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Introduction
By Carl Dubois
At its core the life of Charles Vicknair is a love story. Instead of arriving wrapped in lace, it presents itself in leather. The football, not the pink Valentine’s Day heart, is the lasting icon.
Like all love stories, this one is filled with drama — in this case, tension and conflict most often played out on a field of grass, in practice and in more formal competition. There are pages with X’s and O’s, but rather than signifying hugs and kisses, they symbolize Buccaneers, Broncos, Cowboys, Gators, Golden Tornados, Rams and Saints. They represent the good guys and the bad guys, the individual match-ups and assignments designed to work in unison to succeed against the other team’s strategy.
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Every love story finds obstacles that threaten to block the path of the protagonists in their quest, and there is no shortage of such roadblocks here. A coach learns, then relearns again and again, his goal is essentially the same as that of the people around him, but there is nothing approaching a consensus on the right path for getting there. Coaching is often about making adjustments, at halftime and during a game with no more timeouts or breaks. Those unwilling to compromise, to roll with the changes, can be left behind. Charles Vicknair wasn’t that kind of coach. He embraced change — perhaps too frequently, even his most ardent supporters said then and now.
His story, as presented here, contains few of the obvious trappings we’re accustomed to in the genre of the love story, but the essential component is easy to spot. It’s tucked inside details that at first glance don’t seem to fit the definitions ingrained in us by more stereotypical narratives of passion and romance.
In the master bedroom of the house there is a trunk filled with love letters, but not in the traditional sense. They are the hundreds of sheets of plays he drew, notes he scribbled at coaching clinics, the handwritten proof of Vicknair’s love of the game and his love of learning.
In the memories of others, there are the terms of endearment: nicknames, pet names. He rattled them off like a roll call, and he was more likely to give you a name of his choosing rather than call you by the one on your birth certificate.
June Bug. Pahds. Pancho. Bootsie.
He could remember the name he gave you. It wasn’t a given he could recall the name your parents gave you. Charles Vicknair reserved the naming rights to his world and the people in it.
Love? It’s there in the consistency of the man who met his 89-year-old mother for coffee every day at 6 a.m. It’s there in the effort to be home each night in time for family dinner together. It’s in the sameness of commitment to players in the 1990s as in the 1960s, so much so from one generation to another they use almost verbatim phrases and sentences to describe the side of Vicknair that was, in fact, unchanged.
To put his longevity into perspective, consider he began coaching at what is now called S.P. Arnett Middle School in Westlake in 1964, two years before Joe Paterno became head coach at Penn State. Vicknair began his last season, cut short by his sudden death, in 2008, years after the first questions about the inevitability of JoePa’s retirement.
Vicknair’s story here isn’t about statistics. His won-lost record in 25 seasons as a head coach was unspectacular, although the highlight remains one of the golden seasons in Southwest Louisiana prep football history. A 14-game winning streak and a 14-1 season in 1980 at Barbe High School in Lake Charles, La., a season that ended with a bittersweet trip to the state championship game, was the standard of excellence at that school a decade into the 21st century. Coach Vic, as he was known by many, wouldn’t return to a state championship game as a participant until 2007, when his career came full circle as an assistant coach at Westlake.
He spent 16 seasons as a high school assistant, four as a college assistant at his alma mater.
But that’s just football. We promised you a love story. Peel away the shoulder pads, the grass and mud stains, the sweat and blood and the real and choreographed machismo of amateur football, and the more than four decades of Vicknair’s coaching career reveal the slow, steady hand of love of the game, of tough love, of a love that isn’t always fully understood until years later.
A father makes his son do the work, whatever form that work takes, knowing he is preparing him for manhood. A father who also happens to be a coach and teacher has many sons, and when the light of recognition comes on for them as adults, they find meaning they couldn’t grasp as teenagers.
They get it.
Coaches, who often scrape by on wages shockingly low when calculated by the number of hours they devote to the job, find there is a bonus waiting for them at unexpected times. Former players come back or call or write to say thanks. Some do it eloquently, and some have to mask it behind the comfortable language and rituals of coach-player dynamics years after they’ve raised children themselves, but too many players to count let their coach know they finally understand.
Football coaches — especially those who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s — have never been known for having the vocabulary of group therapy. In their world an “I love you” from man to man is more socially acceptable as a punch line in beer commercials or movie titles. Otherwise, it is too touchy-feely for many coaches, so the manifestations of “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” and expressions of gratitude in the same area code as the heart are frequently taken in trade: a simple gesture, a favor for a favor, and the silent recognition that a brief reunion or conversation 15 or 20 years later is the way some men work these things out between each other. The coach knows the visit from his former assistant carries meaning beyond the simple swapping of new ideas and the strategy du jour. He knows nobody forced the former player to come and see or e-mail him. The message is tucked inside the ritual, just as it was years before during two-a-days, during punishment laps, during nauseating drills that seemed conjured by a dictator rather than a loving father figure. In these moments of sometimes awkward, always sincere “thanks,” coaches receive a bonus check they will never cash, one they will carry with them through the next season because it reminds them that maybe all the frustrations, the defeats both big and small, are ultimately worth it.
And so these tough guys, whose walls are adorned with framed posters of John Wayne and Vince Lombardi and the most popular sayings and images of those iconic tough guys ... well, they say “I love you, man” in whatever manner they can muster. Charles Vicknair, 66, died Sept. 20, 2008, the morning after helping coach Westlake High School to a victory against nearby Sam Houston High. When months of grieving and remembering became a year, then longer, former players and assistants of Coach Vic kept looking for ways to say it — to his memory, to the world, to his family, and to the next generation, and to the next.
He coached for 44 full football seasons and part of a 45th, all in Louisiana, all on high school campuses except for his four years as an assistant at McNeese State University in Lake Charles. That city in Southwest Louisiana was never more than a 15-minute drive from the office, yet he made an impact that stretches wide.
It wasn’t always about football, even when it appeared to be. Long after Vicknair’s death, and decades after he coached at Barbe, one of his players at the South Lake Charles school found himself teaching seminars in the business world and making his point with words and lessons that came from Coach Vic.
Coaches often find themselves locked in battles with academicians and administrators who lament and counter what they see as too much emphasis on sports in schools, but the coaches with a player’s long-range interests at heart understand it’s often not as simple as outsiders see it. They find out there are benefits to participation in athletics that can give a teenager much-needed structure and discipline and the experience of being a part of something larger than one person. At times, meeting the minimum requirements for playing sports in school is dismissed as just getting by to serve the team and its goals, but coaches discover there are students whose lives are at risk for veering off into any of a number of ill-fated directions without a regular routine, without constant monitoring and without the sense of belonging they derive from being part of a team. Sometimes, their mere participation in a team sport is the difference between becoming an adult with a set of skills that allows them to function in the structure of society rather than becoming a statistic and a cautionary tale about what can happen when young people fall through the cracks.
It’s in that context that many coaches will take the heat for doing everything they can to keep a player on a team rather than cut him loose and increase the odds of him continuing down a path with consequences that can permanently alter one’s destiny. The former Sam Houston High School player who commissioned the research and writing of this story, a man who credits Vicknair with laying the foundation for his successes as a businessman and as a family man, decided to memorialize his long-ago coach by creating the Web site CoachVicknair.com. He said Vicknair turned his life around.
