Gene Cox at fullback was a great ball carrier. He was only about five-eight, but he weighed more than 200 pounds. He was hard to bring down, like trying to tackle a bowling ball. Gene was blind in one eye, and sometimes you’d be talking to him and he’d stop you and point to his good eye because you’d been looking at the bad one.
We played against some real characters, too. Dick Christie was an All American receiver for North Carolina State, which was ranked second in the nation. On one play I was covering him on defense and he ran off the field, so I dropped off him. But he came back on the field behind me, which is illegal. (If they’d had instant replay in those days the play would have been called back.) The next thing I knew, they’d passed the ball to him and he was carrying it toward our end zone. I finally ran him down at the one-yard line.
Coach Nugent never let me—or anybody else—forget it. At half time he said, “We’d be leading right now if Reynolds hadn’t fucked up!” I tried to tell him that Christie ran out of bounds, but he was having none of it.
Auburn had a defensive back named Fob James, who later in life was the governor of Alabama. We found out later that he was their hundred-meter champion, but we didn’t know it at the time. Early in the game I ran fifty-four yards from scrimmage until Fob ran me down and tackled me on the one-yard line. We failed to score and it cost us the game. I caught a huge bunch of shit from Coach Nugent about that, too. Had I known then that Fob was a world-class sprinter, I would’ve had an answer.
The last time I saw Coach Nugent, I was sitting next to him at a dinner.
“Buddy,” he said, “I thought you hated me.”
“You were a little rough on me, Coach, but I never hated you. I thought of you like a father.”
And I did. I’m glad I got the chance to say that to him.
By the way, my run against Auburn gets longer at every reunion. It was fifty-four yards, but the last time I told the story it was ninety-eight yards and I got tackled in the parking lot next to the hot dog stand.
—
VIC PRINZI was a wonderful guy and a great quarterback for FSU. Vic and I would go out and carouse around the night before a game, and on the first play, he’d look at me and smile and I’d think, Oh, shit, he’s gonna give me the ball. The later we were out the night before, the more he ran me. If we hadn’t been to bed at all, he’d run me until I almost fainted. But Vic was my goombah. He was the reason I always wanted to be Italian. He had a wonderful philosophy of friendship. But Vic wasn’t perfect. Like my dad, he had a terrible blind spot.
“You have a problem with black people!” he’d say.
“No,” I’d say, “I don’t have a problem with black people, I have a problem with white people who have a problem with black people.”
But we were able to get past it and remain lifelong friends.
—
LEE CORSO wasn’t big, but he was a sensational athlete. He was a standout at Miami-Jackson High at quarterback in football, guard in basketball, and shortstop in baseball. The Brooklyn Dodgers offered him a $5,000 signing bonus, but his father made him go to college. Lee wound up at Florida State, where he played both offense and defense: As starting quarterback he broke all kinds of passing records, and at defensive back he set a career interception mark that stood until Deion Sanders came along thirty years later. And Lee was so quick as a punt and kick returner they nicknamed him Sunshine Scooter.
Lee and I were roommates our sophomore year. He had an old Chevy that he painted metallic green. We named it the Green Hornet, and we were a dynamic duo in that car.
When Florida State played Texas in the 1955 Sun Bowl in El Paso, Lee and I went down to Juárez the night before the game. We were having such a good time that we almost forgot to come back. Lee broke his fibula on the fourth play of the game and they took him to the hospital. I was his backup on defense, but I hadn’t expected to play both sides of the ball. We’d gone to a few parties in Juárez and been up all night. That Texas team was tough and fast. They beat us 47–20. By the end of the game I was totally wasted. When Lee heard, he found a good deal of humor in that.
Lee was way too small for the pros, and after graduation he went into coaching. At the University of Maryland he became the first coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference to recruit an African-American player. He was head coach at Indiana for ten years before he moved into broadcasting. He’s had a fabulous career as a TV commentator, and he’s been the mainstay of ESPN’s College GameDay since it started in 1987. Lee always had something funny to say in the huddle, and he’s hysterical on television. He’s a natural showman, and the highlight of the show every week is when he dons the headgear of the team he’s picking to win the featured game. He calls everybody “sweetheart,” and his “Not so fast, my friend!” has become a national catchphrase.
Though Lee and I were teammates at Florida State, we played against each other in high school when I was at Palm Beach High and he was at Miami-Jackson. In a pileup during one of those games, somebody tried to gouge open a previous wound on Lee’s cheek. He still has the scar. I keep telling him that it makes him look tough, but he’s not amused and still swears I did it. He’s been going around accusing me of trying to rip his face off, and I’m sick of it. So, for the record, I have only one thing to say to that slanderous charge: Not so fast, my friend!
—
I STARTED three games at running back as a freshman. I began my sophomore year starting at left halfback and had a good opening game. On the first play from scrimmage of the second game, I ran off tackle, and when I made a cut, there was a sound like a gun going off. I looked down and there was a lump in my right knee. They had to help me off the field.
We had a wonderful trainer named Don Fauls, whom we called Rooster.
“Rooster,” I said, “am I finished?”
