Houston Nutt had a headache. It was the night before his first game at Ole Miss, and the coach had just finished a tedious session of game planning filled with the fancy words (and lots of them) and confusing dry-erase board scribblings of his new offensive coordinator Kent Austin. He had returned to his office to clear his head and decide how best to handle yet another enthusiastic, idealistic offensive assistant. Houston stared blankly about his new office.
The walls were pocked with fresh plaster and several head-sized holes still awaiting maintenance’s attention-- just a few of several things left behind by Houston’s predecessor during what looked to have been a frenzied and perhaps violent exit (AD Pete Boone still refused to enter, preferring to conduct his meetings with Houston from the hall in a trembling voice, hiding behind a student assistant). Thinking their owner might someday come to reclaim them, many of the orphaned items still littered the office, including a nutria pelt nailed to the wall, a full box of Meat Market copies with “O” scribbled in red crayon on the inside covers and a filing cabinet haphazardly stuffed with Pop Warner scouting reports from across the country. Also in the cabinet was a mysterious folder labeled “Thinkun Dust” containing a small zip lock bag of powder.
It was then that Houston remembered the Thinkun Dust. A big believer in amateur Louisiana apothecary skills since discovering Boudreaux’s Butt Paste as a treatment for chiggers (a common hazard for those recruiting the athletes of southern Arkansas), he decided to try what he thought to be a homespun Cajun headache cure. Houston stirred a spoonful of the powder into his glass of Ovaltine (a nightly tradition in the Nutt household), drank it down and decided to take a walk around campus.
His headache was indeed gone, but Houston was feeling a growing sense of anxiety as walked into The Grove. What if his offensive coordinator really was as bright as his flowery language and complete, grammatically correct sentences seemed to suggest? If Houston did let him call the plays, and the plays were actually successful…would the fans worship Austin and not Houston? Would they build great statues and design humorous t-shirts riffing on his colorful, Canadian influenced names for various formations?
“Nuttin but fun, my sweet be-hind,” Houston mumbled.
No, no, no. This could not be-- another uppity OC trying to outshine Houston Dale. Hell, he and Markuson had taken that blood oath butt naked. He knew Boone was too cheap to pay another coach’s severance. But, what if he wasn’t fired…but just wasn’t there…went missing…then there wouldn’t have to be any severance package...
The mutinous plot began to become clear to him. Jerking his arms in violent exclamations of treachery, he raged into the night against a conspiracy of Austin, Pete Boone, Jerry Jones, Mitch Mustain’s mother and the Canadian government that he was sure would end with Austin’s ascention to head coach, his own mysterious disappearance and death and Socialist CFL infiltration of SEC football.
“And after I’m gone, whass to keep ‘em from goin afta my family!” he wailed. “Jerrah hess always been afta meh wife…and meh daughters…darlin daughters…Austin’ll probably take ‘em. I seen ‘em eyein’ ‘em, that, that…” an alkali taste grew in his mouth as that last thought matured in his mind. His daughters not only being defiled…but being defiled by that which he detested most-- those who had been the bane of his professional existence. His throat swelled and his lips quivered as he spat the words into darkness—“OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR!”
A spasm of hate from those last words drove him to the ground. But it was at that moment of absolute darkness that a light began to grow around him. A warmness. A sense of comfort and then…a familiar voice from a higher being, an advanced form of humanity…
He squinted as he turned toward the words and saw a figure in red, shrouded in perfect white light.
“Darren….Darren is that you?”
The year was 1989. In Miami, Florida, a program was on the rise, an eccentric graduate assistant was trying to make a name for himself and head coach Dennis Erickson was looking for a way to work his team, and particularly his defense, into a bloodthirsty rage. He was familiar with the stimulating, pain-killing and violence-inducing effects of PCP from…well, needless to say, his time in South Florida had given him an extensive pharmaceutical education, and he had long-contemplated ways to give his team not just a physical chemical enhancement, but a mental one as well.
Spiking the team’s Gatorade would be simple enough, but he wrestled with the difficulty of maintaining control over a sideline full of unknowingly wet athletes. The cheerleaders would almost certainly be sacrificed to the berserker mob—probably the trainers, too. And if they managed to escape the confines of the stadium…well, it’s Miami. It’s questionable whether they’d even be noticed. But, at an away game, well it would be like Attila’s legions being loosed on a Quaker village.
He decided, though, he didn’t need to infect the mob, just the mob leader. One irrational barbarian to work those around him into a state resembling his own—almost a contact high of aggression. It didn’t even have to be a player, it could be a coach.
Rarely do the epiphany and the facilitation of that epiphany occur at the same moment, but it happened on that day in the fringe of the Devil’s Triangle. Ed Orgeron walked through Erickson’s door seeking advice on how to mentally prepare for gameday…and hundreds of miles away in the sleepy hamlet of Oxford, a whiskey drunk student attempted to start a Hotty Toddy at a crowded bar called The Gin. A nameless sadness befell the patrons. Good cheer faded. Stomachs turned. Eyes darkened. And for reasons not understood at the time, nobody answered the drunkard’s call to arms.
More than a decade later in the early hours of the morning, that eccentric graduate assistant, now a positional coach at USC-- under the delusional haze of Angel Dust-- came to believe he was capable of running a major college program, found a payphone and awoke a disoriented Pete Boone, who was in the midst of trying to drink his sorrows away after firing a moderately successful head coach.
“I told that old Pete Boone that I didn’t really need any offensive coordinator, but he insisted,” Houston explained to what he thought was an angel in the form of Darren McFadden. “So, I told him to go on and hire somebody as long as he didn’t cost too much. I’ll be damned if he didn’t go out and hire a danged old illegal immigrant-- and not one of those hard-working Mexicans, but some smart alecky Communist from Canada.”
Kent Austin was neither Canadian nor Communist. He had been a four-time Academic All-American quarterback for Ole Miss during the 80s and went on to have success as a player and coach in the Canadian Football League. When Boone came to tell Houston about the hire, all Houston heard was “Canadian,” and assumed it was a cost-cutting move. In his defense, the miscommunication was probably due in equal part to Houston’s indifference for the offensive coordinator position and Boone’s lingering refusal to enter the office once occupied by Orgeron—preferring to shout from the hallway.
“For no more than we’re paying him, he sure does spend an awful lot of time at work,” Houston continued as he strolled through the dark Grove. “I just slip him a $20 once a week in an envelope, same way we do with the guy who bushRebels our pasture and does our taxes. But there he is, day and night, covered in them sticky notes and charts and graphs about plays and such.
“You know, Spirit Darren, I’ve always hated callin plays. All the stress and decision making and planning, that’s not what coachin’s about. I’ve always wanted to focus on the more personal aspects ARHG!”
He tumbled to the ground. The light around him faded. He looked up from the dirt and there, shimming in the dark, he saw the object that tripped him. What believed to be the answer to his play-calling delimma.
To be continued...
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