Day 28 – After Mono…
My throat stopped hurting, my fever was down, but I was still dragging from the Mono. School started again and so did football. In the off-season we had to take a class called PE 101, it was actually winter conditioning for football players. Invariably, there would be so crazy kid who would sign up for it thinking, “This will be an easy A”…what a joke!
We had 20 minutes in the weight room, 20 minutes running agilities in the Colosseum and then to top it off 20 minutes running stadium steps. Sometimes they would throw in a session in the wrestling room where we would get in a circle on our knees, put one guy in the middle, in T-shirts and shorts and he had to fight his way out…no rules as to how!
To give you an idea of the intensity, some guys would run up the stadium steps and at the top just lean over the edge and puke. So needless to say, after one day, all the non-football players dropped the course. Some even left before we started…smart choice.
Now I was just coming off of Mono, but they didn’t want to hear excuses. So, when I got behind in one drill, they called me out. What that meant was after the hour was over, Coach Gant took all of us who had been called out, to the upper deck of the Colosseum and we had to run sprints.
I can’t remember how many, but it was a lot. As we were dying and ready to quit, Coach Gant said calming, “Boys, you can do anything once, so just finish”… I never forgot that and it’s true, no matter how bad it is, you can finish.
This was a tough time at ECU. Counting our Freshman Coach, our freshman class had 4 different coaches in 4 years. Coach Bill Cane, our Freshman Coach. Coach Stasavich our sophomore year. Coach Mike McGee our junior year and Coach Sonny Randle our senior year…what a fiasco!
Needless to say, we struggled, but we had each other and that was what it really was about. I still keep in touch with my roommate George Hendley after 50 years now. I think I mentioned earlier that my first roommate was Mike Aldridge, who was the Quarterback I snapped to at Rose High School in Greenville, but he slept at home most of the time, so George was my roommate the longest.
We were a tight group, as a lot of football players are with their teammates, but ours was strong because of all the turmoil in the front office. Both Mike McGee and Sonny Randle played in the pros, so we had capable coaches, but it was just a mess.
Coach Stas, as we called him, was a big deal at ECU. Earlier at Lenoir-Rhyne he had 120 wins 32 loses and 7 ties (yes they recorded tie games back then, no overtime). From 1962-1969, when we came to ECU, he was 50-27-1 and then, the wheels fell off, as they say. The game really just passed him by and that was sad.
He used to recruit some amazingly tough guys out of the coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia who chose to play football rather than work in the mines. Being from Greenville, I knew a lot about the players. They had a middle linebacker, Harold Glatly, from somewhere up in the mountains, who would chew tobacco during practice and when the Pitt County Fair came to town, he would wrestle a declawed, muzzled bear in a cage and WIN…I kid you not.
As the story goes, to be his friend, you had to trade punches with him. That meant he would stand there, stick his face out and you would hit him as hard as you could on the jaw. If you didn’t knock him out, then he got a turn. Thank God he graduated before I got to East Carolina. But these were the types of guys who play for Coach Stas and they were no joke. For years before I got there, ECU would play as conference champions, in the Tangerine Bowl in Florida in December and always win.
That last year of Coach Stas was a sad time to see such a wonderful coach and individual be ridiculed and tossed out…he just stayed too long.
All in all, my years at ECU were very rewarding and I never regretting going there. I probably could have played more at Appalachian State or other schools that offered, but East Carolina was the right place for me and I’ll talk more about that later.
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