Others helped persuade the American Press, the newspaper of record throughout Vicknair’s career, to name an award for Coach Vic. Longtime Westlake assistant coach Jamie Schiro was recognized as the first winner of the Charles Vicknair Award, now presented annually to the top assistant in the Lake Charles area. Other finalists were DeQuincy’s W.A. Ashworth, St. Louis Catholic’s Wayne Cespiva, Barbe’s Mike Cutrera and DeRidder’s Mitch Mills.
Schiro first went to Westlake as a student assistant in 1978-79 and was offensive coordinator in 2008, when he won the award. Cespiva, who coached with Vicknair at Barbe, was named the second recipient of the award Dec. 26, 2009.
Former colleagues, friendly rivals and friends of Vicknair also began exploring other ways to pay lasting tribute to him.
Those and other gestures are a testament to the longtime and consistent influence of a coach who never won a state championship and was rarely in the spotlight. Those he helped to find their way know the far reach he had upon Southwest Louisiana football and the young men who populate its history and its future.
“He molded a lot of people’s lives,” said Kirby Bruchhaus, whose coaching career began as a student teacher under Vicknair’s employ and crested at McNeese State as defensive coordinator and, briefly, head coach. “He molded my life, and I would have never had the opportunity to get where I got into the coaching field without him. I’ll just be indebted to him for all my life, and it didn’t start with me, and it didn’t stop with me.”
Jimmy Shaver, an assistant to Vicknair at Barbe before taking his place as head coach in 1982, talked about the extent of Vicknair’s influence.
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JIMMY SHAVER
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“He had a big impact on our community and all the coaches in this area,” Shaver said before the first anniversary of Vicknair’s death. “Some of them might not have been directly under him, but somebody on their staff has been or they worked with somebody before that was under Vic, so all of us (were affected by him). I can’t think of anybody that hasn’t been influenced somehow by him.”
Shaver’s long stay at Barbe and many Southwest Louisiana Coach of the Year awards earned him more frequent attention than Vicknair, but the former pupil said the mentor did not come and go without leaving his mark.
“He’s been a part of every community,” Shaver said. “He’s coached all over this area, from Sam Houston to St. Louis to LaGrange to Sulphur to here. He’s been all over. He knew way more people than I do, because he was pretty visible. I don’t think it went unnoticed.”
In many ways, Vicknair’s story represents thousands of high school coaches who let others pursue the dream of coaching in college or the NFL for the bulk of their careers. They let others chase better-paying jobs that in many cases don’t require any more of a time commitment from them. They let others become household names regionally and nationally.
They are content to be high school coaches and teachers, to be father figures to their players during the teenage years when the choices a quarterback or receiver or lineman make can affect the rest of their lives. Vicknair was one of those coaches, consistent in his approach, hopeful of making a difference when a young man’s future could be in the balance.
“The guy was one of the best offensive line coaches, one of the best coaches I’ve been around,” said Ed Orgeron, whose career includes stops at the University of Miami, USC, Ole Miss and with the New Orleans Saints before he became assistant head coach at the University of Tennessee. “I’ve been around some great guys.”
When Orgeron became a graduate assistant coach at McNeese State in 1985, he worked under the tutelage of Vicknair, who was in the last of his four years as a college assistant.
“The guy could have coached at any level he wanted to,” Orgeron said. “He could have coached in the NFL if he wanted to. That’s how good he was.”
This is a story told by those he prepared for the time when he’d be gone, whether family members who would outlive him or assistant coaches who would continue to work without him after he’d moved on to another school. This is a story told by the players he turned into men and the assistants he turned into head coaches. This is a story of the assistant coaches who see new ways of doing things come and go, but few methods that convince them to change from some of the basics they learned from Vicknair.
This is a story from the lips of those who see Charles Vicknair in the things they do, the organizational parameters he taught them that have become as natural and automatic to them as breathing.
“I’d never coached offense before,” Orgeron said, recalling his year with Vicknair, “so all the things I do today I learned from him. Like, I’m able to draw a blocking scheme and do everything because of something he taught me. He was fantastic.”
Orgeron played defensive line at Northwestern State and spent one year after that as a graduate assistant there. His year at McNeese was his first away from the familiar surroundings of his five years in Natchitoches, and he said Vicknair made it special.
“The guy treated me like gold,” Orgeron said. “He spent a lot of time on how to coach, what to do, how to prepare, mannerisms ... believe me, the guy was fantastic to me. He remained a good friend for me the whole time. You know how it is when you go to a new place, it’s your first time? The guy took me under his wing and treated me great. He was awesome.”
Some of Vicknair’s pupils didn’t stay in coaching, but they never forgot him.
“My father died at 53, the year before Charles Vicknair talked me into being a high school football coach with him at Sam Houston High School,” said Tom Brandow, who left the profession and is an educator at the Calcasieu Parish Elementary Alternative School in Southwest Louisiana.
“Through most of my adult life, Charles Vicknair was the closest thing that I had to a father,” Brandow said. “We didn’t always agree or see eye to eye, and we had vastly different lifestyles, but Coach Vic was what I thought a coach should be. He didn’t care that I played music in the offseason, or that my interests were different than his. Coach Vic loved football coaches, and I was honored to have had the experience to work for a man that has left a legacy among high school football in Southwest Louisiana that will never be equaled.”
Brandow is the first in this story to touch on what will be a recurring theme, and the first of many.
“Coach Vic often stated that he didn’t want to ever feel like we had lost a game because we had been outplayed or outcoached, which translated into long tedious hours of preparation, but looking back it was this attitude that sums up the man,” Brandow said. “Charles Vicknair was Charles Vicknair — honest, no hidden agendas, often not politically correct, and probably the worst speller in the history of the world. He was definitely one of the true giants as a coach but more importantly as a man.”
What follows, section by section, is a series of snapshots of Vicknair’s life and loves. It’s unlikely the reader will navigate all of it in one sitting, so this Web site features a link to each section for the sake of convenience. The story isn’t always in chronological order, so it doesn’t have to be read in any particular sequence, but if time and patience allow, it helps to start at the beginning and finish at the end.
That said, there really is no end. Just as it’s impossible for this story to tell everything about the coach and the person, it’s folly to consider this a complete record of his life. This Web site allows for readers to post comments, their recollections of the man, and to extend the story in an organic and personal way.
Like the impact Charles Vicknair had upon Southwest Louisiana, his story continues to be told.
Horse trailers and wallpaper
<< Go back
Sam Smith worked for Vicknair at St. Louis High School in Lake Charles from 1996-99, coaching all three of Vicknair’s sons. He left for Texas, eventually becoming offensive coordinator at Tomball, a Class 5A high school near Houston. That’s where Smith was when Vicknair died in September 2008.
“When I left and came to Texas, my relationship with Coach Vic only grew stronger, and we grew closer,” Smith said. “I’m originally from DeQuincy. Mom said that if it weren’t for Coach Vic that I would never come back home and that she would never see me.”
Smith and Vicknair attended nearly every coaching clinic in the region from January to April for 10 years.
“Our wives always joked that we spent more nights together during clinic season than we did with them,” Smith said.
The time together made an impression.
“His passion for the game of football and his wife and family has given me a model that I try to live up to daily,” Smith said.
“He treated me like another son,” he said. “My dad’s still living, and we’re real close, but I always said I felt like Coach Vic was my second dad. He was also such a good mentor.”
One thing coaches learn the longer they stay around the game is how much they don’t know. Smith discovered this while he worked with Vicknair, and he saw something else that stuck. It is a recurring theme in the life of Coach Vic.
