Coach by Keith Dunnavant

Author:Keith Dunnavant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

10

Arms and the Man

JOE NAMATH WAS a gift. During the recruiting season of 1960–61, the immensely talented quarterback from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, signed with the University of Maryland, but his college boards fell a few points shy of the school’s minimum requirements, so late in the summer he suddenly was up for grabs, like a lottery ticket tossed to the winds. Recruiting buzz was more subdued in those pre-ESPN, pre–sports talk radio days, but Tide assistant Charley Bradshaw got a call from a friend on the Maryland staff. The Terps were crushed to lose such a promising prospect, of course, and were frightened of playing against him at Penn State, which was hot on his trail. Alabama, which didn’t appear on the Maryland schedule, was a more palatable alternative; that Joe’s older brother had been recruited by Bryant at Kentucky certainly didn’t hurt ’Bama’s chances. So the coach dispatched former Wildcat Howard Schnellenberger to the hills of western Pennsylvania, and after more than a week of fending off the various other suitors—including Notre Dame—for the greatest passer since Johnny Unitas, they hopped a plane headed south for an official visit.

After all those days on the road with only two changes of clothes, the tall, mustachioed Schnellenberger looked like a sailor staggering home after a week’s shore leave. His clothes were wrinkled, he smelled of sweat and cigarettes, and he was flat broke. The thirtysomething Schnellenberger, with a wife and two children to support on the modest salary of an Alabama assistant coach, had expected to be on the road no more than two or three days, so when two or three days ran into a week and then ten days, he ran out of money; rather than risk losing the prospect by waiting for a wire from home, he wrote a bum check for Namath’s plane ticket. Like the Marines, Bryant men were taught to improvise, adapt, overcome!

The Birmingham airport was fogged in, so the coach and his prize were forced to fly into Atlanta and spend the night, which necessitated another rubber check for a hotel room. The next morning, when they got up and returned to the airport to fly on to Birmingham, Schnellenberger dug deep into his pants pocket and retrieved fifteen cents.

“Luckily, Joe didn’t want breakfast,” said Schnellenberger, who later led Miami to the 1983 national championship. “If he had, I’m not sure what I would’ve said. But he wanted a cup of coffee, so I bought him a cup of coffee and I did without.”

Two-a-days were in full swing by the time they arrived on campus, and Schnellenberger wasted no time in getting his prospect in front of the boss, although he was worried what the coach would think about the young man’s appearance. The product of a broken home and a modest environment in steel-mill country, Namath looked like a street hustler, sucking on a toothpick and wearing a checkered sport coat with a pocket watch dangling from the breast pocket. When he climbed

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