Mo was screaming: “Let go, Buddy, let go!”
I must have been twenty-five feet in the air when I finally did.
Luckily I landed in tall grass and not on concrete. If I’d waited another second or two, I’d probably have broken both my legs. The blimp kept going up until it disappeared.
The next day we made the front page of the newspaper: VANDALS CUT LOOSE ADVERTISING BLIMP. The paper estimated that the blimp would come down somewhere in Texas, and said it was worth four thousand dollars, which was a lot of money back then. We would’ve had to work years to pay it back. We were scared for a month that they’d find out who did it.
Recently over lunch, Mo said, “Listen, Bud, maybe you shouldn’t tell that story in your book. Somebody might read it and come after us.” But then he smiled and said, “Well, I guess we’re safe after sixty years.”
Mo and I have stayed friends all these years. When he lost his wife, Linda, it was a blow to me, but it just about killed him. She was a wonderful woman and they were a great couple. People said that every widow in town would be after Mo and that he’d marry again right away, but I knew he wouldn’t. He’s that kind of guy. He lives nearby now and we get together for lunch every week. Mo comes to watch me teach on Fridays whenever he can. He has a way about him that I admire. He couldn’t care less about Hollywood, which is another thing I love about him. We’ve been friends since junior high and never had a cross word between us. It’s not easy to go a lifetime without finding fault with your pal, but we never have.
Buddy
A lot of the residents of Riviera Beach came from the Bahamas and supposedly had mixed blood, which made them undesirable to a lot of people in those days. I was lumped into that group, probably because some of them were friends of mine. I’ve never forgotten how it felt to be excluded.
I got the nickname Mullet in junior high. After the fish, not the haircut. It’s what they called people from Riviera Beach. We were “fish heads” and “greaseballs” and “mullets.” I got in fights about it, but like anybody else, I wanted to be accepted. The cool guys were the lettermen, and though I’d never participated in organized sports, I dreamed of being one of them. Football gave me my chance.
My career started with a footrace against one of the best athletes in the school, Vernon “Flash” Rollison. I wasn’t the brightest kid in the world, but I knew it couldn’t be a good idea to race anyone named Flash. I also knew that if I lost the race, I’d remain Mullet for the rest of my life.
We walked down to the football field with a crowd behind us. We would run the hundred yards between the goalposts. Flash took out a pair of track shoes. I’d never seen track shoes before, and I was amazed at how sharp the spikes were. He got down in what I later learned was a four-point stance, and suddenly we were running. I can still hear the sound of those spikes biting into the turf, and my bare feet making no sound.
He got off to a quicker start and took the lead. I reached down inside myself for more strength or more guts or whatever it would take, and somehow found the extra speed. I passed him at the five-yard line and crossed the goal line first.
Nobody cheered. They were stunned that anyone could beat Flash Rollison.
Peanut Howser came over, shook my hand, and said, “Great race, Buddy. We could use you on the football team.”
From then on I was Buddy Reynolds.
The next day the student body had a whole different attitude. They knew I’d beaten the fastest kid in the school, and I was suddenly everybody’s best friend. I didn’t fully enjoy my sudden popularity, because I hadn’t forgotten all the crap they’d given me. But I smiled and kept my mouth shut.
When I joined the team I was clueless about how to put on the pads. I remember sitting on the bench, running my hands over the number on my jersey—I’d never had a jersey with a number on it. I looked up and Peanut was standing there, smiling.
“You need help?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Does the big number go in the back?”
I chose number 22 and kept it all through high school and college. I’d thought it was a great number ever since Bobby Layne wore it to bring the Detroit Lions back from the dead in the 1950s. I liked Bobby because he was a rebel and I wanted to be just like him.
I’d never played tackle football before, at least not in full uniform. We played tackle without pads or helmets on an open field near my house, and it was rough. But it is a different game with pads on. I couldn’t see how anyone could possibly get hurt.
I played mostly on instinct. I hadn’t had any real experience or instruction in the fundamentals. So I watched and imitated everybody else. We’d have a chalk talk before a game and I knew what I was supposed to do on certain plays. Otherwise, I hid behind cockiness. I’d tell the linemen in the huddle, “Just give me a crack and I’ll go through it,” and I usually did. I made the team at Palm Beach High and started every game at running back.
Richard Dalton “Peanut” Howser was small in stature, but he was the best athlete I ever saw. We played on the ninth-grade football team together and then all through high school. He was too small to play college football, so he concentrated on baseball and made All American in his sophomore, junior, and senior years. He was drafted by the Kansas City Athletics and was American League Rookie of the Year and captain of the team. He went on to manage the New York Yankees and then the Kansas City Royals, who won the World Series three times with Peanut at the helm.
We stayed the best of friends over the years. Besides being a great athlete, he was a magnificent man. He died of cancer in 1987 at fifty-one. When he got sick, I went to see him and he handled himself the way I hope I would. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him something terrible. There’s a structure at Florida State University called the Dick Howser Stadium. Across the street, the football dorm is called Burt Reynolds Hall. So I guess old Peanut and Buddy are still together.