“He had a knack of understanding there’s always something else out there about there about the game,” Smith said, “and you can never know everything there is to know about football. He always said it’s a constantly changing game, and he coached for more than 40 years and never let the game pass him by.
“A lot of coaches get in it, and they get to a point where it’s like, ‘I’m done with learning, or I want to take my career in this path,’ and they kind of let the game pass them by. They don’t quit being good coaches, but it’s just the X’s and O’s of the game kind of pass them by. Coach Vic never let that happen.”
More on that later.
Smith said he and Vicknair spoke by phone at least five times a week after Smith left for Texas, extending the friendship for nearly 10 years after their coaching partnership ended. They bounced ideas off each other.
In the football-themed love story “Jerry Maguire,” the agent whose name is the title of the movie has a heated debate with a player he represents. When the agent walks away, the player addresses the nature of the perceived conflict.
“See? That’s the difference between us,” he yells. “You think we’re fighting, and I think we’re finally talking.”
There was no such confusion between Smith and Vicknair, but it wasn’t always obvious to Smith’s wife that the two men, mentor and pupil, were on the same page about the nature of their exchanges even when they weren’t in agreement about the specifics.
“We were at lunch at St. Louis, and we were changing from a split defense to the 4-3, and I’d played in a 4-3 under David Paine at DeQuincy, and so we were talking about linebacker reads and drawing it up on the board during lunch,” Smith said. “In the coaches office, we talked like coaches. We were fussing back and forth, fussing back and forth, and people often said, ‘God almighty, it sounds like y’all hate each other when y’all are talking football.’ Well, no, not at all.
“But my wife walked in while Coach Vic and I were going back with each other, and all of a sudden our tone changed, and she came back later and asked, ‘Well, y’all are not mad at each other?’ We just kind of looked at each other like brothers and said, ‘No, not at all. We’re just talking about football.’ That’s just the type of relationship he had with his coaches, and that’s just how comfortable you always felt with Coach Vic. He never took offense to being questioned because he always questioned everything.”
The first year Smith coached for Vicknair at St. Louis, Smith’s wife taught in Deweyville, Texas. They lived in DeQuincy, roughly halfway between Deweyville and Lake Charles. The next year, the Smiths moved into a house in Lake Charles.
“We had a horse trailer we moved our stuff in, and he and his wife came up and helped us move,”‘ Smith said. “Then they came for the next week and helped us put up new wallpaper and do things like that around the house. That was the type of guy he was. Since then, I’ve never had a head coach offer to help me move. I’ve moved a lot since that second year with Coach Vic, and never since then have I had a head coach do any of that.”
‘I hope I get paid’
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Vicknair was head football coach at Barbe High when Mike Abshire, a 1981 graduate, played for the Bucs. They next crossed paths when Abshire got his first coaching job, at Moss Bluff Middle School, a feeder of nearby Sam Houston High School in the Moss Bluff suburb of Lake Charles. Abshire helped at the high school.
“I can’t say I really helped him up there, but Coach Vic never ran anybody off,” Abshire said. “If you were up there, he was going to put you to work. As soon as I would finish my duties at the middle school, I’d go up to the high school.”
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MIKE JOHNS
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This was after Vicknair left McNeese after four years as an assistant coach and begin a long stay as head coach at Sam Houston High in 1986. Matt Viator, who would later become head coach at McNeese, was the offensive coordinator at Sam Houston. Mike Johns, later a head coach at LaGrange and St. Louis high schools, was defensive coordinator. They and others worked for Vicknair, and Abshire volunteered to do whatever they needed.
“I’d be a fly on the wall, but Vic never allowed that. He was going to put you to work. I’d walk in, and they’d be passing out paperwork with their coaches’ names on it, and I’d get one,” Abshire said. “I was lost in that office with him. He’d be talking about stuff, and I didn’t know what he was referring to. I didn’t even know what sport he was referring to. I just knew he was the football coach, and since I knew him for so long I knew he was all about football.
“They were leaving to go to a clinic, and he said, ‘You’re coming with us, Abshire.’ I didn’t know that we were leaving at 5 o’clock the next morning for San Angelo, Texas. I thought we were just going a couple of days. I went home that evening, and I hadn’t been married a year yet, and I told my wife I was going on a football clinic.”
She asked where, and he said, “Texas.”
That’s all he knew.
She asked how long he’d be gone, and he said, “Well, I really don’t know.”
He didn’t ask Vicknair any questions. He went home and threw some stuff in a bag. It was enough for a couple of days.
“We left Wednesday morning at 5 and came back Sunday, and at the time the speed limit was 55, so it was about a 12-hour drive,” Abshire said. “I didn’t know then, but I know now, that Vicknair was pretty much the pioneer of all the coaches going to clinics. I don’t think he missed a clinic. Ever.”
Abshire said there were 2,500 coaches at that first clinic he attended at Angelo State, and Vicknair didn’t miss a meeting. Other coaches attended some of the meetings and socialized the rest of the time, but Vicknair sat through every presentation and took detailed notes.
“I learned how helpful those clinics were, and I learned how to go to one, what to get from it and how to put it to use,” Abshire said. “I came back just in time to stop the divorce.”
This was before everyone had a cell phone, so Abshire’s bride didn’t know what had happened.
“She thought I was kidnapped,” he said.
Abshire later moved up to the high school. His wife was an alumnus, and before the promotion she had told him, “You’re going to coach right here,” meaning Sam Houston High School.
He did, at first for Vicknair, and then coming back years later to work with a different set of coaches.
“You know how you hate when they’re right?” Abshire said, referring to wives. “That was one of those times.”
Being a first-year coach and based at the middle school, Abshire didn’t know much about the logistics and school board procedure when Vicknair called and, fulfilling the prophecy of Abshire’s wife, asked Abshire to come to work for him at the high school.
“I didn’t even know if I was going to get a check,” he said. “It was pretty much that quick. We were already doing football, busy with that, and I said, ‘I hope I get paid.’
“That was that. I was on his staff.”
Complete with paycheck.
Viator had been head baseball coach, and when he left to coach football at Vinton High School, Abshire took over the baseball program at Sam Houston. Abshire and Viator grew up together, and Abshire was already helping Viator coach baseball at the high school.
“Typical of those days, the old-school football coach fought the spring programs because they’d take away from offseason football work and things like that,” Abshire said. “I’m trying to make it work together, but Vicknair would always tell me, ‘You can’t do that. Baseball’s gotta wait. Baseball’s gotta wait.’ That’s all he ever told me.
“One day I walked in the office, and his oldest son, which he referred to as No. 1, was starting to play baseball,” Abshire said. “I walked in early in the morning before school, and Vic hit me right at the door: ‘How do you throw this damn baseball?’ I said, ‘What in the hell are you talking about?’
“He said, ‘Oh, my boy wanted to throw in the yard yesterday, so I grabbed a glove and went out there, and hell, I know he’s not doing it right, but I don’t know how to do it.’ So, he wanted some coaching.”
Abshire thought about it before responding.
“Coach,” he told Vicknair, “baseball’s going to have to wait.”
Abshire laughed as he remembered Vicknair’s reaction.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You’re sorry. I knew you were going to say something.’ I said, ‘Vic, you told me all my life, even when I was in high school, that baseball’s gotta wait. Just tell him it’s gotta wait.’ I always held that against him, jokingly, and we got a laugh out of it, because here comes No. 2, his second son, and he liked baseball,” Abshire said. “I’m in the yard with him, helping him, and here comes No. 3. He loved baseball. They all did.
