Vernon Leverett – I Called Him “Coach” (1)

Vernon Leverett coached football and other sports at Clyde High School.   He proved to be one of the great influences in my life.   Although he only coached for about 8 years before going into school administration, I still called him “Coach” until the day he died.

“Coach” was a passionate man with a short fuse.   Once he deemed a referee’s call to be so flagrantly bad that he took the team off the field in the third quarter, loaded us on a bus and took us home, even though we were leading 13-7.  However that same kind of temperament  drove him to convince young men they could achieve the impossible.   Although I had no football ability, I believed all those speeches about what you could become.   I would have followed him anywhere.

He was notorious for “locker room speeches.”   He used lines like, “Those guys put their britches on the same way you do, one leg at a time.”   It was years later before I learned he borrowed that from Knute Rockne.  One of his previous players had been killed a few years earlier, so he developed his own “Win One for the Gipper” speech.  

If we were playing a poor team, he did everything in his power to convince us that we would be fortunate if we came off the field alive.  He would say, “They’ve got Number 32. You can’t stop him.  The best you can do is slow him down.”  That Friday night we would win by a lopsided score and 32 would get tackled every time he had the ball. 

One the other hand, if we played a team that appeared to be good, he would work hard to convince us that they could be beaten.  We played one team, who had an outstanding boy named Wolf.  He prepared us to take down Wolf all week. When we were doing calisthenics, we usually would count one – two or maybe one – two – three – four.   This particular week we would count “wolf meat” or “one – two – wolf meat.”  Wolf didn’t stand a chance.  He had a terrible night.  The defense was instructed to tackle him on every play whether he had the ball or not.

He also made sure that we didn’t pay too much attention to the press.  Remember high school football is a religion in West Texas, and the Abilene Reporter-News even covered us.  

About halfway through the season, A. C. Greene, who later became a prominent author, but covered high school sports for the Abilene paper at that time began to realize that our team was pretty good.  He even showed up for one of our practice sessions.   The week before we played Wylie he ran a piece on our team.  It was filled with lofty praise.   Coach Leverett came to the field with a copy of the paper in his hand and said, “Boys, I want to read you some garbage.”  He read the piece and said, “Don’t you see what’s he’s doing? He wants Wylie to win so he can write about how the underdogs defeated the favorites.  He’s setting us up.  Don’t believe any of that trash.”   

Some years later I got a letter from A. C. Greene.  He reflected on his experience as a high school sports reporter. He said that it was his job to serve as a whipping boy for the West Texas high school coaches.  If he picked a team to lose, the coaches would say, “He doesn’t have any confidence in us.”   If he picked them to win they would say, “He’s just trying to set us up.”  There was no way the reporter was going to come out on top.  He said that he was on a radio talk show out of Dallas about thirty years later, and one of those old coaches called in.  He was still mad at him.  We did manage to beat Wylie, and the score wasn’t even close.  As I recall it was something like 31-7.  Ironically, Coach Leverett eventually became a school administrator for the Wylie School District.