Coach, father figure
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There is far more to the Charles Vicknair story than the way he influenced younger coaches in Southwest Louisiana. Forty-five school years began with him working with young men, trying to get them to improve as players and as people.
“He impacted a lot of kids at a lot of different schools,” Mike Johns said.
Players and coaches liked to tell stories about Vicknair standing up for his players and his program, even against a school administration that didn’t always agree with him. There were conflicts when Vicknair was a head coach, and later when he was an athletic director too.
Bruchhaus said he was strong-willed.
“He was always fighting for something all the time,” Bruchhaus said. “He always had a project.”
Vicknair often used one of his standard responses straight off that card the family prepared for the funeral — “Don’t worry, football will pay” — about something the athletic department needed, and friends and colleagues were quick to quote the line when talking about Vicknair. So was his wife.
“Don’t worry, football will always pay,” she said.
He pushed hard for what he thought the program needed, and it didn’t always win him support.
“A lot of people got mad at him,” Bruchhaus said. “No. 1 is because he pushed to win. He could get things that other people couldn’t get in the younger days. But now as it got older, he couldn’t get those things, and it really frustrated him.”
If he couldn’t run the program the way he thought was best for the players, he moved on. If that meant briefly taking a job teaching at an elementary school rather than let boosters dictate some of the details, so be it.
“He fought for his players,” Matt Viator said. “He fought for his coaches. He was always the leader of trying to get coaches better pay. That was just him.”
Viator said Vicknair constantly told him to never lose sight of the reason they were coaching: to help young men.
“He used to say that, ‘If you don’t have players, then they don’t need you.’ He used to tell me all the time, ‘If it ain’t for the players, Matt, you ain’t got a job. They don’t need you.’ It’s about the players and about trying to obviously make them better football players, but (also) to make them better people, to give them the best quality of life you can give them,” Viator said.
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CHARLES VICKNAIR
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It’s one thing for Vicknair’s former colleagues to recall a long list of teenagers who learned from the coach. It’s another to find those who, as adults with families, social and professional networks, wish to share the troubles they overcome and the transformations they made because of Vicknair’s guidance.
One who played offensive line for Vicknair at McNeese in the early to mid 1980s looked back later in life at a time when he and his position coach weren’t on the same page. If the player was waiting for the coach to change, he would be waiting a long time, and it finally dawned on him.
“As with most personality conflicts, youthful arrogance keeps you from realizing that the player needs to get along with the coach a lot more than the coach needs to get along with the player,” said Jay Gallagher, who went on investigate claims for an insurance company long after his McNeese career ended. “It was a valuable life lesson to learn.”
Gallagher said he was one of a few who knew how to modify basic cable TV wiring so they could get free Showtime in the dorm. One night during curfew check, Vicknair stumbled upon the procedure and asked what was happening. After finding out the details, he grinned, asked about the raw materials and returned the next day with a roll of antenna wire. He asked the players to come with him to wire all the coaches’ houses.
Years later, Gallagher reconnected with Vicknair man to man, away from the game and the player-coach relationship.
“I grew to like Coach Vic a lot, but it was mostly after football,” he said. “Though, in hindsight, I came to appreciate how he conducted himself as a coach a lot better as I got older. Maturity does that, I think.”
Nobody knows that in this context better than Blayne Rush, who played for Vicknair at Sam Houston and went on to be one of the top offensive linemen at McNeese during the Bobby Keasler years. Rush grew fond of telling people to do a Google search on Vicknair’s name and spot testimonials on his influence on the social network pages of his former players and others.
Vicknair’s sons noticed at an early age their father’s influence on his players, especially those in need of a strong father figure.
“When we were young, we saw Blayne and a couple of others from Sam Houston that he would take in, and they would be around the house and hang out,” Chad said. “We got to experience our dad hanging out with them, teaching them things, but we were young, so we kind of didn’t understand, probably until later in life, what he was actually doing. In retrospect, he did it the whole time, all 45 years of coaching.”
The boys saw their father make sure these players went to class, were doing well academically, were going to practice regularly.
“There were kids that I found out after the fact about, and one in particular, without naming names, he would call him up in the morning to wake him up to go to school,” Chad said. “This guy told me about it. He’d say, ‘Hey, are you awake? You’re going to class.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah, he’d wake me up,’ and I found out the guy didn’t have a father. He lived his life without his father. Dad would call him up to make sure he came to practice. At times, he would go by his house.
“I didn’t really notice the impact on guys like that until the funeral, when I saw all these people, and after the fact stories started coming in.”
The stories had a familiar ring to them.