“I’m over there, and Vic’s cooking steaks in the back and we’re working in the yard, trying to teach them how to throw and hit a baseball. It was when they were real young, and it was funny how it all transpired with a guy that I really looked up to, and still do.”
Abshire said he thought, as a player, he knew what it would be like to coach. Then he became a coach and found out how little he knew about it.
“I realized I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” he said, “and then a guy like Charles comes along and catches me right at the beginning, thank goodness — right when you’re on the bubble of going either way or quitting and doing something else — and he gives you insight into how you need to do it.
“In my mind, I don’t know any other way now. I really don’t. I hear a lot of different other ways, and I just don’t know any other way.”
The most lasting message was to put in the necessary time and effort.
“If you lost, it wasn’t going to be because you didn’t work or you got outworked,” Abshire said. “That’s probably what everybody else has told you about Charles, but that’s just how it was.”
Years later Vicknair became an assistant coach at Sulphur High School, where Abshire was already on staff. Abshire went there to work for Viator, who left to become offensive coordinator at McNeese. Lark Hebert became head coach, and Abshire stayed as an assistant coach.
It was another chance for the pupil to needle the mentor.
“Coach Vic walked in the first day, and I knew he was getting hired,” Abshire said, “and I was going to take him around and show him where everything was. I knew it wouldn’t take a day to show him what’s going on, and he’d have it down pat, but when he walked in I had a chair next to me. I pulled the chair back and said, ‘Sit down. I’m going to teach you how to be an assistant coach.’
“I told him the first three letters in assistant are a-s-s. Don’t ever forget it.”
Vicknair laughed, but the punch line was yet to come.
“I said, ‘You old fart, you forgot: I learned that from you.’ We laughed and laughed about that,” Abshire said.
Do the deal
<< Go back
In whatever way coaches and players discovered Vicknair’s work ethic, it stayed with them.
“Vic was definitely the mentor. He was the teacher,” Shaver said. “He was the guy that taught us all — not only made us learn football, but he taught us how to practice, how to work hard. Had I not been under him, I know my chances for success would have been very, very slim, because he showed me how to work.”
One of Vicknair’s favorite sayings — “Do the deal” — had multiple meanings, but the man who said it again and again demonstrated to those around him a tireless commitment to the assignment, including those self-imposed.
Shaver, who called him “a working machine,” recalled feeling guilty when he sat down to make out his practice schedule or start a phase of his program, because he knew Vicknair was already ahead of him.
“Even though he didn’t even know it, he made us work harder because we knew he was,” Shaver said. “Even if we weren’t playing him. Everybody would say, ‘Look how hard they’re working, and y’all are not working.’ He was that type of guy, and he had the ability to make you stay on top of things.”
Especially with those who worked for him.
“He could just look at you, and you knew you were supposed to be doing something else,” Shaver said.
Bruchhaus, who was on the staff at Barbe with Shaver when Vicknair was head coach, said Vicknair pushed assistants to the limit. It was something Bruchhaus got a taste of as a student teacher and coach for Vicknair a few years earlier at Westlake High, and Bruchhaus experienced it in greater detail as defensive coordinator at Barbe. He knew things would never be the same for him.
“Then it was on,” Bruchhaus said, grinning and laughing.
When you worked for Vicknair, Bruchhaus said, you didn’t do anything but coach. That was it. You went to work early in the morning, and late at night you were still coaching. It was seven days a week.
“I didn’t go into a store from probably July until December,” Bruchhaus remembered. “I can remember going to a store after the season, having to go buy clothes because I lost about twenty-something pounds during the football season.”
Vicknair hired Max Caldarera from Merryville in 1974 and brought him to Westlake. Caldarera worked for him for four years and succeeded him as head coach when Vicknair took over at Barbe.
“He brought me and Mike Ortego in together,” Caldarera said. “Mike was offensive coordinator. Vic was teaching me to be defensive coordinator. He called defense those first few years. That last year he pretty much turned it over to me.”
Thirty years later Caldarera was Vicknair’s boss at Westlake, hiring him as an assistant coach and giving him the job he had until the day he died.
“He knew only one speed when he was coaching,” Caldarera said. “Vic went after everything just full blast and didn’t accept failure from kids at all. They were going to do it right, and they were going to continue to do it until they did it right.”
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MATT VIATOR
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Matt Viator, who began coaching as a student teacher under Caldarera’s wing, then with Vicknair at Sam Houston High School, said Vicknair was a pioneer in Southwest Louisiana with respect to having players work hard in winter, spring and summer.
“He was one of the first ones to really major in offseason,” Viator said. “You didn’t just lift weights. You had the speed work, the conditioning, the weights, and how it all went together, and he was one of the first to make it a comprehensive program.”
Viator said Vicknair was one of the first coaches in the area to institute an athletic period during the school day, then a freshman athletic period, and one of the leaders in finding new ways to work the freshmen into the program.
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LARK HEBERT
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Lark Hebert played on the offensive line at McNeese, where Vicknair was an assistant coach after leaving Barbe in 1982. Vicknair was the position coach for Hebert, who nearly two decades later hired Vicknair to be one of his assistants at Sulphur High School. Hebert said Vicknair’s work habits set him apart and made the most lasting impression.
“If there was a team meeting at 2, the offensive line would meet with Vic at 1,” Hebert said of his playing days at McNeese. “If practice started at 3, we were going to be on the field at 2. When the rest of the team would come out for stretching, the offensive linemen were already soaking wet.” Hebert said Vicknair taught the players team play and work ethic, stressing they should leave no stone unturned.
“He was in great shape,” Hebert said as he recalled Vicknair coaching for him at Sulphur on the cusp of his seventh decade of life. “He always had great energy. It caught me by surprise.”
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MIKE COLLINS
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Mike Collins was a high school player in Ruston when he first met Vicknair. Pat Collins, Mike’s father, was a coach at Louisiana Tech, where Vicknair would bring his coaching staff to summer football camps. The relationship continued when Mike Collins became a McNeese assistant coach in the 1990s, while Vicknair was coaching at area high schools.
“I think anytime you were around him, you felt his energy,” Collins said, “because he had great energy. I think that’s important as a coach, and it seemed to affect everybody around him. It was a positive energy.”
Vicknair had an effective way of communicating, Collins said.
“He was going to make sure it was (done) right, but at the same time it made you feel good as a coach or as a player for him. It affected you in a positive way,” Collins said. “I don’t think there’s any question that just being around him and him having the energy he had at his age, still, and the passion that he had for football could not help but rub off on whoever was around him.”
Collins saw first-hand and heard from Vicknair’s assistants about the effort he required from himself and from them.
“He was just a real grinder when he worked at it,” Collins said, “and he expected his coaches (to do the same).”
Shaver said that’s an understatement.
“He never sat around,” Shaver said. “There was no down time for him. He was not a guy that would go sit on the couch all afternoon. He was doing something. He was drawing plays, he was out working in the yard, he was doing something. He didn’t sit around.
“On the other hand, me? I can sit for days. But he can’t do that.”
There, in that quote, is another telling piece of Vicknair’s reach. His pupils often speak of him in the present tense, and they were doing so a year after his death.
“I know he’s a hard worker,” said Hebert, sitting in his office at McNeese, where he was entrenched in his role as defensive coordinator when Vicknair died. “Probably the biggest thing with Coach Vic is you learn so much football from him. He teaches you how to be a coach and how to be professional and all that stuff.”