“You’re finished tonight,” he said. “We’ve got to get this thing in place, and it’s gonna hurt.”
“Okay, just do it.”
He had a big tackle come over, and when the two of them snapped it back in, it made that sound again.
“Great,” I said when I caught my breath. “Now I can play.”
“No, you can’t,” he said. “It’ll come back out again. Let me tape it up at half time and we’ll see how you feel then.”
So at half time he put a ton of tape on it and it felt like it couldn’t possibly come out again. I started the second half and it went out on the first play. They sent me to a doctor, who performed surgery.
Afterward he came into my room and said, “What the hell did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I was running and it popped.”
“Well,” he said, “it must have been bad for a long time, because it looks like ground meat in there.”
After the operation I tried to play, but nothing worked. I was a step slower and couldn’t cut left or right. I realized I couldn’t play football like that, but I was hoping for a miracle.
Watson Duncan III
A few months after the operation, before midnight on Christmas Eve, I was barreling down the Beeline Highway in my dad’s Buick when I saw red lights flashing in my mirror. The cop who pulled me over was John Kirk, and he knew my dad.
“Did you know you were going almost a hundred miles an hour?” he said.
“No, sir, I didn’t,” I lied.
He was kind and gave me a ticket for doing only sixty. I headed home, making sure I stayed under the speed limit. I was already in big trouble and didn’t want to rack up two tickets in one night. I was worrying about how to explain it to my dad when I slammed into the truck.
A bunch of geniuses were stealing concrete blocks from Rinker Cement and loading them onto a big flatbed truck parked across the road. I didn’t see it until it was too late. I went right underneath the bed of the truck. I was canny enough to roll up into a ball and dive under the dash just before the
entire bed full of concrete came down on me. If I’d been going much faster—if John Kirk hadn’t given me that ticket—I’d have been crushed to death.
I don’t know how long I was trapped in what was left of the car, but at one point I felt somebody reach in and take the ring I got for playing on the All Southern High School football team. Pulled it right off my finger. I never found out who it was or what happened to the ring.
The first cop on the scene was Clark Bibler, a lieutenant on the force with my dad.
He was yelling, “Anybody in there, anybody in there?”
“Clark, it’s me, Buddy.”
“Jesus Christ, Buddy, what are you doin’ in there?”
All I could say was “Don’t tell my dad!”
“I’ve got a feeling he’s gonna know,” Clark said.
My dad’s big ol’ Buick was now the size of a Mini Cooper. It looked like there was no way in the world someone could come out of it alive. They didn’t have the Jaws of Life in those days, so they used pry bars to get me out. They gently set me down on the pavement, put a blanket over me, and said there was an ambulance on the way. I felt okay lying there and thought, This is ridiculous, I don’t need an ambulance. But when I got to my feet I coughed up blood and blacked out.
I woke up in the ambulance and recognized the attendant as Tommy Price, a classmate of mine at Palm Beach High. I remembered that Tommy was religious and asked him to pray for me. As I went in and out of consciousness, he held my hand and prayed, all the way to the hospital.
By coincidence, my high school doctor, Lynn Fort, was on duty that night and admitted me to our local hospital. When he checked my blood pressure he turned to the nurse and said, “Prep him, this boy is dying.”
Dr. Fort performed emergency surgery to remove my spleen. During the operation I heard the nurse say, “We’re losing him!” and in fact I did flatline. I clearly remember going down a tunnel toward a white light and heard myself saying, “Fuck this! I’m going back!” Doc Fort climbed on top of me and began giving me CPR. It wasn’t common practice in those days, but it saved my life.
I woke up on Christmas Day with fifty-nine stitches in my stomach, lucky to have lost only my spleen. I felt I’d been on the receiving end of a miracle, though not the one I’d hoped would allow me to play football again.
While I was recuperating, somebody told me that the ancient Greeks cut out the spleens of athletes to make them run faster, and I wanted to believe that it might revive my football prospects. But that would have taken a really big miracle. People ask me how having no spleen affects my life, and the answer is, not much. Except that my body temperature is weird. I can’t take cold weather, no matter how much I bundle up. But warm weather doesn’t bother me, which is a good thing if you live in Florida.
It happened that the man who owned the cement company was Marshall Edison “Doc” Rinker, a local philanthropist and the biggest high school football fan in Palm Beach County. After the accident he put money in a bank account to pay for my college education or whatever else I wanted to do with it. I’d never even met the man, but he’d heard about the accident and wanted to help me.
I’ve often wondered what kind of four years I would have had at FSU if I hadn’t been injured. I’ll never know, of course, but I think I could have made it to the NFL. I had the speed and the moves, and there were things I did that a lot of running backs have no stomach for. I loved to run over people and I actually enjoyed blocking because I loved knocking guys on their ass. And after that, I almost certainly would have been a coach.
Everything had fallen in place: I’d had a great career in high school and I’d started strong at Florida State, which was becoming a national powerhouse. The pros were even sniffing around me. Football was my reason for being, my great passion in life. And it was over, just like that. It would take a long time to get through my thick skull that there could be more to life than playing football and chasing sorority girls. I had no idea what to do. But what’s that old saying? When one door closes, another door opens. I didn’t find another door, I found another building.