“It was the same with us,” Chad said. “Try your best. A hundred percent. Not only with us, but with these certain guys that didn’t have father figures and that he was drawn to and wanted to help lead their life in a good direction.
“Like with Blayne, it showed, and I’m seeing other guys that are successful in life that he had tried to steer in the right direction. I thought it was pretty neat what he did. Not only was football a big part, but he was taking these kids that he coached in high school and making sure that they were going to make something out of their lives instead of doing something bad or being lazy or whatnot. Probably one of his biggest pet peeves was being lazy.”
He walked the walk before and after talking the talk, as his oldest son recalled first-hand and from talking with others who worked with Vicknair. The consensus was he was not going to be outworked.
“As the head coach, he wanted to set the tone for what he expected out of his coaches,” Vic said.
All of that filtered down to the players, who found out quickly they had a standard to maintain.
No story of Vicknair’s involvement in a player’s personal development is more compelling than the one Blayne Rush has told many times to explain what he thinks he owes Vicknair, and it was in the retelling in the spring of 2009 that he began thinking about ways to pay tribute to him.
Rush eventually decided to commission this story and the creation of a Web site where people could find the story of Charles Vicknair and learn about the effect he had upon Southwest Louisiana.
Now a successful businessman in Texas with a wife and two children, Rush didn’t realize the extent of his role in this story until after it was written. Without him, it couldn’t have been told.
“I am a rags-to-riches story, but I was not smart enough to know any shortcuts,” he said in mid-2009, writing to the reporter who covered the end of his college career and hoping to convey the turnaround Vicknair helped bring about in his life.
Broke at 30, thriving financially three years later, he started his own companies and during one five-year span worked seven days a week.
“I was just going to outwork people,” Rush said, aware he’d put one of Vicknair’s lessons into practice.
He overcame a learning disability to earn two master’s degrees and hours toward a third.
“I left McNeese a little scared and lived in some questionable places working in the plants for a while, but I kept on pushing,” he said.
He found himself in a position to help someone who was out of work, and he offered advice based on his hardscrabble experiences.
“Keep pushing, and it will pan out,” he said. “It seems bleak as hell when you are in the middle of the storm. It is scary, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, but you keep pushing forward, because the sun will rise and this will all just be part of your great history.”
Rush spoke with humility as he related part of his history for the purposes of giving credit to Vicknair.
“While I am not wealthy in the financial sense, I have been able to change the legacy of my family,” he said.
Without Vicknair, he said, it wouldn’t have been possible.
Rush left home when he was in high school and playing for Vicknair, who understood the importance of having a strong father figure in the years when a boy becomes a man. Vicknair grew into adolescence without knowing his father, who was out of the picture before Vicknair had a chance to know him.
Vicknair’s mother, Enez Aldret, said it didn’t surprise her when her son took such an interest in shaping the lives of the young men he coached and taught in school. Rush was one who credits Vicknair with changing his destiny.
Rush suffered a major knee injury during the summer before his senior year and moped, as he put it, after thinking he’d lost his ticket to a more prosperous future.
He quit high school for a week, then was kicked out by the same administrator who later worked with Vicknair to reinstate him. In those days, Rush slept in empty apartments in Moss Bluff and in the press box at the school, and he took naps in the woods.
Ivory Stevens, a former high school football player who later worked at McNeese, washed what few clothes Rush had during those days. Rush took shelter wherever he could, sometimes with friends, sometimes with those who proved not to be.
With help, he found a job. He planned to try out for McNeese as a walk-on, but eventually Sonny Jackson gave him a partial scholarship, and he rehabilitated his knee during his first year on campus.
Bruchhaus, who left NLU to coach on Keasler’s staff at McNeese after that, was prepared to offer Rush a full scholarship when he learned Jackson had arranged for it before leaving the program.
Rush went on to play for McNeese’s first Division I-AA playoff teams and become a first-team All-Southland Conference offensive lineman in 1991 and 1993.
Vicknair helped him mature along the way. As circumstances changed, so did the methods. When Rush was a junior at Sam Houston, he needed to take the ACT but couldn’t afford the $18.50 application fee. Vicknair walked him to the counselor’s office, pulled a $20 bill out of his wallet and paid for the test.
After the knee injury jeopardized Rush’s college plans, Vicknair often drove him to physical therapy. While there, the coach asked questions of the staff, prepared workouts for Rush and supervised him while he worked at the rehab plan.
Vicknair called the coaches at McNeese and told them in detail about the extensive exercises Rush was doing to get his knee ready for college football, and when they doubted what they heard from the coach, he told them to come and see for themselves. They did, and they left convinced.
“During that time (Vicknair) taught me a lot about commitment, perseverance, singular focus, trust and believing that set the foundation of who I am today,” Rush said.