Never stop learning
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Nowhere was Vicknair’s drive for perfection, his attention to detail and his work ethic more in evidence than in his yearly attendance at coaching clinics and his insistence that his assistant coaches hit the road to learn whatever new wrinkle Vicknair wanted to install for the upcoming season.
“He believed if you want to run the Wing-T, you go somewhere to learn the Wing-T,” said Viator, one of many Vicknair pupils who went with him to Angelo State, in San Angelo, Texas, for an annual clinic Vicknair regarded as a must.
“San Angelo had the best coaching clinic in the U.S.,” Viator said, “and it’s a long drive. He’d get (wife) Debbie’s van, and whoever wanted to go, you just piled in.”
Johns said Vicknair practically rounded up area coaches and either invited or persuaded them to go with him. It didn’t matter if you coached for him or against him, he wanted you to come along for the ride. Johns said the camaraderie and football conversations were special.
Hebert said Vicknair was insistent about him attending.
“When I first started coaching,” Hebert said, “he would call me: ‘Hey, we’re going to this clinic. You’ve got to come,’ and ‘You need to get to this clinic, and you need to go do this and go do that, and you need to find out about this and that.’
Sometimes they would travel in the mobile home of football booster Joe Jordan.
Nolan Viator, Matt’s late father and another important figure in the Southwest Louisiana coaching tree, was in the habit of tweaking his son and Vicknair about those coaching clinics. They happened every Father’s Day weekend.
Matt’s dad would joke that Matt was spending Father’s Day with Vicknair, so to even things out, Nolan Viator always said he was going to go spend Father’s Day with Vicknair’s children.
“Go learn the game,” Matt Viator said, the words drilled into his head. “You’d go places. You’d change if you have to change. He got a lot of people involved in that.”
Viator didn’t recall Vicknair having many hobbies in the offseason, saying he didn’t play golf and didn’t hunt until much later in life. Older coaches and family remembered a few more things outside the football world occupying Vicknair’s attention at an earlier age, but not for long. Football was what he loved to do.
“If there was a clinic that he could get to, he was going to be there,” Viator said. Others agreed. It was almost always the first thing everyone associated with Vicknair said about him as the anniversary of his death approached in September 2009.
In 1984, after many years at LaGrange Junior and Senior high schools, Mike Johns went to Sam Houston High. Vicknair became head coach in 1986, and Johns worked for him until becoming head coach at LaGrange in 1989.
Speaking in 2009 in his office at St. Louis High School, Johns talked about Vicknair’s passion for coaching clinics. He would say if you learn only one thing at a clinic, it’s worth going. Go and pick up something you can use for your team, or at least to see what other teams are doing, Vicknair would say.
“Before he died,” Johns said, “we were talking about the next clinic we were going to attend. He was like an encyclopedia, he had a library on clinics. He kept it organized.”
That’s putting it mildly, as Caldarera noted. He said when Vicknair returned to Westlake to be his assistant coach in 2006, he required twice the cubicle space as the rest of the assistant coaches so he’d have room for all his notebooks, his files from clinics.
Caldarera said he teased Vicknair, calling them his trophies from the clinics and saying Vicknair probably hadn’t looked at them in years.
Vicknair replied that he opened them at least once a year.
“Whatever,” Caldarera would say.
Still, he knew those notebooks and files represented the drive within Vicknair, who never stopped being a student of the game and a seeker of new ideas.
“He was always searching,” Caldarera said. “He was searching.”
Colleagues remembered Vicknair going to defensive lectures even if he coached on the offensive side, and vice versa. In this case, as in most others, he did whatever he required of his assistants.
When Shaver was Vicknair’s offensive coordinator at Barbe, Vicknair sent him to Monroe to learn the split-40 defense.
“I said, ‘OK, Vic, I don’t mind going, but you know that I coach offense.’ He said, ‘I know that, but you can’t block the split-40 until you know how it’s run, so I want you to go learn it, come back and teach it to me, then we’ll be able to run an offense against it.’ So I did that and spent several days up there with Wossman back in the old days when they were really good and ran the split-40,” Shaver said.
When Vicknair saw Emory Bellard running a wingbone offense at Mississippi State, the Barbe coaches went there to learn it and returned to Lake Charles ready to run the wingbone — for one year.
“He found the trends,” Caldarera said. “He was a leader in that.”
He’d do something until he wore it out, Shaver said, and then he would do something else.
“He was always looking for a better way.”
Bruchhaus knew that as well as anyone. He said Vicknair was adamant about getting better. He said Vicknair taught him, “Don’t be afraid to ask.”
Vicknair sent Bruchhaus to Florida State to see Bobby Bowden’s coaches and to Arkansas to visit with Lou Holtz and Monte Kiffin. Kiffin invented defenses to counter the veer after it became popular at Nebraska and other places, and he’s considered one of the pioneering defensive coaches in America.
Larry Lacewell, who was on Barry Switzer’s staff at Oklahoma, became head coach at Arkansas State, where Bruchhaus went to learn what Lacewell could teach him.
While at Barbe, Bruchhaus taught P.E. classes and athletic periods, leaving plenty of time for him to visit with college coaches who stopped at the school on recruiting visits. The NCAA rules governing recruiting were less restrictive than they would become years later, so some college coaches could stay at the school all day if they so desired.
“We used to have coaching clinics every day,” Bruchhaus said, “and those coaches liked to come to our school — at Barbe — No. 1 (because) we had good players. We had Scott Ayres, who was a great player. We had Randy Edwards, who was recruited by LSU, and Doug Quienalty, and David Womack and all those players that were great players and good kids, and a lot of people came in to evaluate those players.”
Bruchhaus said he would bring the college coaches to the office, where there was a chalkboard, and they’d talk football. He said he got a lot of ideas that way.
“If I wouldn’t have met Charles,” Bruchhaus said, “I probably would have gone back to a smaller school and coached and been a principal right now somewhere and never got the opportunity to get into the coaching field like I did. It wouldn’t have been for him, I would have never gotten an opportunity to do what I did, learn what I learned. He taught me to try to learn.”
Bruchhaus and Viator are two who learned from Vicknair and went on to become college head coaches without having played college football. That’s a rarity.
After leaving McNeese, Bruchhaus entered the business world, tried his hand at assistant coaching again in Westlake but decided things had changed too much for him to be able to coach the way he preferred. He moved on to be director of a technical school that prepares students for work in building and contracting.
Perhaps it’s fitting. Vicknair prepared him in some ways, teaching him how to learn — at clinics, and in informal gatherings with other coaches.
Bruchhaus learned he had to have answers for Vicknair’s questions when Bruchhaus returned from a quest for knowledge.
“He was going to ask you,” Bruchhaus said. “When you came back, you’d better have learned something, because you were going to tell him what you learned — because he was going to try it.”
Johns saw that as a coach on Vicknair’s staff and as a coach at rival schools in the area.
“He believed in change,” Johns said, “not getting stale on something that people could pick up what you were doing all the time. Have something in your arsenal that is a little bit different, even if it’s just to make them work on it.”
Bruchhaus said he wasn’t sure Vicknair’s inability to be content with his offensive and defensive schemes was always a good thing.
“To be honest with you, I thought sometimes that he went overboard on a lot of that stuff,” Bruchhaus said.
Vicknair would have changed defenses more often than he did at Barbe, but Bruchhaus liked to stay with what worked. They argued a lot.
“I can remember him and Kirby getting into some knockdown drag-outs over defense,” Shaver said.
