Story by Chris Graham 

Ran Henry remembers how he came to know the legendary football coach Steve Spurrier.

It was back in the days when there was such a thing as the United States Football League - and Spurrier, a former Heisman Trophy winner whose pro career didn’t quite turn out the way people expected that it would, was the head coach of an upstart USFL team called the Tampa Bay Bandits.

And Bandits they were - at least as far as their penchant for stealing football fans on Florida’s left coast from the National Football League’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers was concerned.

“They were perhaps the coolest team in professional-football history,” says Henry, an Albemarle County-based journalist and author who is hard at work on a book on the Ol’ Ball Coach, whose coaching stops have included Tampa Bay in the USFL, Duke University, the University of Florida, the NFL’s Washington Redskins and his current gig at the University of South Carolina.

“Steve put this team together - and they were nothing if not exciting,” Henry says. “They almost always scored on their first drive, or if they didn’t win the coin toss, Steve would sometimes onsides kick to start the game out to try to get the ball to score. They ran more ‘ball plays,’ as Steve likes to call them, than any other team in history. They ran double-fake-reverse-flea-flicker-halfback-option plays just routinely.”

Henry, who spent his formative years as a journalist in the Sunshine State, writing for The St. Petersburg Times and Tropics, the Sunday magazine of The Miami Herald, was asked to revisit his early work on Spurrier in 1997 in the wake of his University of Florida team’s national-championship victory.

That story - for Tropics - led him to pursue the book project, with the working title Sir Big Spur: A Story of Fathers, Sons and Balls, that has kept his attention for the past decade now.

“I got Steve to agree to give me a lot of access. He remembered way back when, 10 years or more before, that in a story for a magazine, I had said, quite accurately, that his Bandits were far more exciting, and locally loved, than the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were still struggling at the time to make a first down,” Henry says.

As Henry began to meet and interview and get to know Spurrier’s family and close friends from his Johnson City, Tenn., upbringing, he came to realize how much of an influence his father, J. Graham Spurrier, was on his development as an athlete and as a person.

“I came to realize that his dad was a very, very difficult man to deal with, for this reason - because he was clearly living through his son, which I was able to get him to finally sort of tell me in my time sitting with him,” Henry says.

“Everybody in the town got to the point where they would say, You know, Rev. Spurrier, I’ve already read the paper this morning. But he only spoke about his son - that was the only topic of conversation on his mind, how great Steve was.”

It wouldn’t take much to figure out why that would be the case - why the Rev. Spurrier would so dote on his progeny.

“Steve was the star quarterback on his high-school football team - but he also would kick off, return kicks, punt, return punts, kick field goals, and he played safety,” Henry says. “He also led his baseball team to a state title - his batting average was over .400, and he was the star pitcher. And he could have had a career in professional baseball, by all accounts. And in basketball, he was the point guard and scored 20 points a game - and actually could have played college ball in that sport, too.

“What father wouldn’t be incredibly proud of that son?” Henry says.

“Well, his dad was - but his son was never able to hear from his father in his presence any of that praise. It was always, What the hell were you thinking when you threw that interception? How could you have thrown that ball? What were you thinking when you missed that jumpshot? He would never let up on him.”

It’s funny - but Steve has taken on a similar attitude and approach in his dealings with his players over the years. Which, as you might guess, hasn’t always made him Mr. Popularity with fans of his teams.

“Steve got into a major war with the people in Columbia this past fall because he called his team losers,” Henry says, noting a minor firestorm that erupted when Spurrier questioned fans at the University of South Carolina for applauding his team’s effort after a close home loss to highly ranked Auburn University early in the 2006 season.

“There’s a famous story about his dad, who was his coach in Babe Ruth. Steve was the best Babe Ruth player in the country - and his dad was named coach primarily because that was the best way to get him to play. So his dad gets the team together on the first day and says, How many of you here today believe that it’s not about whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game?

“Here’s this minister there asking them this question - and so naturally a bunch of the kids raise their heads. And he says, No, no, no, no - there’s a reason that scoreboard is up there.

“That’s Steve’s attitude, too,” Henry says. “They’ve had mediocrity there at South Carolina there for so long that any sign of life and coming close - like that Auburn game - that was good enough for them.

“Spurrier got on them. Do not clap. Do not applaud. We lost. Do not applaud effort. Effort isn’t anything. We did not win that game.”

Henry is currently shopping his book around to publishers - and in the meantime, he is preparing to add stories from another season of football in Columbia to his manuscript.

By Henry’s reckoning, it could be an interesting year - for his book project and for USC football fans.

“I’ve sat and watched him play the last two years against Florida - and Urban Meyer got outcoached in both of those games, let me tell you,” Henry says.

“I mean, he’s got the best kicker in college football - and even if they had not come down to that last try for a field goal, gosh, they missed an extra point, which never happens, they still would have been tied and into overtime. He just sliced and diced that Gator defense that turned the throttle on Ohio State.

“In year three, with his guys in place now, their opponents had better watch out next year,” Henry says.

Filed under: 7-April 2007 Issue