After leaving Sam Houston for McNeese, Rush stayed in touch with Vicknair, but he said the coach never asked him about football.
“All he cared about was that I was staying out of trouble, going to class and passing,” Rush said.
Years after arriving at McNeese with one pair of jeans and a couple of shirts, no bed sheets and a learning disability, Rush had become the owner of multiple businesses, with two master’s degrees and designs on earning a third. He learned from reading books, and he learned from several mentors, including Vicknair.
Rush became tearful when he pitched the idea of a story and Web site commemorating the life of his most important teacher and coach, saying he owed everything to Vicknair.
“He was the most impactful person in my life,” Rush wrote in an e-mail, “and I grieve because I did not have the chance to show him just how much of an impact he has on my life.”
Rush began exploring the idea of working with others to memorialize Vicknair, a gesture that put a smile on the face of McNeese assistant coach Mike Collins.
“That kid could have been strayed wrong a long time ago, and somebody got a hold of him, and it was Vicknair,” Collins said. “He got him headed down the right path, and that’s why, there’s no doubt, he’s the success he is right now, today.”
Lark Hebert, himself a former McNeese lineman, said he could see why Rush grew to love Vicknair.
“Vic was his father,” Hebert said. “He took that role for him, and then he coached him and he disciplined him and he made sure he did the right things. He wouldn’t let him get away with things, which I’m sure now as a man and in business and being successful Blayne appreciates — all that discipline and correction — just as we all do as we get older.”
Vicknair didn’t let Rush run wild, Hebert said. He took care of him, made sure he was OK, and until he died, Vicknair spoke with Rush at least once or twice a month on the phone. All of this continued after Rush moved to Texas years ago, and Hebert said that’s special for a high school coach to stay so connected with a former player.
“It was a unique relationship they had,” Hebert said.
Mike Johns was an assistant coach at Sam Houston when Rush played on the line for him and for Vicknair.
“Blayne came up the hard way,” Johns said. “He walked or rode his bike to practice many days. Charles kind of took him under his wing to make sure he did the right things.”
His brother, Ronnie Johns, joined with Rush and others to form a committee to explore ways they could memorialize Vicknair. They began informal discussions after connecting at Vicknair’s funeral, and over the next 15 months they weighed short-range and long-range options for accomplishing their goal.
“We want to do something to keep his name out there in the forefront,” Johns said, “and to honor him in some way out at McNeese, and we’re going to do that. Coach Viator was very, very close to him also, and Coach Viator wants to be a part of this process of memorializing his name, along with other personal friends and other coaches out there.”
Johns didn’t see it as an accident Vicknair embraced Rush and helped him turn his life around.
“Here’s a young man that came up in a very difficult situation, and Charles saw something in him and spent a lot of time with him, and now look at the success of that young man,” Johns said. “I’m sure there’s a whole lot of Blayne Rushes out there that he made an impact on somewhere.”
How many, in pay-it-forward fashion, did the same for others as their own way of honoring what Vicknair did for them? Johns helped one of Vicknair’s sons launch his career in insurance, and he and his family check on the Vicknair family often. Vicknair’s former assistant coaches continue to influence others, and the ripple effect is immeasurable.
While Rush grieved Vicknair’s death in 2008 and began planning a series of memorials in 2009, the finishing touches were under way on “The Blind Side,” a film about a family that helped Michael Oher go from a troubled life with no bed to sleep in to a fast-developing football player who became a first-round NFL draft pick and a professional offensive lineman.
Rush’s story, with further details he will choose to reveal if and when he is ready, is no less compelling, and the central stabilizing figure in his turnaround was Charles Vicknair.
“I get choked up when I talk about it,” Rush said by telephone in December 2009, his voice shaking as he brought back good and bad memories.
Without Rush’s devotion to his coach and the drive with which he chose to share Vicknair’s legacy with the world and with future generations, you wouldn’t be reading this story. It wouldn’t exist, except that Blayne Rush made it happen.
After Vicknair’s death, Rush put into words his feelings, ending a written tribute with a reference to a song he passed along to Debbie Vicknair. The song, Rush said, spoke to much of how he saw his mentor.
The note:
Coach Charles Vicknair,
I love you. Because of you, I am who I am. Because of you, I have accomplished what no other man had thought possible. Because of you, my family’s future generations will have a different legacy. All because of you….
Thank you for the help, lessons and my best memories. Even though they will never have the pleasure of knowing you, I love you and my family is forever indebted to you. You will live forever through us.
Frank Sinatra said it best:
(The tribute ended with the lyrics to the song “My Way.”)
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