Bruchhaus, he recalled, would tinker with things and make them better. Bruchhaus said Vicknair wanted to change things regularly, completely overhauling them.
“A lot of people don’t like change,” Bruchhaus said. “If you were going to be with him, you’d better be ready to change.”
Despite their disagreements about the extent of change necessary each season, Bruchhaus said there’s no way he can explain the impact Vicknair had upon him.
“I like him because of what he did for me. I didn’t agree with everything he did, and he didn’t agree with everything I did, but I respect him a whole lot for what he stands for and what he did and how he did things,” Bruchhaus said. “We’re never going to ... none of us are always going to do the same thing other people do, but it’s the big picture you’ve got to look at, and the big picture was good.
“I owe him my life, as far as coaching.”
Bruchhaus gave himself credit for taking advantage of the opportunities Vicknair gave him to learn.
“He created other opportunities for other people, and they didn’t learn,” Bruchhaus said. “He created a lot of opportunities for other people, but they didn’t go and learn. Matt Viator did.”
Viator learned from his father, Nolan, but he knew his dad wanted his sons to go out and get it on their own. Because Nolan Viator liked and respected Vicknair, he was happy to see Matt go with Vicknair and learn from him.
Matt Viator, sounding almost verbatim like more than a handful of other coaches in Southwest Louisiana, said Vicknair taught them how to work, how to organize, how to set up programs, how to organize a coaching staff and how to organize a team.
“He was an unbelievable worker,” Viator said, emitting the type of laughter that springs forth from a place of awe, not humor. “He had a work ethic like I’ve never seen.”
Was he too fond of change?
“He did change a lot,” Shaver said, “but you know, over my years I’ve learned that change is good. There are some people that do a great job of staying with the same things they’ve always done and always been successful. My experience has been you’ve got to change with the times, you’ve got to change with your personnel, and you’re better off.
“I guess I kind of got that from Vic. He was always moving from one thing to another. Sometimes he’d make me mad about that, because I’m running the offense, and all of a sudden he’s telling me, ‘Go see Nolan Viator. We’re fixing to run what they run.’ So I’ve got a little pressure on me. I’ve got to go learn that and get it over here and present it to them. It made it a little difficult, but you know as I’ve become head coach, I spend all my hours thinking about this stuff too, and I understand where he’s coming from. As an assistant, I didn’t because I didn’t spend all my time thinking about it.
“The only time I thought about it, other than just thoughts, was when I just walked through the door (to the coaches office). Not him, and that’s the way I am now. It’s 24/7. That’s all I think about. That’s all I want to do, and that’s the way he was. When I’d walk in the door I was behind already, because he’d had thoughts all night, and he was ready to go with them.”
Shaver said he eventually started calling his coaches and telling them what he was thinking about, preparing them for the next meeting better than he’d been prepared for meetings with Vicknair.
Viator said Vicknair wasn’t a golfer and didn’t hunt a lot until later in life, so football was his hobby as much as his job. That’s part of why he loved change, Viator said.
“He was ate up with it, and I think if he just ran the same offense and the same defense, he’d have gotten bored. He really would have.”
Mike Collins, who became friends with Vicknair after they intersected for years at summer camps, understood.
“Offensive line and defensive line guys are true technicians,” Collins said. “You never can have enough toys. You never can have good enough technique. There’s always some kind of little thing, and I think that’s what he really was.”
Relax, I got it
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All of the talk about the serious side of Vicknair eventually led colleagues and pupils to mention his wry sense of humor. Hebert said if he wasn’t able to go with Vicknair to a clinic, Vicknair would call him when he got back.
Hebert would answer, and all he’d hear was “Bzz, bzz, bzz.”
Then, Vicknair would hang up on Hebert, who had to call him back so he could listen to what became a familiar refrain.
“Boy, I’ve got some buzzwords for you,” Vicknair would tell him, alluding to phrases and terminology he learned at clinics.
“I’ve got some buzzwords for you,” Vicknair would say, “but I can’t tell you because you weren’t there. If you want these buzzwords, you’ve got to pay $60 for the clinic fee.”
On the way to the clinics at San Angelo, Vicknair took charge, taking the wheel and telling the others to enjoy the ride.
“Don’t worry, I got it,” Johns said, quoting Vicknair.
“Relax, I got it.”
Caldarera knew that expression well.
“Don’t worry, I got it,” Caldarera said. “Just sit down.”
Vicknair’s signature was to put some bite into it, he recalled.
“Oh, yeah, very sarcastic,” Caldarera said.
It had the same ring as another Vicknair staple.
“I’ll make the coffee. Don’t get up.”
He said it when nobody showed the slightest interest in getting up, in making the coffee.
That, in a nutshell, was Vicknair’s sense of humor.
“He’d buy you a Coke or something,” Johns said, “and you’d say, ‘Let me pay you,’ and he’d say, ‘No, I want you to owe me.’ Things like that.”
Once a meeting or seminar began at a clinic, Vicknair was all business, Caldarera said.
“He never could not learn something. He was a person for clinics. I missed many. Vic never missed a meeting,” Caldarera said. “If it was boring or whatever, he sat through the whole thing.”
If the others left to get a bite to eat, Vicknair stayed.
“Bring me back something if you can,” they remember him saying.
In later years, the San Angelo clinic gave way to the Lone Star Clinic at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas. The last time Vicknair went there, the Westlake booster club funded a plane ride for the coaches to attend, Caldarera said.
“The last day,” he said, “they had the last couple of meetings, and everyone was tired and ready to go to the airport.”
Not Vicknair. He wanted to be at the last meeting, taking notes as usual.
When the usual suspects returned in 2009, less than a year after Vicknair died, they felt the void.
“When we go to clinics or I have to speak at a clinic,” Hebert said, “I think about him.”
Vicknair would also show up at McNeese on the weekend and whenever the Cowboys coaching staff had something going on he was interested in learning.
“Anytime we’d have something going on here,” Hebert said, “I know he’d always be here.”
That consistency was why it was so noticeable in the summer of 2009 when area coaches went back to the Lone Star Clinic.
“It struck me that he wasn’t there,” Johns said.
Someone else had to drive the van or car. Someone else had to get the coffee.
Organization, attention to detail
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Vicknair sent Bruchhaus to learn from longtime Georgia defensive coordinator Erk Russell. Russell later coached at Georgia Southern, where Bruchhaus picked up some things from Paul Johnson, who would become a successful offensive-minded head coach at Navy, Georgia Southern and Georgia Tech.
Johnson was one example of what Vicknair looked for from coaches he wanted his assistants to learn from: He had something, something different, or a creative way of doing things Vicknair appreciated.
Decades later, Johnson would become the talk of college football, confounding opposing defenses with a triple-option offense he called the flexbone, which Vanderbilt coach Bobby Johnson raved about in the Sports Illustrated issue of Nov. 16, 2009: “There is no way to figure it out,” Johnson said.
Johnson has defenses scrambling to learn his offense, and it’s a good bet he’s already working on staying a step or two ahead of them. That’s the kind of coach Vicknair wanted his staff to mine for strategic gold.
One thing Bruchhaus noticed was how important it was to watch what was called “film” in those days and is now video in one form or another. When Bruchhaus was on site learning about a team’s offense or defense, he’d watch all their games on film, then watch their practices.
“It wasn’t about talking,” Bruchhaus said, “it was about looking.”
