zone - and convince them they like it. Mr. Herbert still had that skill.

At the time I had taken a self-imposed break from coaching. Mr. Herbert encouraged me to get back into the coaching saddle. I asked him if he had any coaching regrets. Two, he said, “I wish I had started earlier, and I wish I had finished later.”

I found that week that I could still learn basketball in a short window of time at Mr. Herbert’s elbow. We sat at a cafeteria table one afternoon and talked for at least an hour. I told Mr. Herbert over the years I had ran some of the offensive schemes he taught us. “Remember the Auburn Shuffle,” I asked?

His eyes lit up. His voice got loud, and the fingers of both hands flew across the tabletop in intricate patterns. To the untrained eye the retired coach seemed to be an overcaffeinated Vegas Pit Boss dealing blackjack without a deck - but he was explaining the Auburn Shuffle, movements as fresh in his 70-year-old mind as they were when he explained them to me decades prior. His intensity made me take note that our roles had come full cycle - the student lectured once again by the teacher. I sat up straight.

As my wife will attest too, I do not let details encumber me. Details slow me down. I blithely forget names – even of my own grandkids (hey, I got 14). But, the exception, for me, was always basketball. I was obsessed over details. I think I picked that up from Mr. Herbert.

“Now, Almany, the Auburn Shuffle, you say, you got to believe in it, get your players to believe in it, but you got to teach it right. Remember this, it is the timing of the back cut, Almany, the timing, it must be perfect. Always. Perfect. No screens in the Auburn Shuffle, it slows things down. Don’t forget that Almany, ever. The back cut.”

It was the last time I ever spoke to Mr. Herbert.

Mr. Rolla (Duke) Herbert passed away in 2012 at the age of 76.

Sooner or later, it gets to be closing time. There's this big, two-ton elephant in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. I pretend like it is not sneaking up. But I know. I live every day as if it were Saturday night.

I am at a point in life where I gratefully acknowledge there were those before me, like Mr. Herbert, who paid for me. It is humbling but also motivating to prepare myself with the hope I can pay for someone else who is yet to come.

I have never liked funerals. Buy him a drink while he's alive. I wish I would have toasted Mr. Herbert to his face that afternoon in the Seckman High cafeteria. But I didn’t. So, allow me now this belated social media attempt.

“Hey Bartender, pour it like you don't own it, and friends join with me as we throw one down for Mr. Rolla Herbert and the perfectly timed back cuts of his life."

Arvel Popp: A Man of His Time

Once, as a senior high school basketball player, a teammate and I decided one evening to drive a few miles north up Highway 61 to the Trophy Inn, a Kimmswick, MO bar, and have a couple of after practice cold beers. It was the kind of roadhouse you would expect to find a sign hanging over the urinal that said, "Don't eat the big white mint." Their lax age carding policies were well known to us. 

Sitting at the bar that night were two high school basketball coaches I immediately recognized: Coach Denver Miller of Kirkwood High School and our own Coach Arvel Popp. Like a cat out of a tree, we reversed field, hastily slipping out the same back door we had just entered. Hopefully, unnoticed. The next day, before practice, Coach Popp called my accomplice and myself into his office. “Boys,” he said, “I been drinking at the Trophy Inn for 20 years. Find a new spot.”

For my junior and senior years Coach Popp was my high school varsity basketball coach at Crystal City, MO High School. I graduated in 1975. I never had a buddy-buddy relationship with Coach Popp. Our interactions were from my side, polite and respectful, but I never thought of him as a friend or even a mentor. He was my coach.

We had a pretty good team. Back then each quarter was started with a center court jump ball. One night, we were 10 points behind at halftime to an inferior opponent when Coach Popp inspired us with a locker room two-pronged strategic adjustment: “Let’s get the tip and remember boys we shoot at the other basket this half.” He then went to his office to smoke a cigarette. Several of my teammates moved to the shower room to do the same. Inspired, kind of, we stormed from the locker room and won easily. I never felt that Coach Popp burdened us with over coaching. I decided to become a high school basketball coach. How hard could this gig be? In his career Coach Popp won over 700 games. 

