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.
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