—
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I was fascinated by the window display in an antique shop on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. I’d stop whenever I could to peer in at the exotic objects on display. One day I looked up and there was a beautiful woman looking back at me. She was probably in her early forties, which seemed ancient to me at the time.
She smiled at me and I smiled back. She asked me to come in. “What do you like?” she said.
“I like everything in the store!”
“That’s perfect: You like old good things. You fit right in.”
That made me laugh, and then I said something that made her laugh, and it went on like that for about an hour.
In those days I’d go down to the old wooden pier, which has long since blown away. I’d walk out to the end and do a jackknife or a half gainer, shinny up one of the pilings, get back on the pier, and then do it again. I’d gather small crowds of tourists who’d give me fifty cents a dive.
One day I looked over and she was there, watching. I didn’t acknowledge her, but I could feel her eyes on me, and I loved showing off for her.
At the antique shop the next day she said, “You ought to come to the house sometime.”
She lived on the beach. We had drinks, we laughed, and one thing led to another.
It was my first time, and I was smitten.
After that, I’d go there once a week. We’d have dinner, tell stories, and make love. It went on for several months, until the night she said it was time to call it quits. I protested, almost pleaded, but she just smiled.
And that was it. She left me bewildered and frustrated, but she’d also made me very, very happy. Not a week goes by that I don’t think about her.
After that, I began dating Betty Lou, a rich girl from Palm Beach. I’d drive there on the North Bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, thinking it was a big deal. Boys from Riviera Beach didn’t date girls from Palm Beach. In those days Jewish people didn’t live in Palm Beach and you’d never even
see an African-American there. The residents were proud of the fact that the Everglades Club had blackballed Joe Kennedy because his money wasn’t old enough. And the town had the silliest laws, like a man couldn’t ride a bicycle with his shirt off.
If you went to a party in Palm Beach, it was right out of a movie. You’d see old men dancing with young beauties, and older women dancing with young studs, usually Latin Americans, who were great dancers. They weren’t their nieces and nephews.
Betty Lou was more than a young beauty, she was a knockout. She had the most incredible body I’d ever seen, and a sweet personality to go with it. Plus she was wild, a genuine free spirit. I’d never met a girl who was so uninhibited. She had only one flaw: two deformed fingers on her left hand. She turned that little imperfection into an asset by always holding a hankie in that hand like a Southern belle.
After sixth period, Betty Lou would come running down the hill to the football field. She never wore a bra, so everything would be bouncing all over the place. Everyone on the field would stop dead, including the coach.
When I rang the bell to pick up Betty Lou on our first date, her mother came to the door and said, “From now on, Buddy, when you come to pick up my daughter, please use the service entrance.”
“Okay,” I said, “that’s what I’m here for anyway.”
Her mother laughed, and when I got to know her better, I liked her. Not only was she gorgeous, she had an earthy sense of humor. When Betty Lou and I would be leaving the house, she’d say to me, “Buddy, I know what you’re going to do, and I want you to be kind to her. She hasn’t been around a man like you.”
The inevitable happened and kept happening until one night Betty Lou told me she was pregnant. It was at the junior prom. We’d been crowned king and queen and were dancing to “Harbor Lights” when she broke the news. After I got over the initial shock, I resolved to do the right thing and marry her. I figured I’d get a football scholarship and then play pro ball and we’d live happily ever after. I made arrangements to go to Georgia, where you could get married at sixteen. When I went to the service entrance to pick Betty Lou up for the trip, her mother stopped me at the door.
“Betty Lou isn’t here,” she said. “We took care of the problem, so you don’t have to worry, but she doesn’t want to see you again.”
I could hear the faint sound of Betty Lou weeping in the background, but I didn’t fight it. I got back in the car and went home. I found out later that her mother had taken her to Cuba for an abortion. From then on when I saw her in school we were polite, but it was never the same between us.
Twenty years later I was on a show called Take Me Home Again, produced by Merv Griffin. It was the pilot for a series where celebrities go back to their hometowns. (The pilot didn’t sell, I think because it became obvious that most celebrities don’t give a damn about their hometowns.) I told Merv, “Let’s not make it like This Is Your Life. Let’s find people who don’t like me—though you’ll probably have to search.” But they found hundreds of people, including Betty Lou.
Merv went to her Palm Beach mansion to interview her. They set up the cameras at the pool and she came out in a string bikini. She was pushing forty, but had the same measurements she had in high school.
“Betty Lou, I understand that you and Burt dated in high school,” Merv said.
“Yes, Merv, we did,” Betty Lou said. “And you know what? I was a virgin until about five minutes after I met him.”
“We can’t say that on television, Betty Lou,” Merv said. “You’ll have to rephrase it. Let’s keep rolling and we’ll start over. Betty Lou, I understand that you dated Burt in high school.”
“That’s right, Merv. See that curved palm tree over there? He used to lay me against it and bang my brains out.”
Teammates
I made First Team All State and All Southern Honorable Mention at Palm Beach High and I was recruited by a bunch of college coaches, including Alabama’s legendary Bear Bryant. I sat there in awe of him.
“I hear you like to hit,” he said.