Vicknair called him into his office and said they were going to sit down and watch film of an opponent. Vicknair asked what the team was going to do on first-and-10. Bruchhaus said he didn’t know. Vicknair asked what they were going to do on third-and-short. Bruchhaus said he didn’t know, and Vicknair gave him a new assignment.
“He said, ‘Well, you’d better go watch some film, and when you can do that (tell me what they’re going to do), you need to come back and let me know.’”
Bruchhaus said he learned the art of studying film.
“You get a feel for it,” he said.
Years after leaving the coaching profession, he said he didn’t know how good an X-and-O coach he was, but he was pretty sure he knew how to call a game. That, he said, came from film study.
It’s a trait Vicknair had, and it was invaluable at Westlake, where his insights from the press box helped the Rams win games right up until the night before he died.
“He taught people how to break down another team’s offense,” Caldarera said. “He was very good at it. He could call a team’s plays.”
The Rams beat Sam Houston on Vicknair’s last night, and Caldarera said Vicknair could call the plays and know what was going to happen when the Broncos had the ball.
“When Vic broke you down, he knew exactly what a team was going to do against him,” Caldarera said.
Striving for perfection was the way Caldarera remembered Vicknair being most consistent. Westlake’s 14-1 season in 2007, Caldarera said, owed a great deal to “him being on top of the press box calling the game down, and to the kicking game.”
Vicknair was in charge of the kicking game too.
It was rare for a high school head coach to have someone with Vicknair’s experience and knowledge working for him as an assistant coach, and Caldarera knew and appreciated it.
All of the coaches who knew Vicknair appreciated his attention to detail.
He watched spring practices at McNeese. He watched the spring game. He attended McNeese clinics. He didn’t want to just watch practice; he wanted a copy of the practice script. Viator learned to make a few extra copies every day, just in case Vicknair showed up to watch.
“He’d walk out there on the practice field and say, ‘Where’s my script?’ You had to be ready because he could be there and he’d want it there,” Viator said.
When Nick Saban was coach at LSU, Viator and Vicknair would attend practices in Baton Rouge when they could. Viator said Vicknair loved Saban’s practices and the way he organized them.
Saban, who was extreme in protecting anything he thought should stay within the walls of the athletic department and the football practice facility, wasn’t the sort of person to make extra copies of scripts for visitors. Viator said Vicknair put the pressure on him to come through, and as luck would have it, there was a connection there.
Mike Collins, a once and future McNeese assistant, was on Saban’s staff at LSU in 2003 and ‘04. A script found its way into Vicknair’s hands, and when he and Viator were looking it over, one of Saban’s practice spies pounced on them.
Sam Nader, a longtime liaison between high school coaches and LSU’s football program, saved them. Nader said he could vouch for them. Viator said he likes to remind Collins, who became one of Viator’s assistants when he returned to McNeese, that he didn’t throw Collins under the bus. He didn’t say where they got the script.
Collins remembered the incident, and he recalled Vicknair’s interest in the practices.
“He was curious about Nick’s defense,” he said.
If Vicknair and Saban were both perfectionists, Saban didn’t appear to enjoy himself as much as Vicknair did. A few hours after LSU won the 2003 BCS national championship, Saban was in his hotel room in New Orleans fretting about the next season. His agent, Jimmy Sexton, noted he didn’t seem able to savor the moment.
After Westlake lost the 2007 state championship game in the same Superdome, Vicknair was able to let go and enjoy the rest of the weekend in New Orleans, one of his favorite cities. His wife suggested his age (65) had something to do with that, that if he’d been the same age Saban was (52) in 2003, it might have taken him longer to get over the defeat.
But it wasn’t lost on those who knew both that Saban had a harder time enjoying a championship than Vicknair did in walking away from a championship loss and enjoying the company of those around him.
Shaver, who was on Vicknair’s staff at Barbe when the Bucs lost the 1980 state championship to East St. John, saw plenty of Vicknair’s serious side. There was no joking on the practice field, Shaver said.
“It was business,” Shaver said. “He was prepared. He made sure we were prepared. He made sure we took care of that. He made every practice schedule. He assigned every person what to do.”
Shaver learned that was Vicknair’s way, so he quit talking about it and just did what Vicknair told him.
“Now,” Shaver said before the 2009 season, “things are a lot different. I have an offensive supervisor, a defensive supervisor, and I just tell them the time (of practice).
“Vic was in control of everything. He’d let you know if you were doing it wrong.”
Vicknair’s sons saw evidence of their father’s attention to detail.
“A lot of coaches would send younger coaches to go get films” on upcoming opponents, Cody Vicknair said. “He did it for years, way past when he needed to. He’d do the small things. He was big on taking care of uniforms.”
Viator worked for Vicknair for three years at Sam Houston before becoming head coach at Vinton. Later, when Viator coached at Jennings, they traded practices. If Jennings had a day off, Viator would watch Sam Houston practice. If Sam Houston had a day off, Vicknair would watch Jennings practice.
They did this despite the schools being scheduled to play each other during the season.
Viator said Vicknair would tell him what looked good and what needed more work, despite knowing he’d have to coach against Viator during the season. He was always there to help, Viator said. He was always honest.
“That’s who he was, and I always appreciated that because he was trying to help us,” Viator said. “If you were loyal to him, he was loyal to you to no end, and I always appreciated that fact.”
Vicknair’s search for perfection wasn’t limited to his team. There was always something he could find on another team that needed improving.
“We won the state championship at Jennings,” Viator said, “and the next day — we had stayed over (in New Orleans) — I saw he and my dad were talking, and we were just kind of shooting the bull or whatever, and Coach Vic said, ‘I wanted to tell you this for a few weeks, but let me tell you: You’d better learn how to punt. Y’all don’t have a clue, and you got lucky that y’all won, and if you’re going to do this, your punter’s this,’ and ... he got all over me.”
‘You can’t take the coach out of him’
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Ronnie Johns met Vicknair soon after moving from DeRidder to Sulphur in 1983, a year after beginning his career with State Farm. He moved for a better business opportunity, and it helped he had family in Southwest Louisiana. His only brother, Mike Johns, was coaching at LaGrange.
The connection between Vicknair and Mike Johns helped start a friendship between Vicknair and Ronnie Johns. The latter watched all three of Vicknair’s sons grow to manhood.
Common interests — cooking, spending time with family and friends — sealed the deal, and Ronnie Johns said he came to admire Vicknair more and more over the years.
“His whole thing was about young people,” Johns said. “He loved what he did, and he loved having an impact on young people.”
Growing up in a family with a coach, Johns saw behind the scenes, where fans rarely catch so much as a glimpse. The view enabled Johns to gain a deeper appreciation for Vicknair.
“I watch how dedicated and how many long hours these coaches put in, and Charles was like that, but the thing that I really admired about him the most was that when he came home from that school, he could leave it there,” Johns said. “He dedicated that time when he got home to his family.
“Debbie — that was his best friend. It really was. They did everything together. They enjoyed doing things together. They really enjoyed entertaining a lot, and we would do that together.”
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If Vicknair wanted people to nurture and care for their corner of the world, he was a great teacher by example, Johns said. Whatever he did, he did with a passion.
Johns began having a regular pig roast, a cochon de lait, at his uncle’s house.
“From the time I lit that fire at 4 o’clock in the morning on, Charles was there,” he said.
The social element was an important link, but a love of food and a desire to try new foods and recipes had something to do with that too.