In 1948 and already an established success, Coach Popp was lured away from Dexter, MO High School to take the reins of the Hornets. He stayed for 27 years, building a Hall of Fame career. A Southeast Missouri native of the town of Perryville and a World War II vet, Coach Popp was an enigmatic leader, aloof and disengaged from the community. He ran his teams as an unbending disciplinarian, totally above the grasp and influence of any of the town’s power brokers. Renowned in his younger days as a barroom brawler who seldom came up short with his fists, Coach Popp made and lived by his own rules.

Coach Popp had a scowl that could freeze a basketball player in midair. He was Hornet athletics, serving in the dual roles of Head Varsity Football Coach and Head Varsity Boys’ Basketball Coach. As an afterthought, he was also Athletic Director. 

Coach Popp maintained an omnipotent stance during his reign. The South Pacific combat war veteran was the Lord of the Manor, his players the Serfs. When I made mistakes, Coach Popp used his vitriolic tongue to correct me in front of my teammates. It was his way of toughening me up. I knew that he wanted me to play a little harder and I went out and played a little harder—sometimes.

Today, Coach Popp is remembered in Crystal City with reverence accorded to a patron saint. The high school gym, whose construction he oversaw in the mid 1950’s, is now named The Arval B. Popp Gymnasium. 

On the heels of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court Brown v Topeka Board of Education decision outlawing school racial segregation, in the fall of 1955 Coach Popp’s football team suited up four black players, the first team in the area to do so. He was given his due for a move many credit for a relatively smooth local school desegregation process. In most small rural Missouri communities in the 1950’s and 60’s, the resentment from the school segregationists spilled into the streets. Not in my hometown. 

The Hornet football juggernaut of the day out-trumped even racial prejudice. The town in the vernacular of the day seemed to say, “if those colored boys can help the team put the pigskin in the end zone, then give ‘em a uniform.” Eight years before Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, ten years before Bloody Sunday in Selma and thirteen years before Perry Wallace would integrate Southeast Conference basketball at Vanderbilt, Coach Popp fielded an integrated football team.

How much of this principled stance should go NOT to Coach Popp but instead to a progressive school board dominated by college educated local Pittsburg Plate Glass factory administrators, is open to debate. Furthermore, the Jim Crow era Crystal City Starr black elementary school did not close its doors until 1960. Why wait an additional five years to fully integrate? Elementary students could not help the football team? This slight is still a point of consternation for older community blacks who bristle to this day at mention of the local board’s historical acclaim for racial progressiveness. 

Many of my black athletic classmates never played basketball for Coach Popp. Ironically, one of our biggest rivals, the local catholic high school, St. Pius, had for over a decade been fueled by black basketball players who had attended the Crystal City public schools through 8th grade, before (perhaps for a fairer shake) moving for high school across town to the private school. 

As a white 1920’s product of the state’s bootheel, an area near Mississippi, Coach Popp would have had little exposure growing up to racial tolerance. For the first half of his life, Coach Popp lived under state laws that mandated racial segregation; everything from education, to housing, to public restrooms. Interracial intimate relations were not only against the law, but in extreme cases led to lynchings, one in Missouri as late as 1933. The legacies of racial discrimination are deeply ingrained in Missouri.

Coach Popp was like all of us, a product of his times. Is it in this retrospective context how the racial culture Coach Popp built and oversaw as the leader of CCHS athletics for almost three decades be judged?

In the mid-18th century, Thomas Jefferson impregnated his 14-year-old slave. In his time, the future President and founder of the University of Virgina was viewed as a national treasure. We still to this day name monuments after him. His face adorns Mount Rushmore. Crystal City is in Jefferson County. But his type of pedophiliac Epstein-like behavior today would draw universal scorn and likely lead to Jefferson’s imprisonment. 

