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Wednesdays With Ed
"Well, hell, you can't stay in Oxford all the time.
Besides, we’ve already offered every able-bodied youngster in
Mississippi and a few that ain't exactly able-bodied yet, but could be
with a few advances in medical science. So I figured it was time to
light out and beat the bushes (Editor’s Note: “the bushes are dear
friends of Dennis and Kim Franchione) in search of some more players
who were BY-GOD Ole Miss material. So I called Coach Luback, who
coaches our defensive backs or kickers or some silly-ass non-defensive
line position but does mix a fine dry martini, and our NCAA compliance
guy, who we all call “Lefty” ever since he tried to explain the “A-P-R”
to me and I tore off his left arm. I said “Fellas, we’re going to
Louisiana and I am going to find me some for-real FOOTBALL PLAYIN’
SUMBITCHES, which is what we need around here instead of these
frat-party two-hand-touch SISSIES that we have right now! Meet me at
the Coupe De Ville.!!” So we went tear-assin’ south across
Mississippi and wasn’t too long until we were back in Bayou des
Cheveaux, Louisiana. I pulled into town and jumped out of the car, and
a lot of people there recognized me as sort of a celebrity since I am
one of the eight gainfully-employed Cajuns in the United States of
America. So I told those people, I said “I’ve got some Starkviller ass
to kick! DO YOU HAVE ANY FOOTBALL PLAYERS THAT CAN BY-GOD HELP ME?? One says, “Well, Coach O, we got this big boy we call Baby Huey, lives down by the fertilizer mill, weighs about 400 pounds…” I says “THAT AIN’T GOOD ENOUGH. We’ll offer him, but I’m not sure that he is BY-GOD OLE MISS material. What else you got?”
“Well, there’s Wilmont DuPuy. Killed his daddy, so he’s locked away up
at Angola now, but he’s a purty good athlete that might be able to bust
out of prison two or three Saturdays in the fall and come help you…” “THAT STILL AIN’T GOOD ENOUGH! I’ll offer him but I need boys can suit up every damn week. Ain’t there anything else?”
“So everybody looks around kind of funny and then this one fella says “Well, there is Loup-Garou Tebeaux.”
The crowd gasps a little, like right before a fifty-crawdad belch. One
or two little snot-nosed bastards start to cry. So I ask this ol’
fella, I says “What the hell is a Loup-Garou Tebeaux?” “We ain’t
sure, Coach O. He lives way back in the swamp, or leastways we think he
does. We ain’t exaxtly seen him and the last boys we sent in to look,
they ain’t come back.” “Well,” I says, “go get me a pirogue because that sounds like BY-GOD OLE MISS MATERIAL to me.”
“We didn’t need no guide. Ed Orgeron ain’t never needed help polin’ a
pirogue. So it wasn’t too long before me and Luback and Lefty are in
the darkest, blackest part of the bayou. We’re way past the
stripped-out cars and the muskrat-trapper huts. We’re back where
there’s nothing but the occasional gator, a few water moccasins and the
faint smell of corn dogs in the air. All of a sudden, we come up
on a little lean-to with a coal fire out front and a bunch of bones –
dog, possum, gator, pelican – outside. I say “Boys, this might be the
place…” So we go in. And there he is. Hair ain’t ever been cut.
He’s either wearin’ a gator hide, or it’s his hide that’s just growed
that way. Bright yellow eyes he’s using to look up at me. So I says “Hotty Toddy! You Loup-Garou Teboux?” He raises up and says in this real deep voice: “YOUR MOTHER SINGS ROCKY TOP IN HELL!!!!” “No, son, my mother shucks oysters in a biker bar in Lake Charles, so you got to do A LOT BETTER THAN THAT.”
So then the room gets real cold, and this Loup-Garou lets loose a
stream of green vomit that stinks like Starkville on a summer Sunday. Coach Luback yells “Holy Mother of Eli! Let’s get outta here, 0!”
