Clarion-Ledger writer Billy Watkins, like Coach Jack Carlisle, is a Mississippi treasure. Can't tell you how many times I have picked up the newspaper, read something Billy wrote and immediately have thought, "Boy, I wish I had written that."
Billy penned the following story on Jack for Sunday's Ledger. Because of space constrictions, some of it hit the cutting room floor. What follows, thanks to Billy and his editors, is the entire version.
-- Rick Cleveland
By Billy Watkins
They
trailed 40-0 at halftime, and inside the dressing room the bruised and
bloodied players were stretched out on the floor and on benches. A few
of them started changing
into their street clothes. No way, the players said, were they going
back out for the second half.
Coach Jack Mason Carlisle, in his first
season as head coach at Jackson Prep at the time, stood before them and
delivered one of the best pep talks of his life.
“You don’t want to be known as a bunch
of quitters,” he told them. “I’m telling you, this next half can be
different. You’ve just got to go out and believe. Those guys over in
that other dressing room are a bunch of loud-mouthed
rinky dinks, and I want y’all to hit ’em in the mouth a few times. If
you do that, the final score can be respectable. What do y’all say?”
A voice came from a far corner. “I ain’t scared of ’em,” said one of the seniors.
“Me, neither,” said another.
Before long,
the players were yelling and pounding the walls, and they burst from the
dressing room toward the field, Carlisle leading the way.
He eventually peeled off and headed
across the field to his own sideline, to his own team that wound up
beating the players he had inspired with his halftime sermon 66-0.
“Our stands were filled, and I couldn’t
have them leaving at halftime. But it didn’t work out quite like I
thought it would that last half,” says Carlisle, sitting in his Brandon
home. “I played every player I had, but I realized
later our junior high probably could’ve beaten them.”
Following that game in 1971, the visiting team boarded its
bobtailed school bus and headed back to England, Ark.. “They didn’t
shower, didn’t change clothes,” Carlisle says. “The coach got the $3,000
guarantee we’d promised them, and they took off.”
***************
That is just one of hundreds of stories from Carlisle’s legendary
coaching career that spanned 60 years. He retired following the 2011
season after serving as special teams coordinator at Louisiana College
in Alexandria.
Carlisle, 83, will be the subject of a roast Tuesday night at the
Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in Jackson. He warns those former
players who are scheduled to share stories about him that “I do speak
last.”
“I assure you,” laughs Tim Ellis, a former Ole Miss quarterback, “I will prepare with that in mind.”
Carlisle, who grew up in Amory, had a high school coaching record
of 262-70-17 and was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame
in 2004. His teams were tough and detail-oriented and rarely beat
themselves.
But there is also a Forrest Gump quality about the man, his path
intersecting with people and events that only the universe can explain.
For instance: In 1954 as coach of Lula-Rich High, he had only 10
players show up for a game at Oakland, a tiny town near Batesville. The
car carrying the left side of his line and one of his best running backs
had broken down halfway there.
He told his 80-pound manager to dress out.
“His mother was a teacher, and she babied that boy to death,”
Carlisle says. “She was at the game, and I assured her I’d put him way
away from the action and that nothing would happen to him, that he
wouldn’t get hit.
“We always carried an extra helmet and jersey or two, but he
couldn’t find one to fit him. I can still see him, the earholes of the
helmet resting down on his shoulder pads.
“Well, sure enough, the other team gets down on about our 10-yard
line, and I put him as far back in the end zone as I can, back by the
goal post.
One of their boys broke through the line and when
he ran into the end zone, he just went and ran right over my manager.
All I could see was his helmet flying one way and him flying another.
His mother came and got him, and that was the
end of football for him. We finished the game playing 10 players each.”
That manager was Thomas Harris, author of
Silence of the Lambs.
In 1970, Carlisle built the Jackson Prep football field, the same
one the Patriots play on today. He disked up what was raw pasture using
an old Farmall tractor, then had an engineer come out and set the
corners of the field.
In 1977, Carlisle was the Ole Miss assistant coach who pleaded
with head coach Ken Cooper to insert third-string quarterback Tim Ellis
in the game at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Jackson against Notre Dame,
with the heavily-favored Irish leading 13-10
with 4:53 remaining. Cooper said no. Carlisle wouldn’t back off. He
knew Ellis was the Rebels’ best passer.
Cooper finally gave in, and Ellis tossed the winning touchdown
pass to James Storey with 1 minute, 44 seconds left. The loss would be
the only blemish on Notre Dame’s schedule on its way to a national
championship.