If America can judge Jefferson’s life as a total body of work, tempered by the ethics of his time, can I do the same for Coach Popp? He was no neo-fascistic racist. But there were some post-World War II coaches, cut from the same social cloth era as Coach Popp, who bucked the racial stereotyping of the times. North Carolina’s Dean Smith was one - brave coaches who used their influential voices to make often-unpopular statements for racial social justice. However, Coach Popp was not one. 

If my black classmates had been on the basketball team, I may not have played much. My black classmate the late Elroy “Jaw Man” Bequette, a local playground basketball legend, never played a minute of high school basketball for Coach Popp. Jaw Man eventually played four years of college basketball at the JUCO and NCAA Division I level. At CCHS in 1975, that is just the way it was. 

Perhaps, Coach Popp hung on too long. According to players from his early Hornet years, he was a sharp-tongued disciplinarian and notorious perfectionist. But hard-nosed old school coaches like him, by 1975, were out of their element, did not relate to a youth culture weaned on the chaos of Vietnam, the Civil Right movement and Watergate. Questioning authority we viewed as our birthright. 

Today, my hometown is a bedroom community of daily rush hour commuters. But Crystal City was in 1975 still a multi-generational blue-collar factory town built around a melting pot of racial diversity – and Coach Popp’s Hornets were the social glue that bound all facets cohesively together. To our parents he was the coach who had turned the boys of their class into men. And he did not suffer slackers gladly. But, by 1975 he was on his last legs. To us, Coach Popp was an alien who had descended in a pod from outer space. He laughed at the wrong places. He was irascible, cantankerous, immovable ol' Coach Popp. 

We had a younger hip Assistant Coach in Mr. Rolla Herbert. With his long hair and mastery of current jargon, he became our sounding board. It was more than just an age disparity. Mr. Herbert had a background of closeness to his players I doubt he ever lost, a trait Coach Popp, at any age, I doubt ever had. Once on an away game bus ride, Coach Popp joked that with Coach Herbert around, it allowed him as head coach to be the evil coach. 

After the 1976 season, Coach Popp retired. For several years after his retirement, he served CCHS in a new role as a substitute teacher. I found that to be out of character for the Coach Popp I had known. My younger brothers were in school then, and they found him engaging and lighthearted. He even let his hair grow over his ears.

Coach Popp passed away on January 25, 1996, at the age of 81. 

So, who was Arvel Popp? As the years have passed, my memories of Coach Popp have become more nuanced, the discordance bouncing around in my head for the last 50 years. He was a man of his time, but it was not a good time. I do respect what he did professionally. He will always be, and justifiably so, a legend in my hometown.

No One Makes It Alone

I didn’t really enjoy high school. I didn’t do a lot of loud stuff, make a lot of scenes. I don’t have any true horror stories, I didn’t really get bullied, I had numerous friends, and I got passable grades… I just didn’t like it. One exception for me - playing football and basketball in my senior year. By then, I was good enough, I guess, that for the first time in my life, I felt noticed. I floated through my senior year.

Crystal City, MO Hornet athletics in 1975, the year I graduated from the local high school, was the lifeblood of the townsfolk. On basketball home game nights, it was always a full house in the school gymnasium, a utilitarian structure that also served at varied times as, concert hall, graduation stage, prom venue, banquet hall, and, on occasion, funeral parlor. Winning coaches could be a dominant personage in that sort of place, legends in the making to a grateful and proud factory town.

From 1980 until 2024, with a couple of short breaks, I coached high school and college athletic teams, the first four years as an assistant, the other years as a head coach. My wife does not buy it, but today in 2025, I am done. Probably.

My approach evolved over the years to praise them when they hit the standard but never lower the standard. When you take care of your athletes, help them grow, the winning will take care of itself. Saying no, not yes, was hard initially for me to master. It took a few years. It is very easy to say yes. But when you say no you build a culture of accountability, you literally get to the soul of your athletes.

Coaches Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were my high school football coaches. In unique and divergent ways, both got to my soul. My personal coaching ethos became, “remember how fun it was to play and imagine you are coaching 1975 you.” I wanted to do for my athletes what those two did for me.

Coach Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad, began coaching at CCHS in 1962. He stayed until he retired in 1986. He told me once he was, “too ornery, too cussed independent,” for any other school to take a chance on him, so he stayed. By day, Coach Mills taught the complexities of the structure of the English language to an often-unmotivated captive audience of 15-year-old sophomores. After school, he corrected the errors of would-be football lineman with a combination of inspirational practice field quotes and the surgically precise placement of the pointed end of a size 12 Wilson coaching shoe up the butt of the player in need of direction.

Coach Mills told me at halftime in the first high school football game of my career, a JV game, that if I shanked just one more punt, “I am going to raise more hell than the alligators did when the pond went dry.” Not my fault, I pleaded. The up-back blocking for me backed into me.

Coach Mills immediately waved me off. You can make excuses, or you can get the job done, but you can’t do both, was his brutal message. Coach Mills, I finally figured out, would recount the disasters to demonstrate his fidelity. He had seen me at the outset at my worst, and he hammered home to me my inadequacy. Now our relationship had nowhere to go but up - you are a horrible punter, but you are “my” horrible punter. I learned a valuable lesson from Coach Mills - never try to con a con man.

Every Quixote needs his windmill. For Coach Mills it was the hated cross town rival Festus Tigers. Just the mention of the name would send CCHS’s version of the Renaissance Man twirling around in a gale. Coach Mills gathered us seniors together before a Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that big of a deal.

One of our seniors attended the first half of the school day at the Vocational Tech School at Jefferson College in Hillsboro. All the county public high schools bussed students there. From a Festus football player and VoTech classmate of one of our teammates, Coach Mills learned that the Tigers, who were suffering a down year while we were rolling, had a desperate plan for Friday night. The hapless Tigers were spending the week installing the archaic Single Wing offensive formation. They were going to catch us unprepared. This unorthodox strategy would be the equivalent of pulling the 1970’s Wishbone offense from the football mothballs in 2025. Crazy. But maybe just crazy enough to work?

Coach Mills had our defense locked in on how to defend the Single Wing. There were many reasons why teams no longer ran this offense, and Coach Mills knew them all. When Festus huddled up for their first offensive play from scrimmage, Coach Mills had the defense chanting, “Single Wing, Single Wing.” The surprise factor was gone before the first snap. For the master of “One Upmanship,” it was Coach Mills at his best. Our defense owned the night, shutting out Festus in their Homecoming game 28-0. We had earned, at least for that evening, Main Street cruising bragging rights.

His practice field rants were often hyperbolic, but their substance was real. Nobody crossed Coach Mills. Impious and blasphemous, he relished throwing snowballs at top hats. When the teams I coached went on the road for a big rivalry game, I taught my guys to be confident, aggressive and obnoxious, just like Coach Mills had taught us.

Somehow, his varied and disparate approaches would find a confluence and Coach Mills was well liked and successful in both the classroom and on the football field. To this day, sneaking up on 90 years of age, he remains unbroken, irreverent and as he told me a few years back, “loudly humble.”

Coach Dick Cook graduated from CCHS in 1956. He then played football and ran track at the University of Missouri. Coach Cook was the calming voice of the Captain Cook/General Mills dynamic duo, displaying always patience and reason. The two coaches' personalities were a good mix.

As a coach, I started our practice every day by blowing my whistle with: gimme three lines, gimme three lines. One day I decided to be cute, I came out and said gimme two lines and everybody looked at me like I just asked them to cure cancer. Practice was a disaster. A lot of coaching is what you choose not to do, not to see. Coach Cook was adept at not allowing distractions to disrupt the day’s plan. I figured as a coach I was wrong 80% of the time, but it would take too much time to go back and make “me right.” I learned from Coach Cook to not complicate things; check your coaching ego at the practice field gate and just keep moving forward. And when you get lucky, roll with it.

