It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and I was walking across the football field at Arkansas Tech University at Russellville. I've broadcast Ouachita Baptist University games on the radio in parts of five decades--from the 1970s until the present--and my habit for road games is always the same. I get to the stadium early, walk onto the field and visit with the Ouachita coaches when the team arrives.
On this Saturday in October 2010, I mentioned to Todd Knight, the Ouachita head coach since 1999, how many years it had been since a Tiger team had defeated Tech in Russellville. Knight's senior quarterback, a Russellville product named Eli Cranor, heard me and jogged away. He wanted to win in his hometown in the worst way.
"You just ticked Cranor off," Knight said. "And that's a good thing."
I doubt it's the case, but I like to think I motivated Cranor that day. He had a combined 261 yards rushing and passing as Ouachita rolled to a 28-7 victory. Cranor would go on to set several school passing records. The next season, he played professional football in Sweden and led his team, the Carlsbad Crusaders, to a 10-1 record and the Swedish national title.
While Cranor was playing in Europe, Ouachita was winning the inaugural Great American Conference title in 2011. It has now won five of the nine GAC championships, gone 31-2 in the regular season the past three years (there are no games this fall due to the virus) and become a small college pigskin powerhouse.
Players such as Cranor, one of the smartest quarterbacks I've ever met, laid the foundation for the current success. Not having games this fall has given me more time to read. That, in turn, has me thinking about Cranor, who traded in his football for a laptop and is now a writer.
Cranor's first book was released last month. It's titled "Books Make Brainz Taste Bad" and is targeted toward children ages 8-13. Cranor is working on a second children's book that's scheduled to be released next fall.
Even though I'm almost twice Cranor's age, we have something in common in addition to our love of good writing and Ouachita football. That's a Ouachita English professor named Johnny Wink, who has been teaching for half a century. We both list Wink among our favorite teachers. If ever there's an example of a teacher who has had a profound influence on one's career path, it's Wink.
"I took a creative writing class in college," Cranor said in a recent interview. "I knew I liked English, but I thought I would be a lawyer. I was a political science major, but those classes were boring. So I double majored and added English literature. I got into all these English classes."
Wink became Cranor's mentor and still edits what Cranor writes. Cranor writes a lot (in addition to teaching in the Russellville School District), having completed a few manuscripts that have yet to be published along with writing syndicated columns and guest pieces for publications such as this newspaper.
The theme of his children's novel is that too much screen time is a bad thing. Zombie teachers control students' brains with virtual reality headsets. The only way to fight them in Cranor's book is through reading. Thus the name of the novel.
In an interview with River Valley Now, Cranor explained that his mother "was the most anti-technology person ever. My dad was among the last Americans to not own a cell phone. Johnny Wink calls himself the last slabless American. That's what he calls cell phones. But my mom is much more vocal. She would say when she saw a cell phone that it was the ruination of the youth and America. I guess it rubbed off on me a little.
"Being a teacher, I see kids on their screens, and they just kind of zone out and become zombies. ... I used to to say to the kids: 'That thing is going to suck your brains out.' I said it enough that I thought, 'Who eats brains? Zombies eat brains.' It was my first attempt to write a kids' book, and the idea fit perfectly because they're the most at risk of being changed by this technology."
Cranor has been awarded the Robert Watson Literary Prize by the Greensboro Review and received the 2018 Miller Audio Prize from the Missouri Review. His sports-themed advice column titled "Athletic Support" appears in publications across the country. He calls the column "a place where people can send in questions concerning their children's sporting endeavors, and I'll answer them. I've played football at every level, pee wee to professional. I was a high school head coach, an assistant coach and now I'm a father. I take my daughter to gymnastics on Wednesdays. I've seen things.
"'Athletic Support' works as part advice column, part sports column. Some weeks, I don't answer questions at all but instead focus on a story and how it relates to youth sports. When I do answer questions, I will always do so honestly. This means a great deal to me. I believe sports is one of the greatest teaching tools America has to offer. With that being said, let's make sure we're doing it the right way."
Cranor admits that he still misses playing the game.
"I've tried for years now to fill the football-shaped hole in my heart," he wrote for the Oxford American. "I've tried writing the pain away, writing my way back to glory. But writing is nothing like football. Writing is lonely, selfless work. There's nobody in the stands. Hell, there are no stands. Writing burns you up from the inside out, like a heatstroke but slower. Writing is a marathon, a war of attrition."
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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.