Unless someone slammed a shopping cart into your shin or cut you off in traffic or sat you buy a drunk uncle at Present Opening Time, you might have counted your blessings in the past few says.
The spirit surrounding Christmastime and the New Year usually lends itself to such positive behavior.
Smelling coffee brewing and watching our 17-month-old granddaughter eat an apple and tell the puppy to ‘Get down!’ (a new phrase learned on Christmas Day) and considering that I can sense these things, even at the advanced stage of my development, reminds me that I might be the luckiest piece of protoplasm you could ever meet.
If not the luckiest, then at least in the Top 10 or so. There is really no other excuse for me even being here except by some mistake of nature.
First came winning the Uterine Lottery thanks to my personal mother, and then being born in America and not on some hill in some country whose name I can’t pronounce or even locate without Google and a map.
So started a chain of events of God putting people along my wayward path to teach and encourage and inspire. One of those has a birthday December 28, and since I’ve missed writing to tell him “Happy Birthday” for 80 consecutive years, I won’t make that mistake again this time.
He’s had other jobs before and after, but Keith Prince was the sports information director at Louisiana Tech for 25 years, beginning in 1969 through the time I was there as a student in the early 1980s. It was outside what is now Scotty Robertson Memorial Gym that he asked me if I wanted to go to graduate school and be his graduate assistant.
Once I finished laughing, I thanked him and reminded him it had already taken me six years to earn a four-year degree. But … besides being organized and efficient and a wonderful writer and athlete, he is a kind and persistent man, sneaky convincing, a teacher by example, and I signed on with him for what ended up being one of the great adventures of my life. Even graduated in the legit two years, like a person with any sense is supposed to do.
Sports information directors are today called Associate Athletic Directors for Strategic Communications, or something like that. The job is the same as always though: promote your student-athletes, cover the games, never get ahead, and have four days off a year.
It’s a job that requires stamina, talent, grace, and the ability to deal with egos that often accompany your more dynamic competitors.
To make us better, Mr. Prince introduced us, maybe even shared us, to others who did his job at their schools, to Bob Anderson at what was then Northeast, to Collie Nicholson at Grambling, Jerry Pierce at Northwestern State, Larry Hymel at Southeastern, the incomparable Louis Bonnette at McNeese State, and a bunch of others. They became our teachers but also our friends. Tremendous break.
Mr. Prince had all the tools, but his best attribute was grace under pressure. That, and the ability to convince you that you could earn a place. He gave me and so many others a chance. And he showed us the way. Still does.
For those reasons and many more, I hope this is his best birthday yet.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu