Family man
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Cody Vicknair moved back to Lake Charles after college and said it was the best four years he spent with his father. He saw his dad become an assistant coach again, in time for the 2006 season at Westlake, and he saw him become more relaxed.
“What he became was a promotion in my mind,” Cody said. “From head to assistant, everyone else was taking it easy, but he became a player’s coach and a coach’s coach. He was there to be the consultant, to be the friend, to be the teaching coach to these coaches, to mold them, so that Southwest Louisiana football could continue.”
Ronnie Johns saw Vicknair as devoted to and worried about his boys as he’d been when they were toddlers. The boys, now adults, were seeing a different aspect of their father.
In the summer of 2009, Cody wanted to talk about it. He found out his mother would be meeting one day with someone who wanted to write about Charles Vicknair the coach, father and husband, and the youngest son of Charles and Debbie wanted to be with her for support and to help her tell stories about the man who left behind a void impossible to miss.
They sat in the living room, surrounded by keepsakes and other tangible reminders as they reflected.
“Mom lost one of her best friends, unexpectedly, and then we lost (two family friends), two sons of Kirby Bruchhaus,” Cody said. “Going through those experiences as a family, we realized life is precious. We realized at any moment we might not be here anymore.
“So it was like a different chapter in our lives, where the past four years were even more family driven and opening up communication more with Dad: ‘We know football is your life, but we want to make sure we have each other for as long as possible.’ He continued to work, but when it came down to family, he wanted us here too.”
They caught up on doing things there was never any time for earlier in his career and earlier in their lives. The shared experiences helped sharpen the view the boys already had of their father.
“Everything he did was first-class,” Cody said.
“Not monetarily,” his mom said, quickly correcting him.
True, son replied, but ...
“He wouldn’t cut corners,” Cody said. “He did it the best he could — not just a rinky-dink tree stand for deer hunting, but we called it the Taj Mahal. If the job was to do the landscaping or polish up the yard, he gave you the most elaborate looking flower arrangement he could create.”
Debbie said her husband was like an older brother to Darrell Guidry, her brother. Vic Vicknair said the deer lease was an idea hatched by the brothers-in-law. They had been hunting at another place, and Darrell did a lot of the legwork, with Vicknair’s assistance, in finding a lease where they could build their own blinds and hunt.
If it was worth doing, it was worth planning, and if it was worth planning, it was worth designing in painstaking detail.
“He did elaborate drawings,” Debbie said.
That included a sketch, while they sat at a table in a restaurant, that puzzled everyone in the family until Vicknair revealed he was helping them understand how to find a deer he’d just seen on the deer lease.
“He tried to draw the deer he saw on a napkin,” Cody said. “He always drew like that. He always carried a pen on his shirt. Matt Viator got that from him. You never know when you’ve got to draw up a play or have an idea. Wherever we were, he’d get a napkin — restaurant, wherever.
“So he tried to draw the deer. My brother Chad was next to him, and he described to Chad what he saw, and it was unbelievable. It looked like five stick figures sitting around at a picnic table, and Chad took a picture of all of us trying to figure it out.”
Dad became frustrated.
“Are you not seeing this?” he asked everyone.
The sight of the deer’s rack inspired him to speak with a cadence all too familiar to family members.
“When dad talks, dad just doesn’t talk, he talks with enthusiasm,” Cody Vicknair said, slipping back into that present-tense mode that returns now and then when the subject of Charles Vicknair surfaces.
“He gets excited about it.”
Vic and Chad remembered the story a few months after Cody’s telling of it.
“He brought all of his tendencies to deer hunting,” Chad said. “He and I went hunting, and this one time he went in one blind, and I was in another blind, and we get back, and I said ‘I didn’t see much.’ He said, ‘Well, I saw something.’
“He gets his napkin, gets his pen and starts drawing the buck’s antlers. I laughed, and I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re drawing here,’ and I took a picture and e-mailed it out and people started laughing. He was dead serious. He said, ‘This is what it looks like. You need to go find it,’ and …”
“Are you listening to me?” Vic said, picking up the flow of the story from Chad as he’s done many times before, mimicking his father’s words as he remembered them. “Are you listening? Are you paying attention? Here are the main beams, and here are the G2s, and see, what it’s going to look like is this, and it’s going to come out from this direction,’ and Chad’s just kind of looking at him with this puzzled look like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
“So Dad says, ‘You know what? The hell with you. Shoot, I’ll go kill it next time.’ He was serious.”
Darrell Guidry wasn’t there, but Chad e-mailed him the picture of the drawing. Darrell called after seeing it on his cell phone, and they all laughed about it.
The attention to detail doesn’t stop there. Vicknair was like an investigative reporter when it came to seeking reports on others’ hunting trips.
“Every time we’d go and get together,” Vic said, “even if he wasn’t there, he had to talk to everybody that went to find out exactly who saw what at what blind and at what time, what the conditions were, and he kept this journal …”
“He kept a journal,” Chad said, shaking his head.
“… where he wrote all this down,” Vic continued. “We’d come in, and we’d be eating breakfast talking about it, and he’d go down the list: ‘All right, what did you see? What time was that?’ He wanted to know every little detail from everybody.”
Details. Vicknair knew no other way to approach anything but to exhaustively research the details.
The flat-panel TV in the Vicknair living room sold for nearly $8,000 years ago when Vicknair began pricing that model, but he set out to find a more affordable one. Without much of a knack for the Internet, Debbie said, he got online, figured out how to shop and researched that specific TV.
A few trips later to big box stores in and out of Louisiana, and with more research, he found it somewhere and bought it for about $5,000, a price that included shipping.
“Whatever his project, he went full out,” Cody said.
Debbie, who was 11 years younger than her husband, didn’t see much of him because of the nature of his job. They woke up early every morning to compensate.
“We did have our time,” she said.
“We always had supper together,” she said, fighting tears as the first anniversary of her husband’s death and another football season grew closer. “Always.”
She said they never had a large den or living area, so they had a sitting area in the master bedroom. If the boys had company, they were in the living room or back in the sitting area.
Cody said his dad would wake them up in morning before he left and tell them all goodbye, then return for dinner in the evening. They’d talk more on weekends, he said, even if he was at work, coaching.
“He called them all the time,” Debbie said. “Even when they were grown, he’d call them. No matter who they were with or if they were on the road, he was going to call them, no matter what — especially when they were on the road.
“He’d say, ‘Are you there yet? How fast are you going?’ ”
If he could get away, he’d visit them when they were in Baton Rouge. They appreciated that.
“We never said, “We never get to see him.’ We respected (that their parents) put their energy into their jobs to provide financing for us to get an education, and so we felt honored,” Cody said. “He would come running to us. He really did. We had good times at LSU. We got a condo. He’d spend spring and summer time with us there.”
Debbie, who is an educator, said they made trips to New Orleans when they could. That was his hot spot, where he loved listening to blues and Cajun music. Mostly, she said, he loved spending time with family.
“Work is work, and fun is fun,” she said.
The family experienced more of the latter with him in the last four years of his life. To see a serious coach cut loose, that was special. As the boys got older, their relationships with him strengthened more, and on a different level. Cody said it took on a different feel, but it was just as special.
Vicknair went to New Orleans every year for the Superdome Classic, the state finals of Louisiana high school football. He had fun, entertained, ate and drank with Debbie, with friends and with other coaches. Vicknair’s sons tagged along on those trips when they came of age. When they saw their father stay out until midnight, 1 or 2 a.m., it amazed the boys he could stay out that late and have so much fun after being such an early-to-bed, early-to-rise man for years.
“He never went to the games,” Chad said. “It was a social trip.”
The only time the boys went to the games was when Westlake made it to the finals in 2007. They enjoyed seeing the coaches interact off the field, teasing each other and being friends rather than competitors or co-workers. This was something their father didn’t allow them to see until they went to college and were old enough to spend time with him as adults.
“I think he got to be more comfortable and could let loose,” Chad said, “and we saw a different side of him that you really couldn’t see in high school because …”
“Well,” Vic said, “he was athletic director slash coach slash teacher, not to mention we were there, so it wasn’t until we got to college that we started changing the bond with him.”
The boys said they appreciated how strict their parents were in raising them, but they also enjoyed the way things became more relaxed as they matured.
Oh, that night after Westlake lost in the state finals in 2007, when Debbie saw her husband unwind and enjoy the rest of the weekend? Well, as the boys will tell you, that’s what she saw — only after he had a chance to vent with his sons between the end of the game and their night on the town.
“It’s me and Vic and a few friends,” Chad said, “and we’re sitting at the Royal Sonesta waiting for him to get back, and he gets back. You could tell he was amped up. He was fired up. I said, ‘Dad, relax. It’s over.’
“He said, ‘We should have won it. We had it.’ I said, ‘Let’s go get a drink,’ so he and I and a few others sat down and got a cigar and a beer, and he takes a napkin, pulls it out, takes a pen, and ‘We should have done, this, this, this and this.’
“I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And he’s explaining, ‘This is what happened,’ and he starts drawing plays. I said, ‘It’s over. (laughing) Relax.’ Usually you’ll see people and they’ll say, ‘We did what we could do,’ but not him. He was figuring out ways they could have stopped them or should have stopped them.”
Debbie didn’t remember it that way, but her boys said that might have been part of their dad’s plan. His friend, Gerald Link, was with Vicknair and the boys. Link’s wife, Debbie, was with Debbie Vicknair.
“Debbie and Gerald Link traveled with us to the New Orleans getaways and were there for the Westlake state championship game with us,” Debbie Vicknair recalled. “Gerald and the boys stayed up replaying the game after Debbie and I turned in for the night.”
That is when Vicknair worked through the aftermath of the 19-18 loss to Parkview Baptist in the Class 3A championship game.
“He might have even been trying to get away from her to talk about it, now that I think about it,” Chad speculated. “But yeah, he got it out of his system, and after that we unwound. It was probably one of the best trips we had to New Orleans. He let loose more than I’ve ever seen that weekend.”
Vic still has a photo from that night on his cell phone.
“You’d have thought we’d have won the state championship,” Vic said, looking at the smiles on the faces in the group picture.
“He was learning to relax,” Debbie said of the years after Coach Vic returned to Westlake to be an assistant coach. “The summer of 2008 was the first summer he didn’t work — ever.”
Nobody knew it at the time, but they were the last few weeks of his life.
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