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“That’s good, because we like to hit here.”
I think I would have done well at Alabama, but I’d always dreamed of going to the University of Miami, which had a great team in those days, and I signed a grant-in-aid.
Peanut Howser was going up to Florida State on a recruiting trip and he asked me to go with him. They fell all over themselves to get him, and they did.
The FSU football coach, Tom Nugent, called me into his office.
“What’s Miami giving you?” he said.
“A lot, coach,” I said.
“Can they give you this?” he asked, pointing to a chart on the wall showing a seven-to-one ratio of women to men on campus. The number was so high because FSU had been a girls’ school until only a few years before. He let that sink in for a while and then he pulled down a blackboard and drew a chalk figure 7 and then a 1. He pointed to the 7 and said, “This represents the girls. Then he pointed to the 1 and said, “This is you. Think about that!”
I thought about it. And about the fact that if I went to FSU, Peanut and I would still be together.
“Coach,” I said, “I think I know where I can get a hell of an education.”
Tom Nugent was an innovator. He invented both the “typewriter” huddle and the I formation. Most teams had never seen the I before, and when we set up on the line of scrimmage, the defense would be scrambling all over the place.
Coach Nugent was quite a character. He belonged in show business. We had a team choir that we all had to join, whether we could sing or not. We actually performed at campus events. But his training was brutal. There must have been twenty-five guys on the team with full scholarships, but they couldn’t take the practices and they all ran off. Most of them wound up as starters on other teams.
The year before I got there, FSU was playing schools like Stetson. By the time I arrived they’d begun playing up, trying to elevate the program by scheduling better teams. My freshman year we played Alabama and Georgia, which was a big rise in class.
Coach brought in some real bad dudes. I swear he got them out of the penitentiary. Others were fresh out of the ’Glades. They weren’t great athletes, but they were tough. And they’d hit you. Even when we lost, the other team would be carrying players off the field. I thought, If I can hang in with these guys, I can do anything.
One of my best pals on the team was Bobby Renn. He was one of the most gifted and versatile football players I’ve ever seen. He was a brilliant rusher, receiver, and defensive back, and an incredibly accurate punter. I ran around with Bobby a lot. He wasn’t super good-looking, but he was a ladies’ man. For one thing, he was older. He’d been in the army and seen action in Korea. He had a mystique that women were crazy about, a real James Dean quality.
Bobby was dating a Pi Phi, which was considered a big deal. I looked up to him, so I started going with a Pi Phi, too, and we’d double-date. I tried to be as slick as Bobby. I watched him and tried to do whatever he did, and once in a while a girl would ask, “Aren’t you going a little fast?” We’d go to this awful joint in Tallahassee called the Oasis and drink beer and tomato juice, which we thought was the height of cool. Bobby introduced me to it and I picked it up. I ordered it once with a girl, thinking I’d score points, but she thought I was an idiot.
Bobby fell in love with a rich girl whose family thought he wasn’t good enough for her and did everything they could to break them up. The girl married him anyway and then tried to force him into a mold. She wanted him to be a lawyer, but he wanted to be an actor and dreamed of making it in Hollywood. As the years went by, he took acting lessons and went on auditions in his spare time without making much headway. Then one night he was fixing a flat tire and a car hit and killed him.
I’ve always tried to help ex–Florida State ballplayers break into ac
ting. I’ve advised them and helped them get parts. But not Bobby. I don’t know why, because of all the guys, I thought he could have been good. But for some reason I didn’t reach out to help him, even though we were the best of friends. I’ve always regretted it.
—
THERE WAS ONLY ONE whirlpool in the FSU locker room and we had to stand in line to use it. And there was no weight room. I had to do push-ups and sit-ups to stay in shape. We had players who were strong as bulls, but without weight training, they were just “farm strong.” And there was no sense of proper nutrition. They fed us mashed potatoes and gravy to pork us up. I guess they thought the more weight, the better, even if it was fat.
We had some real characters. Ray Staab was an animal and most of the other guys on the team were afraid of him, including me. One night in the dining hall I saw him pick up a cockroach and eat it. I had a buddy, Tommy Thompson, from Boston. Talk about street tough—he was the only one Ray was afraid of. Tommy used to say, “Why don’t you let me beat the shit out of him?” I should have said, “Be my guest,” but I couldn’t do that to a teammate.
Big Al Mackowicky was tough as hell and a great ballplayer. His dorm room was across from mine. One day I got a “Dear John” letter from my girlfriend back in West Palm, and I ran out of my room hopping mad. I punched the first thing I saw, which was Big Al’s door. My fist went through it and I couldn’t get it out. Big Al opened the door and said, “What’s the problem?”
“I just got a Dear John letter,” I said.
“That’s tough,” he said, and he closed the door with my hand still stuck in it.
At six-seven, 270, Tom Feamster was the tallest man in college football back then. He was a terrific ballplayer and the nicest guy in the world. He played both sides of the ball, at defensive and offensive end. He was so large, he intimidated everybody. Tom married a gal who was large, too, thank God. After football he became a preacher, and when he called people to come down, they came down!
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 3