My high school alma mater will play for a state football championship for the first time in three decades today.
As I watch Arkadelphia take on Warren for the Class 4A title at War Memorial Stadium, memories of two men will come flooding back. Willie Tate and John Outlaw died within a few months of each other in 2011 and 2012. They helped make me the person I am today.
Tate died in March 2012 at the all-too-young age of 69 following a battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was a giant of my youth in Arkadelphia. Raised in a large family in the tiny community of Gum Springs, he attended college at what's now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and became a star football player for the Golden Lions.
I was fortunate that Coach Tate followed my class from junior high to high school. He was my head football coach in junior high and my offensive line coach in high school. We loved the man off the field just as much as we feared incurring his wrath when we were on the field. Arkadelphia had experienced severe racial problems in the spring of 1972. By the fall of 1973, I was playing for Willie Tate. He was black, and I'm white. But color didn't matter to any of us on that football field. Tate let us know that we were all Goza Junior High Beaver red and white and later Arkadelphia High School Badger red and blue.
I quote him to this day. He would warn us about "season women," those girls who would date you during the fall if you were a football player and then drop you for a basketball player in the winter. He would preach self-esteem by telling us: "If you ever read that Willie Tate committed suicide, you had better call the police. Somebody murdered me and made it appear to be a suicide. I would never do that because I love Willie Tate."
He would say, "Let me show you how to block" or "let me show you how to use a forearm," and we would back up. Yes, we were in pull pads. Yes, he was in shorts and a T-shirt. Still, no one wanted to take on Willie Tate and have his massive forearm crush into the chest. He wouldn't scream at you when you came off the field following a bad play. He would just put his hands on his hips and give you a stare that burned all the way through. It has been more than 40 years, but I still picture that sideline stare in my mind as vividly as if it had occurred earlier today.
Tate would spend weekends in the fall watching the film of Friday games and grading each of his linemen. He would hand out the grades and individual comments each Monday. A positive word from him on those sheets was enough to put a bounce in your step during the Monday afternoon practice. The humidity always seemed to hang heavier than elsewhere around that practice field on Caddo Street. As the sweat poured out, our coach would laugh and sing about "blue Monday."
I didn't play for John Outlaw. I was already a sophomore in college during his first year as Arkadelphia's head coach. We quickly became friends, and he had a huge influence on my budding career as a sports journalist. I was the sports editor of the Daily Siftings Herald and the sports director of the city's two radio stations. I also was carrying a full class load in college. There was little time for sleep, but it was heaven on earth.
Outlaw was just 25 years old when the Arkadelphia School Board hired him. I was 19. This intense, wiry man, who had been an assistant football coach at the University of Central Arkansas, won me over the first night I interviewed him. We led the front page the next day with the story of his hiring. My story was designed to introduce the community to Outlaw. Those were the first of millions of words I would write and broadcast about Outlaw and his Badgers in the years to come. Tate remained on the staff as his top assistant.
I had a sense that the new coach was something special. Writing four to five newspaper columns a week, I filled them with accounts of his team's off-season drills and previews of the 1979 season. Arkadelphia lost early that year to Ashdown and didn't lose again. At age 26, in his first head coaching job, Outlaw produced a state championship team with a 19-0 victory over Alma. It was a magical time.
Outlaw was 84-20-1 in nine seasons at Arkadelphia, winning another state championship in 1987 with a 14-0 team that became the first Arkansas school ever to be ranked in the USA Today Super 25. After the season, Outlaw decided to see how he could perform on high school football's biggest stage--the state of Texas. His teams went 57-21-1 at Sherman from 1988-94 and 162-46-1 at Lufkin from 1995-2011. That 303-87-3 record speaks for itself, but it doesn't begin to describe how much the kids who played for Outlaw loved him.
I had taken the day off work on the Friday before Christmas in 2011. I was downstairs at my home, reading the newspaper and sipping coffee. My cell phone was upstairs charging. When I went upstairs, I noticed the phone was filled with messages. Those messages were all the same: John Outlaw had died that morning of a heart attack in Lufkin following his early morning run. Just more than two months later, Tate also was gone. I was at graveside as both men were laid to rest, remembering their Friday night magic.
As I watch a Badger team play for a state title today, I'll picture Willie Tate and John Outlaw roaming the sidelines and encouraging their team. The men are gone; the memories linger.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 12/09/2017