Homage To A High School Football Coach

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One of my best friends from my college days recently passed away. He was a high school football coach.

Craig Gill was my first college center. I was his quarterback.  As freshmen at Elon (N.C.) College (now University), we had the world by the tail and bonded instantly.

We were not only teammates, but both eventually starters on the school’s varsity football team. We also joined the same fraternity, shared many of the same classes, went on road trips and did all the things 18- to 22-year-olds do in college. We were usually in over our heads but really never knew it because we were having the time of our lives. Those were, indeed, the halcyon days of our youth.

As a player, Gill was known for his grit and leadership. Undersized for the interior line, he nonetheless was highly respected by his teammates, coaches and opponents. Nobody practiced harder than Gill. When things got tough, his unique, guttural voice could be heard above the din, encouraging his mates to dig deeper.  As a student, he was consistently on the Dean’s List.

Gill went on to earn his Master’s degree at the University of North Carolina. Afterward, he became a high school football and track coach because it was in his blood. In retrospect, from the day he stepped foot on the Elon campus, there was no question about his life’s calling. He was a coach.

Gill was born to it. He was both demanding and tough. The kids loved him because he always told them the truth, challenged them to excel and to be better than they thought they had a right to be. He willed many youngsters to reach beyond their limitations.

As an assistant football coach for 17 years, Gill sat and waited patiently to be the head man at his dream job at Andrews High School in High Point, N.C. Meanwhile, as the school’s head track coach, he amassed an unmatched record while winning a number of state championships. Last year he was inducted into the school’s Sports Hall of Fame.

When he was finally tapped as the head football coach at Andrews, I packed up my camera bag and drove from Atlanta to High Point to chronicle for him his first game as a high school head coach. We were alongside one another for nearly 24 hours. I snapped close to 150 shots — from the team boarding the bus for the away game to returning home after a tough loss.

What amazed me about Gill that night was not so much his intensity. He was always an intense coach. The optimism he projected to his team was contagious to everyone around him. Yes, there were moments when he was frustrated beyond words and yelled at his players for under performing. But he would not cross the line of humiliating a kid. Corrections were private exchanges although scores of other important things were happening. Teaching in the moment was his thing and nobody did that better than Gill.

He might say, “Damn, son, you can do better than that,” but he would not dare damage a player’s self worth by berating him in front of the team and fans. To Gill, that was off limits.

As I observed him coach at Andrews and later at Buckingham County High School in Central Virginia, where he finished his career as a legend, it was obvious to me that Gill was a very special human being. He had overcome some professional and personal difficulties, some of which would have defeated a lesser man. But Gill always maintained his integrity, self worth and dedication to his craft of coaching and to the young people he was charged with nurturing and developing.

In 2013, Craig was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer.  Upon getting word of his diagnosis, I hopped in my car and went to see him. He reassured me he would beat the beast within him. He began to speak at churches in the county, many of them the predominantly African American congregations of his players, about his journey and how much he loved his players. If his legacy had not already been cemented in the community, these sincere speeches certainly did that.

Gill lived in a two-story, white clapboard farmhouse about 100 yards, fittingly, off the main road and about 15 miles from Appomattox Courthouse and four from Buckingham Courthouse.

He was proud to say that both Lee’s and Grant’s armies passed by the house on their way to signing the Civil War surrender in 1865.

“Just imagine that,” he would exclaim.

The house was surrounded by about a half dozen huge oak trees that used to cool it down from the summer heat and humidity. Gill had to install window air conditioners to make it bearable inside, even with 12-foot high ceilings throughout.

He paid monthly rent to a widow. The land had been in her family for a couple hundred years, she claimed. There were about 600 acres and Gill had free run of the place to hunt, fish or do whatever. She leased the farm portion to a man who raised cattle, wheat and corn.

After renting the place for about 10 years, the woman called Gill over to her house one afternoon and told him that because he was obviously so dedicated to the place, she felt bad about charging him rent. She said he could stay there for free if he wanted.

Besides his coaching, Gill was an avid gardener growing fresh vegetables and flowers.  He frequently delivered bundles of flowers to grateful neighbors. His half dozen or so Blue Tick hounds were ready anytime he chose to go hunting. They howled anytime he walked their way to signal they were eager to run through the woods out back. His vintage Mustang sat covered beside the house and underneath a port.  A few times each year he would take it out for a spin on the winding roads.

I treasured our visits because after the cursory football chats he would go on about his own children and how proud he was that all three of them were doing well.  We would sit on his back steps and talk all evening about his life, what was important to him and his high hopes for the disadvantaged young people of Buckingham County. He saw it as his purpose in life to help his players and other students get a glimpse of their potential. Gill desperately wanted them to know that they could achieve great things with hard work and a good education.

This past May a friend called to say he had heard that Gill’s cancer had returned. This time it had pounced on him with a vengeance. When I called to check on him, his voice was decidedly weaker, so I headed to Virginia.

Driving up to the familiar farmhouse, I could see Gill on the front porch waiting on me. He was very thin.  The normally fit, 180-pound man with his signature, gray flattop was down to an emaciated 130 pounds.  His hair was longer, whiter. Bones protruded from shoulders which for 40-plus years had popped with muscles earned through weekly weight lifting sessions with his teams.

My friend was dying. He was 63.

This visit was no stroll out to the garden. The dogs, save one, which came to greet me, had been given away to friends near and far.  When we hugged, his skeleton was what remained of three years of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Yet his handshake grip was firm and strong. I took it as the last visage of the man he still wished to be. There was hope in that grip.

“They almost killed me with that last round of treatments,” he lamented.  “So I told them to stop. I was going home.”

Instead of sitting on his porch, we went inside and eased onto opposite ends of his worn couch. He explained what was happening with his health and that his doctor had advised him to get his affairs in order.

“So I have,” he said.

The next hour I sat and listened as he described what the future held, including how he had arranged for his children to be taken care of.  His wife, he said, would be taken care of by her parents.  He spoke somberly that he had just announced to his principal that he was going to take a year’s sabbatical, vowing to be back in the fall of 2017 to coach one more year.  Five days later, it was announced that he had formally retired.

Then he matter-of-factly told me the details of his upcoming funeral. As he spoke, he looked down at the floor and straight ahead. We both knew that if he looked at me in the eye we would both lose it. He would have none of that. After all, he was a football coach, and he had a game plan to discuss with me.

He talked about beating back the beast once more. This time, though, confidence was absent from his voice.

When Gill finished all he needed to say to me, he said he was tired and needed to rest. I declined his invitation to spend the night there.

We got up from the sofa and walked to the front door. I knew he didn’t want to walk down the 10 or so steps because the energy it would take to climb back up would do him in for the rest of the afternoon. Our final goodbye, after 45 years of friendship, would be on the place we had sat so many times when life held far more promise.

At last we looked at one another. His voice shook as he grabbed and hugged me and said that he loved me in that still gravelly voice.

I told him I loved him, too, and we held the hug for a few more seconds  I could hear his emotions start to well up in him, but he he refused to relent to tears. He was, to the end, a football coach.

Driving down the gravel driveway for the last time, I looked back through the rear view mirror. Gill stood there, on the top step of that stately, old house, waving to me. Then he dropped his head, turned and disappeared through the open door.

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