June Bug
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Relax, I got it.
Do the deal.
I’ll make the coffee. Don’t get up.
Love your bubble.
Don’t worry. Football will pay.
It’s been a slice of heaven.
Charles Vicknair said a lot of things often enough for people to remember them as his favorite catchphrases. His family put some of them on a card with his picture on it after he died.
Along the same vein, as you might recall from early in the story, he had a habit of giving people nicknames. Shaver, saying he understands that side of Vicknair the older he becomes, recalled Vicknair making up names for players whose real names he couldn’t remember.
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“He’d just make up a name, and that’s what he’d call the kid,” Shaver said. “Instead of having to learn the name, it was just ‘Pancho’ or ‘Pahds.’ This guy was ‘Pahds,’ and this guy was ‘Bootsie.’ That ended up being their name for four years.”
There is no standard spelling of “pahds,” an approximation in writing of the sporting short-hand for partner or “podnuh.”
Ronnie Johns, the State Farm agent who befriended Vicknair in the early 1980s, got to know this side of him.
“Nicknaming those kids, that was his trademark,” Johns said.
Vicknair didn’t stop with football players.
“My daughter Claire, who’s 20 years old now,” Johns said in the summer of 2009, “from the day she was a baby until the day he died, he called her June Bug.”
There was the junior high student with the last name of Evans who discovered Vicknair was talking to him without getting his name right. He would say “Evers” or “Everson” instead.
“Get over here, son!”
The young Mr. Evans realized he wasn’t receiving special treatment.
“Of course, he messed up everybody else’s name as well.”
Vicknair’s oldest son, Vic, said his father was bad with names.
“In order for him to remember,” Vic said, “he had to give you a nickname so that he could remember your nickname. He couldn’t remember names.”
At a seminar in the early 1990s where high school coaches learned the new rules and points of emphasis game officials would use in calling their games, Vicknair referred to Scooter Hobbs, sports editor of the American Press, as “Scooter Pooter Pooter.”
Shaver said there was imprecision that cropped up in other ways, a bit of comic relief around a coach so well known for focusing on the details. After Barbe received new belts for the weight room, Vicknair wanted to write ‘Bucs,’ the team’s nickname, on all of them.
“Vic could not spell anything, now,” Shaver said, trying to prepare a visitor for what came next.
“B-U-C-K-S, on every weight belt. Big, blue letters on every weight belt. So now we’ve got to get White-Out and white out what he did. He wasn’t much on spelling, even on kids’ names.”
Especially on kids’ names.
Another Vicknair favorite was to say, “Let’s pull a Hank Snow.”
That expression is a reference to the country music artist whose first big hit was a 1950 song called “I’m Movin’ On.” Vicknair, who came of age in the ’50s (he was born Oct. 7, 1941), joined those in his generation and others in using the songwriter’s name as a way of saying it’s time to move on, to leave one place for another.
After Vicknair went to St. Louis High School, Saints soccer coach Jason Oertling became acquainted with Vicknair’s frequent use of that expression. During the playoffs of the first soccer season after Vicknair’s death, Oertling made his players T-shirts on which he urged, “Let’s Pull a Hank Snow.”
Oertling did some research and explained the history of the saying to the players.
When it was time to pull a Hank Snow, Vicknair sometimes said, “It’s been a slice of heaven.” He’d say it in good times, and in not-so-good times. Anyone close to him understood the sarcasm when the reality of the moment may have been a tad south of heaven.
Mostly, he said it as if he meant it.
Then there are expressions with origins that may never be explained. One such saying was “Love your bubble.”
The family had heard it enough to put it on the small bookmark-style card they prepared for Vicknair’s funeral, but more than a year later, nobody in the family could identify the origin of “Love your bubble,” nor any specific context in which he said it.
There was speculation Vicknair meant one should love his or her place in the world, to love and tend to one’s corner of it. Speculation ended when Sam Smith, who coached for Vicknair at St. Louis in the 1990s, explained the far less metaphysical meaning of the expression.
“I gained a lot of weight when I was coaching for him,” Smith said, “and he was always talking about people’s bellies. He said you can’t lose any weight when your belly’s always full.
“That’s one of the things he was always talking about when he said ‘Love your bubble.’ He was talking about your bubble around your waist.”
Smith didn’t remember it being anything critical or mean-spirited.
“He always had a way of making you feel good about yourself,” Smith said. “That was one of those things he said that made you smile. You never really knew where they came from. They were just things Coach Vic said. You never knew what saying at what time. He’d just come out with one.”
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