ARKANSAS SPORTS HALL OF FAME : Tommy the technician
Posted on Tuesday, January 29, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Sports/215182/
Third in a series of articles profiling individuals who will be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame this year. The Hall of Fame
banquet will be held Feb. 22.
For Charles Tuberville, every
fall Friday was Take Your
Child To Work Day. Tuberville wasn’t a hard man to figure out. His was a life that was about family, work, football and the outdoors, with few intrusions. People in south Arkansas tend to keep things simple. So it was natural on those Friday nights for Tuberville to leave his home in Camden with his elementary school-age son, Tommy, in tow as he headed off to officiate high school football.
What wasn’t natural was what happened once he got there. Charles and his crew would conduct pregame meetings with the coaches, which is customary. But more often than not, Tommy would be there, standing quietly by his father and listening intently to every word being spoken.
This at an age where most kids were perfectly happy knowing how to simply throw and tackle in games of backyard football.
No one sees Tommy Tuberville’s fascination with football minutiae as strange anymore. With millions of dollars in the bank and a 42-9 record over the past four seasons as coach at Auburn, including a 13-0 run in 2004, the Camden Harmony Grove and Southern State (now Southern Arkansas ) graduate enters the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame as one of the top names in college coaching today.
Those Friday nights with his dad, who died of a heart attack at 53, injected Tommy Tuberville with a lust for X’s and O’s that carried him through an uncelebrated high school playing career, an even more middling time as a walk-on free safety at Southern State and a number of early coaching jobs that paid Tuberville more in football knowledge than in legal tender.
“I probably knew the rules better as a player than some of the coaches,” Tuberville said.
Sonny Whittington coached at Fordyce High School during the 1960 s and remembers Charles Tuberville showing up to call his games with Tommy, an “itty bitty fella.” He also remembers serving as defensive coordinator at Southern State when, years later, Tommy Tuberville showed up again.
Tuberville remained “itty bitty” compared with his college teammates, and he was slow afoot to boot. But that didn’t stop Tuberville from pestering Whittington to let him sit in on the meetings for the other defensive positions.
Whittington balked, which led Tuberville to take his request up the chain of command to Coach Rip Powell.
“To be a college coach, I had to play college football,” Tuberville said. “I had to know what they [the coaches ] were going through.”
Powell finally relented, figuring the first time Tuberville missed a good time with his friends because of a six-hour film session would mark the last time he set foot in the defensive coaching offices.
Instead, he became a fixture. And eventually, his sheer football smarts enabled him to occasionally see the field during games as a backup, though he usually found himself beaten by faster players.
“If all your players were like him, you wouldn’t win many games,” Powell said. “But it’d sure be enjoyable.”
Adulthood changes people, and very often, their dreams change with them. Not Tuberville’s. Shortly after graduating, Tuberville left a low-paying job as a high school coach at Hermitage for what started out as a no-paying job as an assistant at Arkansas State.
Then came a period of working as a part-time assistant at Miami.
“For about three years, I didn’t make anything,” Tuberville said. “I had to buy burgers with the change out of my car ashtray.”
All that came with no guarantee of success later on. Tuberville says now that, of course, so much of becoming an SEC-level head coach is just as much a matter of who you know as what you know. There are others that share his football acumen, but the jobs didn’t open for them like they eventually did for Tuberville.
Think Tuberville’s not grateful ? Consider 1997, when he flirted heavily with the prospect of leaving his coaching post at Ole Miss for Arkansas. Tuberville later claimed to have turned down an offer from the Razorbacks, but he was back in the news 10 years later when rumors surfaced that he was considering leaving Auburn for Fayetteville.
A well-paid coach’s wanderlust ? Maybe. Or maybe the memories of those fall Fridays haven’t completely left Charles Tuberville’s son.
“I’m still an ol’ country boy at heart,” Tuberville said. “I really appreciate my roots.”