OU professor learned that `hard work is the name of the game'

Iwas 16 years old, kneeling with a group of other B-teamers on the sideline of a chilly football practice that gray November afternoon, when assistant coach Charley Phillips walked over. “I need to talk to my sophomore miler,” he said. We all looked around at each other because no one had a clue who he was talking about.

But today, at 67, the fact that it turned out to be me was what flashed to the front of my mind while reading recent accounts on Why I Love Sports in The Oklahoman. I still don't know exactly what led him to say that. But I know it was the start of dramatic changes for me, in sports and in life.

That day in Hooks, Texas, was five years before Billy Sims started playing football for the Hornets and went on to make the town famous to most fans in Oklahoma. The 1967 season was almost over and had made me famous to no one.

Whatever was on my mind before Coach Phillips strolled over, it probably had something to do with the fact that in a town obsessed with the game, it had grown clear I probably had zero future in football — or any other known sport. At that point, I had never run track. I probably didn't even know running the mile against other people was a thing.

But then a coach told me how he believed with hard work I could be a good miler. As soon as football season was over, he got me started on distance runs out along then-new Interstate 30. A little later, we started interval workouts on the cinder track. I did everything he said and more. By the time meets got going in the spring, it turned out he was right about hard work — I was beating all the juniors and seniors who had been running the mile longer.

By senior year I switched to the quartermile, won a half-dozen meets, set a district record that stood many years, made it to regionals, just missed out on state, and later ran for a couple of small-college track teams.

But looking back now, from the perspective of an OU professor of media law and history given to academic analysis, I see what Charley actually did was help me reconstruct a dominant personal narrative. To put it in far fewer words than eggheads like me usually do, it sold me on a story that I could live by — of how working really hard can transform one's lot in life.

“I remember you running on those hot summer days while other athletes where sitting up under the air conditioning,” Durwood Merrill — another Hooks coach of mine who worked his way from getting fired for losing too many high-school football games to a long, colorful Major League Baseball umpiring career — wrote in my senior yearbook. “Remember it was all hard work, that is the name of the game.”

Charley and Durwood have both passed on now, but their lessons would live long with me.

It drove me to publish not only books and scholarly articles on law and history, but also on the role of sports and sports media in modern life. I focused on why sports narratives are so important for countless human beings, how often we live by them and keep craving more.

I firmly believe in what narrative-analysis can reveal about why people love sports and what is ultimately going on with the games and the people who play them.

Consider, for example, the way an episode of the recent ESPN "Last Dance" series retold the remarkable story of how a basketball coach at Southeastern Oklahoma University came across an unknown Texas kid named Dennis Rodman. Rodman recalls he couldn't even make a layup in high school, but that meeting helped launch an ultimately spectacular reconstruction of his dominant personal narrative.

Rodman turned out to have great talent. But he only learned that because a coach sold him on a narrative of what hard work in the Southeastern program could do for him. Otherwise, as Rodman says, most likely he could never even have imagined a life beyond total obscurity — instead of one in which he would become an NBA Hall of Famer so flamboyant that, for a few years, he was more famous than even Michael Jordan (also according to Last Dance).

I can't think of anything Dennis Rodman and I really have in common — except discovering the electrifying power of a transformative personal narrative. And I know that he will always remember the day that coach talked him into playing basketball for him just as clearly as I will always remember the day Charley Phillips talked me into running the mile for him.