Coach Nugent had been kind. He said I could keep my scholarship if I worked as the team manager. My dad said, “Well, you’ll still get a free education.”
“Dad,” I said, “they want me to hand out jockstraps.”
“I don’t care what they want you to do,” he said, “you’ll get your degree.” So I went back to Florida State in the fall to be a manager. It took about an hour to realize I couldn’t do it, and I left FSU for good. Now I really had no idea what to do with my life. I thought about a career in law enforcement. I didn’t want to be a cop, but I thought it might be interesting to work in the criminal justice system, and I eventually enrolled in Palm Beach Junior College as a sophomore, intending to become a parole officer. It was there that I met a teacher who changed my life.
Watson B. Duncan III, an English literature professor and the school’s theater director, was my first and greatest mentor. He was a gentle soul and a master teacher. He stood at the lectern and didn’t just recite the words of Milton and Shakespeare; he breathed life into them with his booming voice. Every class was a performance. No wonder they called him the “Pied Piper of English literature.” The son of a Methodist minister, he answered a calling to be a teacher. He often said that the greatest sin a teacher can commit is to bore his students. He was never in danger of that, because we hung on his every word.
I wasn’t interested in drama or literature. I took the class to fulfill a requirement, and like all good football players, I sat in the back row. But as Professor Duncan read Byron, Shelley, and Keats, I was amazed at how he was Byron and he was Shelley and he was Keats. He especially loved Shakespeare—“the Big S,” he called him. Students lined up to get into his Shakespeare classes, where he wore Shakespeare T-shirts and brought in a cake to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday. And every summer he went to the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival to act in the plays.
He was such a good actor, I started moving closer and closer to the front of the room. By the time he got to Paradise Lost I was in the first row and totally hooked on English literature. It was a whole new world I’d never dreamed of. To this day I’m a ravenous reader . . . because of Watson Duncan.
Professor Duncan’s passion for literature was second only to his love for his wife. Honey Harper Duncan is as Southern as a peach orchard. She was one of his students. We were in his English literature class together, and like me, she moved from the back row to the front row; only he married her. They were devoted to each other for the rest of his life.
Professor Duncan encouraged us to be everything we wanted to be. He touched the lives of countless students over his forty-year career. He helped many of them get financial aid to get through college, and he even went into his own pocket if they didn’t qualify.
One day he said, “Buddy, you’re going to be an actor.”
“Professor Duncan,” I said, “you’re a smart man, but I have no talent and no interest in being an actor.”
“Tomorrow we’re reading for a play,” he said. “Be in my office at three o’clock.”
I had no intention of going, but the next day at three I found myself sitting across from him in his office. He pushed a play over to me. I picked it up and read one word—I think it was the—and he said, “You’ve got the part!”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“You’ve got the part,” he said.
“You mousetrapped me!” I said. “I’m stuck now and I can’t get out of it!”
“Do you want to get out of it?”
“Well, no, I guess I don’t,” I was surprised to hear myself say.
The play was Outward Bound, about people on an ocean liner who discover that they’ve died and are about to face the final judgment. I was cast in the lead as Tom Prior, a tragic figure played by John Garfield in the 1944 movie ve
rsion, Between Two Worlds. I felt at home from the first rehearsal. I thought, I can do this! Maybe I’ve found something that can take the place of football.
As rehearsals went on, Mr. Duncan gave blocking to everyone but me. I thought it was odd, but didn’t question it. I figured I could move wherever I wanted. So I wandered all over the stage. While the other actors were talking, I’d be at the bar fixing myself a drink. I’m lucky they didn’t strangle me. The performance went well and the audience seemed to like it. We took scenes from the play to local hospitals and veterans’ homes and they loved it. And it was great for me, too, because I felt I was being useful.
At the end of my sophomore year I won a Florida State Drama Award scholarship to summer stock. So instead of spending eight weeks working on a fishing boat, I went to Hyde Park Playhouse in New York. The theater was actually a big barn, the most glorious barn in the world. The first week I had a walk-on part in Affairs of State by Louis Verneuil, directed by Wynn Handman. I was listed in the program as an apprentice.
There were two older women in the company—they must have been in their early thirties—and they seemed very sophisticated to a nineteen-year-old from Riviera Beach. I went out with them every night, and it got to be, Holy cow! If this is show business, count me in! But the language! I’d been so sheltered, I’d never heard women talk like that before, and it turned me off at first. But then I realized that it didn’t change the fact that they were wonderful in every other way, and I stopped judging them. It was the least I could do.
Rip Torn
The first time I saw New York, it was like Oz. It was the mid-fifties and I was fresh and innocent and unsophisticated. Walking down Broadway, I looked up, and there was a giant neon waterfall advertising Pepsi-Cola. I stood there gawking for ten minutes, my mouth open. I couldn’t believe it. It was a block long, that waterfall. Around the corner was a huge sign with a man smoking Camels. I spent an hour watching him blow smoke rings. At that moment I fell in love with New York. Unfortunately, New York didn’t fall in love with me.
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 4