Terry Curtis finds out just how much of an impact he’s had, even on those he never knew, but who will be the new Godfather?

 

 

MOBILE — There is nothing ornate about the sign that informs you that you have arrived at the office of a great man who was not only a football coach but who fully defined and lived the title, who won not with brute force and overwhelming talent but routinely got into the heads of his opposition and gave his players the feeling that whatever he did was infallible, even his infamous preseason “County Fair,” a rite of passage and a badge of honor for life.

The unadorned placard outside the office of UMS-Wright coach Terry Curtis reads, simply, “ATHLETIC DIRECTOR,” even in braille.

But go inside and take a right past the desk of administrative assistant Molly Nordmann, walk past a combination conference room/storage room — where a straw hat and a whistle lay abandoned and silent on a table — and take another sharp right and there on Tuesday afternoon, in his inner sanctum, hours after a press conference at which Curtis was in top form while announcing his retirement, the recumbent genius was genuinely puzzled as he studied his cell phone with his glasses sliding down his nose.

He was trying to answer several hundred text messages of congratulations and/or commiseration — “I can’t just say, ‘Thanks’” — and it was beginning to sink in how much he means to thousands of people, how much he is loved and respected, when one message in particular made him slam on the brakes and ponder the sum of his life and career.

“Coach Curtis, my name is Jon Clements and I coach in Birmingham. I just wanted to tell you thanks for all that you have done for football and football coaches in this state. I watched your press conference and heard you mention when you decided to be a coach. Well, I remember mine like it was yesterday but I was in the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel in Hoover after you had just beat Cherokee County at Legion Field in 2008 and I had just graduated from playing baseball at (Jacksonville State) and had no clue what I wanted to do. But when I saw you and your team and parents and how excited everyone was, I knew I wanted to be a part of something like that. So, as I enter year 17 as a coach and teacher, I just wanted to tell you thanks for having an impact on me. I wish you and your family the very best.”

Curtis had no idea who Jon Clements is but had still reached him deeply and inspired him to become a coach. If Curtis could have that effect on someone he didn’t know, imagine those he does know. Plenty of them were there for Tuesday’s announcement in a show of affection and appreciation that caused the often impervious 74-year-old coach to sprinkle everyone he hugged with his tears. Curtis couldn’t speak and when he sat down, he inhaled deeply and held his breath to stanch the outburst of emotion.

The moment and the man were not evidence of a sport that many coaches feel is becoming a cesspool with its merciless transfers and the inevitable encroachment of NIL deals for players. Coaching has also become less collegial as the guiding lights of Curtis, Danny Horn and Steve Mask fade.

“A lot of us older guys are friends,” Curtis said. “I look at every score every week and I’ll call them or send them a note. A lot of these younger coaches now, if you get beat, they won’t talk to each other.”

There are plenty of good, high-character, relatively young coaches, such as Jeff Kelly, Zach Golson, Keith Etheredge, Bill Clark, Mark Freeman, Jason Rowell, Jason Massey, Chan Lowe and Eric Collier, but are they enough to turn the sport upright again?

Curtis has been a mentor to many coaches — some call him the Godfather — a responsibility he has always taken seriously. Who is going to take his place?

“My last seven or eight years mentoring younger coaches or even older coaches that just got fired has been very, very important to me,” he said. “I was up at 11:30 last night answering texts from coaches. I love coaches. They’re my best friends. I don’t even know my next-door neighbor. All my friends are coaches and I answer them each and every time and I love being around them.”

And they sought the wise counsel of a coach who often won games he shouldn’t have with average talent, a regular occurrence UMS Head of School Doug Barber said he savored.

“The people we never should have beaten,” Barber said. “One of my favorite things with coach is to always just go up to him after a game like that and many, many times we didn’t speak, we just laughed. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Curtis was (and is) an anachronism, a man who succeeded with old-fashioned values in a modern game. He was also contradictory in many respects, a trait of unpredictability that served him so well. He was unrivaled as a play caller yet rarely consulted his scrupulously crafted play sheets once they were in his pocket. He was supremely confident in his abilities yet resorted to superstitions such as keeping lucky rocks in his pocket, eating peanuts during games and insisting on eating the same meal at the same restaurant weekly as long as the Bulldogs were winning. He once had the team buses at Murphy turn around and go back to the school and start over because they made a wrong turn on the way to Ladd-Peebles Stadium. He wore the same shabby undershorts on Friday nights for 20 years, kept respectable by the patching of his wife, Jeanie. He didn’t wear headsets.

This is a man who in his job interview at UMS-Wright foresaw success by looking out a window at the elementary school building.

Curtis said he was asked where he would get the players to make his grand plan for winning championships come to fruition.

“I was already standing up and I just went over to the window and pointed out to where the elementary building was,” he said. “And I don’t know if I shocked them or they didn’t believe me or what but I said, ‘Well, we’re getting ready to develop those kids right there to be Bulldogs.’ And some of them said that’s what got me the job. We started playing the third, fourth, fifth, sixth graders.”

Curtis had only a handful of SEC-caliber players despite the contentions of critics who said he recruited.

“They would call us UMS-White,” said former tight end Preston Dial, who went on to play at Alabama. “They’d say we bought all the talent in town. I kind of laugh about it. We just had a bunch of 5-foot-10, 185-pound, well-coached dudes who wanted to win.”

Curtis had an answer for the critics after his first state championship in 2001. An Alabama High School Athletic Association official wanted to know how many players had enrolled at UMS-Wright after the seventh grade and Curtis told upper-school principal Ed Lathan, who gave Curtis his first coaching job at B.C. Rain, how to reply:

“Find out who he was and tell him to come down and watch us come out on the field,” Curtis told Lathan. “If I was going to recruit, I wouldn’t be recruiting them.”

Curtis said he was most proud of his program’s consistency and never being fired from a job.

“That’s unusual,” he said. But not if you averaged 10 wins each season over 36 years.

“We were not a one-time wonder,” Curtis said. “We didn’t go and win state and then all of a sudden you never heard of us again. We have been relevant in the state of Alabama in 4A and 5A.”

But will the Bulldogs remain relevant? Curtis will remain at the school in an advisory role but said he would not get involved in choosing his successor.

“I have asked for a few of my assistants to be interviewed,” he said. “They’re gonna get the right guy and it’s gonna be a special guy.”

But programs in which a legendary coach retires, resigns or dies often have trouble maintaining their level of success and there’s a chance it could happen at UMS-Wright, which must compete in Class 5A instead of 4A, where it belongs.

The school has plenty of time before the white smoke emanates from its campus to signal a new era has truly begun. Regardless, high school football in Alabama has been greatly diminished with Curtis’ retirement and we must hope his influence, as with the young Jon Clements, is strong enough to help the sport be an honorable means to an end.