And in 1992, Carlisle led Madison-Ridgeland Academy --- a school
that had experienced one winning season before his arrival in 1983 ----
to the AAA Mississippi Private School Association state title. MRA
whipped Prep, the program Carlisle had started
from scratch, by two touchdowns in the championship game on the field
he had built two decades earlier.
*****************
He grew up hard.
His father, Herbert, worked as a railroad engineer. He took
pneumonia at age 37 and died. Carlisle, the second-oldest of four
children, was eight. His mother, Estelle, bought a farm near Amory next
to his grandparents, and they raised cotton and “just
about everything we ate,” he says.
He fell in love with football at an
early age. “My daddy and oldest brother were both baseball fans, but I
was always getting up football games and listening to the New York
Giants on the radio,” he says. “And I didn’t mind
getting skinned up. In my tender years, I could stand a good bit of
pain.”
He was a 125-pound, three-year starter
for Amory High at running back and helped bring home the Little 10
Conference title his senior season.
Carlisle
hoped to play junior college ball. But shortly after graduating in
1947, he was riding his motorcycle and pulled out in front of an
18-wheeler. They hit head-on,
and the truck ran over Carlisle’s right leg. All but six inches had to
be amputated. He was hospitalized for six months.
“I couldn’t play football anymore, and I was mad about that,” he
says. “So I had pretty much made up my mind I wanted to coach, but I
kept thinking ‘Who is going to hire a one-legged football coach?’ But I
was doggone determined to make it happen.”
He attended East Mississippi Junior College for a year, then
decided to try and get a job at the garment plant in Nettleton where his
mother worked. Though he failed to get the job, the trip changed his
life. He met Jean, his wife of 63 years. They have
four children, 10 grandchildren and one great grandchild.
After another semester at EMJC, he enrolled at Mississippi State
in 1951 when Jean got a job on campus. He graduated from State in 1952,
and had already learned that at least one school would hire a one-legged
coach: Ethel High School, which hadn’t produced
a winning record in more than a decade. Carlisle, who received a
temporary teaching license in order to take the job, led Ethel to a 6-3
record.
He soon became known as a coach who could win where others had
failed. His three teams a Lula-Rich, which had eliminated the football
program before his arrival, went 2-6, 6-2-2 and 7-3.
He left Lula-Rich for Nettleton, where no one could recall the
school’s last winning record. In his second and third seasons, Nettleton
won the Tombigbee Conference. Nettleton’s home turf is now known as
Jack Carlisle Field.
His legend grew, especially when he arrived at Jackson Murrah. In
11 seasons, his teams won the city of Jackson championship eight times
and shared it twice more. He won the 1965 Big Eight Conference title,
then considered the state championship. His
track squads also won eight city of Jackson titles and at one time
Murrah held every state record in the running events.
******************
Skip Jernigan, an attorney in Jackson, played for Carlisle at
Murrah in the mid-1960s. He later played guard on the offenses
quarterbacked by Archie Manning at Ole Miss.
“Coach Carlisle could push you further than you ever thought you could go,” he says.
Before every season, Carlisle would load the Murrah players on a bus and take them to Camp Mondamin in Simpson County.
“They locked the gates after we drove in, and for the next seven
days we ate, slept, showered and breathed football,” says Jernigan, who
will emcee the Hall of Fame roast. “We slept in these old cabins that
were unmercifully hot. It was brutal. One night,
he would take the team to the movie, and the whole town of Mendenhall
would turn out to see us. But during that week we bonded as a team. And
when we came back to Jackson, he had separated the sheep from the goats
and knew who he could count on. And we were
tough as whip leather.”
Looking back, Jernigan is amazed by Carlisle’s attention to detail.
“We all had the same blazers with the Murrah emblem on them for
travel,” he says. “When we walked onto the field pregame, every player
had to have his helmet on and their chinstrap unbuckled and hanging from
the left side.”
Carlisle’s playbook was several inches thick, but his players often wondered why.
“We only ran about six plays,” Jernigan says. “But we could run them in our sleep.”
Ellis, a Jackson resident, says the same was true at Ole Miss. “I
remember days when we ran the same play over and over until we were
sick of it. But there was a method to the madness. We’d run 16 Lead 20
straight times every day in practice. But when
it came time for a game, we knew how to run it against every front,
every blitz, anything a defense could throw at us.”
And there was one other ingredient to Carlisle’s success: “An
unbelievable fear of losing and making him mad,” Jernigan says. “I was
scared to death of him until my senior year, when I became a captain. I
saw the man, who didn’t weigh more than 135 pounds,
pick up a 225-pound lineman one day at practice and hold him in
the air while he chewed him out. That’ll get your attention. That’ll
drive you to do everything in your power to win.”
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