Coach Mills shared a good story with me. Randy Cayce was a star running back on the undefeated Hornet football team of 1965. He later played for the Denver Broncos and the Buffalo Bills, as a teammate to O.J. Simpson. “We are playing up at Fox. Coach Cook calls for Randy to sweep to the right. Of course, wherever Randy went, so did the 11 on the other side. Well, Randy sees he is boxed in, comes to a complete stop, I mean a complete stop with both feet; he looks around and then takes off around the left end and outruns the whole Fox team for a touchdown. Nobody laid a hand on him. I saddled up to Coach Cook on the sideline and said, ‘Nice call Coach, just how you drew it up.”'

In basketball, team chemistry follows the shot chart. Everyone wants to shoot the basketball. You've got to have your best shooter shoot more, but the others must shoot enough. The ability to create and maintain that balance amongst a group of testosterone fed teenage boys takes skill. The task when overseeing a football team, I would assume, is similar. There is only so much room in the next day’s headlines. I was never an indispensable cog on any team, in high school or college, but more than any other coach I played for, Coach Cook made me feel valued.

The cerebral Coach Cook would successfully wear many coaching hats in his long tenure at CCHS and over the years has filled a plethora of civic leadership roles as a respected public servant in support of his beloved hometown. Coach Cook, who won six consecutive state championships between 1984 and 1989 coaching the Hornet’s girls’ track teams, ascended to his current community god like status by sticking to a philosophy that emphasizes the practical and the unpretentious. Win or lose, turn the page.

Coach Cook was instrumental in helping me get a college football scholarship. I lasted one semester. I came home and got a job washing dishes. I dreaded the thought of letting Coach know I was a failure, that I had wasted his efforts. After Christmas break I made my way to the elementary school where he taught PE. In his usual disarming way, Coach spoke for a half hour with me. His message was: "Do what you want with your life; it's all up to you." Most importantly, he offered to again help me. I did not squander my second chance.

Times have changed. I came through at a good time. Coaching high school athletes in the 1970’s was still both manly and honorable. They were unique men, instilling a post-war type of football discipline on its last legs - weed out the weak during summer camp and then "dressout" those left standing. But those coaches were the Last Cowboys. They represented a time that has vanished (maybe for good reason - three-hour mid-day August practices with no water breaks) from high school athletics and from this nation. But good coaches can still teach life lessons that transcend the scoreboard - keep your composure amid chaos, form a plan when all seems lost and find the guts to carry it out.

You manage things; you lead people. Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were mentors to me - authority figures who allowed me to see the hope inside myself. I have tried over the years to pay it forward.  Nobody makes it alone. And we are all mentors to people even when we don't know it.

Boarder Wars

Those in the Twin City's still on the sunny side of 50 don't have the context to appreciate how important and bitter the Crystal City Hornets vs. Festus Tiger annual football game was. It was the single most important event on the area calendar. The last game between the two was contested 36 years ago.

Fifty falls ago, Coach Rodney Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad himself, gathered us seniors together before the Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that important. At their Homecoming, we shut them out 28-0.

The two “Twin Cities,” separated only by a single street; played each other 45 times between 1946 and 1989, twice in 1947, the second game on Thanksgiving Day. The rivalry was intense. Older fans, for example, still debate the legality of the “sleeper play” CCHS pulled off in the 1949 game. The Hornets dominated the early years, the Tigers the later.

From 1963 to 1967, CC pitched five straight defensive shutouts over Festus. Go back seven years, 1961 to 1967, and the totally outmanned Tigers crossed the Crystal City goal line only once; scoring a grand total of only six points, an average of less than one point per game. The Hornets won all seven.

In 1989, the annual border war was discontinued by mutual agreement. The Tigers won the last ten played. As Festus’ enrollment grew and landlocked CCHS’s dropped, the game became no longer competitive. The final tally stands as a draw, 21-21-3, perhaps, a perfect ending to the greatest sports rivalry this community will ever know.