I just turn to the boy and says “Look, son, that carney bullcrap may
work on these country coon-asses around here, but I am ED BY-GOD
ORGERON. I have coached at Southern California! I have lived in Los
Angeles! And when I did, by god, I once saw Rosie O’Donnell walking
down the street IN BROAD BY-GOD DAYLIGHT wearing a halter top and a
pair of pink pedal-pushers. So again, if you want to scare Coach O, you
BETTER have something else!!!” Well, about this time, the boy
levitates himself about three feet off the ground, so he’s sitting
cross-legged and still staring me in the eye at the same time. Then he
starts turning his head, and he keeps turning it around and the neck
bones start cracking until he’s spun around a full 360 degrees.
Wasn’t nothing else I could do in that situation, so I looked him
square in the eye, ripped off my shirt and started to spin my head,
too. Getting to 90 degrees was no problem. Then I kind of slowed down
at that point, so I grabbed my nose with my right hand and started
pullin’ as hard as I could. Well, that got me to about 180 degrees so
I’m looking straight-ass backwards at Luback and Lefty, but I couldn’t
go any further.” That seemed to calm the boy down, though.
Showed we shared a common interest. Today’s high school athlete likes
that. So he makes this low sound in his throat, and this old woman
steps out of the shadows. And I mean ugly. Real ugly. So ugly she
wouldn’t be popular at the Ole Miss staff Christmas party, if you know
what I’m saying. She’s got one eye, and two gold teeth, and a chicken
foot on a string around her neck. “Is this your boy?” I says. “Found him in the swamp,” she says.
So I yell “Hey, Lefty, does “found him in the swamp” constitute legal
guardianship under the Rules of the N-C-By-God-Double-A?” “YES,
COACH O!!!,” Lefty says. He says that a lot these days, especially when
I reach over and get a good grip on his one arm. “ALL RIGHT THEN! Well, old woman, we’re offering. A DAMN BONA-FIDE OLE MISS SCHOLARSHIP. He got any other offers?”
“Ain’t no other coaches been here, but he’s got this,” she says, and
holds out an “Auburn Athletic Department” envelope. (“Tuberville!” I
hiss.) It’s got a scholarship offer. Plus it’s got an Alabama depth
chart showing that they got seven demon-possessed boys already on the
team plus two more committed for next fall. And it’s got this” – she
handed me a well-gnawed Colonial Bank ATM card – “but the boy couldn’t
eat it so it wasn’t no good to us.” I says “All right then, old
woman. We can offer him all this, too. Plus we got some boosters
that’ll run a hog into this swamp every Christmas if the boy comes to
Ole Miss. That’s legal, ain’t it Lefty?” “YES, COACH O!!!”
“All right then,” I say to the old hag. “What’s your answer, ‘cause I
ain’t got all BY-GOD day to hang around this hell-hole of a swamp, not
with “American Idol” coming on tonight.” So she says “Coach O, this is too big a decision for us to make without some guidance. You know what I mean…” “Yes, ma’am, I think I do.”
“So what we going to do is this. We going to have a one-hour special on
ESPN2, and at the end of the show, I’m going to take a white stick and
kill a black hen. If the hen’s blood spill out in a pattern of a hairy
chest, then you got him. But if it spills out in a pattern of two giant
ears, well, we thank you for your time.” “Well, ma’am, I can’t ask for no more logical and fair decision-making process than that. We’ll be in touch.”
“So we headed back to Oxford. But we’re going to keep recruiting
Tebeaux, even if he is leading us on. Believe me, if a boy is possessed
by Satan himself, Auburn has some built-in advantages. But at Ole Miss,
we ARE NOT QUITTERS! Sometimes, recruiting is easy. You go in, drink a
beer with Daddy, eat some of Mama’s fried chicken, then you beat the
hell out of the boy until he commits. You’d hope they were all that
simple, but they ain’t. “But a boy who can levitate four feet in
the air and spew green vomit, I can use that boy down on the goal-line.
That boy is BY-GOD OLE MISS MATERIAL!! So I'm going to keep on
workin'..." “Damn, I’m getting wordy. I ain’t produced something
that long since I ate a whole box of granola one time. But anyway,
we’re taking a few weeks off so my damned annoying editor can go back
to Texas and help Coach Franny Francis, or whatever his damn name is,
with his late-night crying-jag problem. We will continue the three-part
series in Mrs. O’s Corner, where she talks about her early years in
professional wrestling. Be of good cheer.
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