“He probably had as many cookbooks as Barnes & Noble,” Johns said. “He’d call me, ‘Man, you wouldn’t believe the new cookbook I got. You’ve got to come see this thing.’ I remember when they moved to their present location, he built that outdoor kitchen that he was just incredibly proud of. That was his sanctuary, being out there.
“He was just a wonderful cook. It wasn’t just rice and gravy, the typical man dishes that we usually like to cook: barbecue or sauce piquante or etouffee. He was an accomplished cook and was always trying something new.”
As busy as coaches are, Johns said, many don’t become involved in civic activities. When Vicknair was at Sam Houston, he became active in the Kiwanis Club in Moss Bluff, later becoming president and helping the group become of the most successful in the area.
Johns recalled members telling him Vicknair made it fun, bringing a different energy level to the club.
The Vicknair boys attended Our Lady Queen of Heaven Catholic School, and their parents helped organize a fundraiser. They asked Johns if he’d like to participate, and he agreed to work with them and others on putting together a Mexican fajita dinner for a group of two or three dozen people.
Debbie Vicknair said Debbie and Gerald Link, Rosanna and Jay Lafleur and Vickie and Gerald Smith joined the Vicknairs and Ronnie and Michelle Johns in coordinating the event.
They went the extra mile or miles, beginning with decorating a Catholic school bus in a Mexican motif.
“We actually had some live roosters on the bus,” Johns said. “Gerald Smith we called him ‘Killer’ we had Killer driving the bus, and we went and picked up everybody at their house and brought them out to the camp where we were actually cooking the dinner.”
“It was a fun time, and we raised a lot of money for Queen of Heaven,” Johns said, “and those are the kinds of things that he really, really enjoyed doing.”
People will tell you football was Vicknair’s life. Johns saw a different side of him, on weekends and away from the game.
“Those boys were his life,” he said of the three sons of Debbie and Charles Vicknair.
Charles, known as Little Vic, is the oldest. Johns became his mentor, teaching him the insurance business for about a year and a half. A year after his father died, Vic Vicknair was poised to become a State Farm agent in Katy, Texas.
Chad, the middle child and a registered nurse, moved into orthopedic equipment sales.
Cody, the youngest, went on to work in real estate.
“I nicknamed him ‘The Legend’ years ago,” said Johns, who used Cody Vicknair as his real estate agent when buying a house for his daughter before her November 2009 wedding.
In the wedding party: The Legend.
Hebert, who played for Vicknair at McNeese and later was his boss at Sulphur, said he saw father-son relationships in a different light because of his time with Vicknair.
“I always thought of Coach Vic as another father figure to me,” Hebert said.
If that’s true, Vicknair was the kind of father who knew when it was time for the son — or pupil — to be his own man.
“To have him work for you, and you’ve kind of got to tell him what to do a little bit and maybe correct him a couple of times, that was difficult,” Hebert said, “but he always made it easy.”
The more Vicknair worked for Hebert, the more the latter had a chance to see his personal life, which a child of the 1960s found revealing.
“You know that all our fathers weren’t loving and hugging and all that stuff, so just to watch him” was special, Hebert said. “He put notes in his kids’ ... when they went on trips he’d stick a note, telling them he loved them and he was proud of them, in their bag or something, that they would find.”
Hebert, who has a son, took a cue from Vicknair, updating the gesture for the times.
“We text now. I text him instead of sticking notes, but it’s still the same deal,” Hebert said. “It kind of teaches you how to still relate to your kids. I learned on both sides. I learned the football and family side from him. I loved him. Like I said, I thought of him as a father, and it was just good being around him, working with him.”
The more Johns and others talked about all of the areas of Charles Vicknair’s life the late coach tended to with attentive devotion, the more Vicknair’s energy level took on an almost legendary quality.
He drove often to Alexandria to see his mother when she lived there, and after moving her to Lake Charles when she was in her 80s, he had coffee with her every morning unless he was out of town.
“He was just very, very dedicated to her,” Johns said.
Family meant something to him, and he was proud he and Debbie could see three sons graduate from LSU.
“To be able to send three kids to LSU on a coach’s salary is pretty tough,” Johns said. “It’s not easy, and they sacrificed a lot to be able to do that, but that was what was important to him.”
Along the way, there were laughs. During a beach vacation enjoyed by the Johns and Vicknair families, Vicknair waded out into the water for a bit, then came back to join the others back on the beach. He reached inside his swimming trunks and pulled out his cell phone, which had been with him the whole time.
“You know what salt water does to a cell phone?” Johns asked, not expecting an answer.
The story is even better when you learn, as Johns did, that three weeks earlier the same thing happened during a Vicknair family vacation.
“Debbie was all over his case about him ruining two cell phones in about a three-week period,” Johns said. “Typical him, he just laughed about it. Surely he wasn’t upset about it.”
Football, coaching, teaching, cooking, socializing, civic work ... was there anything else Vicknair found time for in a 24-hour day? Yes, said Johns, a former state representative.
“In the 12 years I served in the Louisiana Legislature, he discussed politics with me at a level that not a whole lot of people would,” Johns said. “He kept up with it. He was interested in it. He understood it. It surprised me at first that he would have an interest in that, and it wasn’t just about football with him, or with other sports. It was about being very well-rounded in a whole lot of aspects, and he had a great interest in politics. We spent a lot of time, a lot of nights, particularly in that 12-year period, talking about political issues, and he was very well-read and very well-educated in that arena.”
There was the occasional swing of the golf club, but Vicknair found it required too much time to work on the finer points of the sport, and Johns said it never became a regular thing.
“Ronnie, I don’t have time for that,” he recalled Vicknair telling him.
Johns said he misses the time they spent together, especially cooking on weekends.
“There’s a void there,” he said.
The 12 months between Vicknair’s death and the first few weeks of the following football season drove home that gap.
“The football seasons are when a lot of people will think about him and miss him,” Johns said, “but in my case, I miss him almost every weekend, because that’s when we spent our time together.
“I miss him. I think about him a lot.”
Johns said one of his favorite stories about Vicknair was a reminder of his passion for teaching the game of football, even to boys who didn’t play for him. Vicknair’s place in the world, his bubble, was far-reaching and generous.
About a year before Vicknair died, Johns said, their families were vacationing at Orange Beach, Ala. While they sat on the beach one morning, they noticed some kids throwing a football while they ran around on the sand. Vicknair began talking with the father of one of them and found out the son was soon to be a high school senior and was receiving attention from college coaches. That was all it took.
“Instead of sitting there and enjoying himself and relaxing,” Johns said, “he spent most of that morning out there coaching that kid on how to throw a football and giving him some pointers on this and that. He was coaching on the beach in Orange Beach, Ala.”
That’s what he enjoyed doing, whether it was at a high school, at McNeese or a summer camp at another college.
“You can’t take the coach out of him,” Ronnie Johns told his wife that night.
“Here was a kid he never met before, that he would never see again, and he spent half of his vacation day coaching him on the beach.”
Johns said Vicknair often asked him how his oldest son, Vic, was doing as he learned the ways of the insurance industry through the coaching of Johns.
“When I had the opportunity to do something for his son,” Johns said, “I never hesitated to jump on that opportunity, and now, God bless his soul, he’s not around here to see it, but his son is going to have an incredible opportunity to have a great business career, and that’s what he wanted for his son.”
Johns didn’t miss the connection between what he’d seen of Vicknair as mentor and what Johns had become for Vicknair’s oldest boy.
“Charles kind of played a part in showing me that you needed to do that for these young people,” he said.
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Charles Vicknair