‘Ol’ Ball Coach’ lives up to LR club’s motto
The motto this year for the Little Rock Touchdown Club is #Legendsarecoming.
That was very obvious Monday when Steve Spurrier — the legendary head coach at Duke, Florida and South Carolina — hit a grand slam during the lunch meeting in front of more than 400 spectators, the largest crowd to attend a meeting when the speaker had no Arkansas ties.
Spurrier was insightful, funny and entertaining during an hour that seemed more like 10 minutes.
His wit was on edge, and his stories ranged from funny to hilarious.
Yet, he opened on a serious note by asking those in attendance to pull out their cellphone and text “Harvey” to 90999, which would make a $10 donation to the Red Cross to help the drenched masses in south Texas.
It was hard to guess how Spurrier, who was making his first visit to Little Rock, might come off. His nicknames run from “Ol’ Ball Coach” to “Steve Superior.”
He recalled the Oct. 5, 1996, game when he brought a Florida Gators team led by quarterback Danny Wuerffel to Fayetteville.
To the world, it looked like Spurrier ran the score up on the University of Arkansas when he had Wuerffel passing late in a game that was easily in hand.
As the Gators left the field with a 42-7 win, the Razorbackers booed heartily.
“What, they don’t believe in passing up here?” Spurrier quipped.
In his locker room, then-Arkansas head Coach Danny Ford said in reality that Spurrier called the dogs off: It could have been much worse.
It wasn’t until later Spurrier shared that Wuerffel needed 13 yards to set a school record for passing yards, and that’s why he was still in the game passing. Spurrier also was pushing his quarterback for the Heisman, which worked, making Spurrier the first head coach to have won the Heisman as a player and coached a Heisman winner.
The Gators would go on to win the national championship that season. On Monday, Spurrier said: “One is enough. One is better than none.”
Spurrier, who won his Heisman as the Florida quarterback in 1966, had come home by way of Duke, where he won the ACC championship. He gave up college football in January 2002 for the big bucks of the NFL’s Washington Redskins, where he ran into an owner, Daniel Snyder, who had never played the game but thought he knew everything.
That lasted two seasons before Spurrier was bought out. He eventually turned up as the head coach at South Carolina, which had an all-time losing record. To the chagrin of his agent, Jimmy Sexton, Spurrier — who got a lot of money to not coach the Redskins — agreed to a $1 million contract.
Before he coached the Gamecocks to three consecutive 11-2 seasons from 20112013, he had gotten plenty of negotiated raises. Midway through the 2015 season, Spurrier quit.
Spurrier, 72, recently was put back on the Gators’ payroll as an ambassador/consultant.
Before coaching, Spurrier spent nine seasons with the San Francisco 49ers as a backup quarterback.
“We all know that’s the best job in the NFL,” he deadpanned Monday.
Spurrier finished his playing career with the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who went 0-14 in 1976.
He walked away from the game as a player, spent five years as an assistant coach before becoming the head coach of the Tampa Bay Bandits of the USFL, and when that league folded he went to Duke.
The legend, who is in the College Football Hall of Fame as a player and coach, has learned a lot about life and gathered many stories along the way, and Monday he shared some of his experiences and razor-sharp wit with the Little Rock Touchdown Club.