[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 197 (Tuesday, December 12, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18445-S18446]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                          TRIBUTE TO TIM COUCH

 Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, it is my pleasure to rise today 
to pay tribute to an outstanding Kentuckian and a record-breaking 
quarterback. Tim Couch ended his high school football career on a high 
note with a 1-yard touchdown pass during the state quarterfinals. Some 
may wonder what is so special about this play. Well, that pass will go 
down in the record books as the one that put the Leslie County High 
School quarterback over the top as the national all-time leader in 
touchdown passes. In 4 years, he has thrown an amazing 12,092 yards--an 
accomplishment that helped earn Tim honors as National High School 
Player of the Year.
  Leslie County is located in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The 
last time the national spotlight shone on the small town of Hyden was 
in 1978, when President Nixon made his first public appearance since 
his resignation. He was there to attend a dedication of a gym named in 
his honor. According to local newspapers, residents said it was an 
exciting day, because everyone in the nation knew about Hyden. And now 
history has repeated itself, but this time the spotlight is shining 
there because of the youth who's become known as ``the pride of Hyden'' 
--Tim Couch.
  His final game as Leslie County High School quarterback was a 
memorable one in many ways. Besides breaking the passing record, Tim 
faced a consistent seven-man rush, he injured his right ankle trying to 
block an extra point, and he was sacked five times. But check out his 
numbers: he completed 17 of 34 passes for 223 yards and 2 touchdowns. 
After the record-breaking pass, the game came to a halt. Fans and the 
media stormed the field to ask Tim for autographs and interviews. 
Fireworks lit up the night sky, and sirens and horns filled the air. 
And before the game resumed, Tim was handed the game ball. What a 
night!
  Every time Tim took to the gridiron, the entire town of Hyden flocked 
to Eagle Field to watch the ``Air Commander'' throw another pass on his 
way to the record books. Sports Illustrated recently did a profile of 
the star quaterback. In the article, Tim said of his 374 fellow Hyden 
residents, ``everybody around here is just so happy. They all want to 
see me go to the NFL and become a big star. It gives me a lot of pride, 
the way such a small place has rallied around one person.''
  If you think football is his only game, think again! Not only is Tim 
an award-winning quarterback, he is also one of the best high school 
basketball players in Kentucky. He led the state in scoring last 
season, with 36 points a game, and he is one of the front runners in 
the race for Kentucky's Mr. Basketball. No wonder he's being recruited 
by the top colleges in the Nation. However, it is my hope that this 
superstar decides to stay in the Bluegrass State and make one of 
Kentucky's fine universities his new home.
  Mr. President and my fellow Members of Congress, please join me in 
congratulating the ``Pride of Hyden.'' Tim Couch has an exciting career 
ahead of him, and I wish him good luck in the future. Mr. President, I 
also ask that an article from a recent edition of Sports Illustrated be 
printed the Record.
  The article follows:

                             Pride of Hyden

                           (By Steve Rushin)

       Elbert Couch parks his white Ford Bronco next to another 
     emblem of American infamy: the Richard M. Nixon Recreation 
     Center in Hyden, Ky. ``There's two kinds around here,'' Couch 
     says. ``There's Republicans, and there's Damn Democrats. I'm 
     a Damn Democrat, but we're outnumbered four to one in this 
     county.''
       This is Leslie County, in the mountains of eastern 
     Kentucky's Cumberland Plateau. It was here, in 1978, that 
     Nixon made his first postexile public appearance, for the 
     dedication of a grand gymnasium that honors his presidency. 
     ``Everybody knew us because of Nixon,'' says Leslie County 
     High School basketball coach Ron Stidham, standing on his 
     home court inside the Tricky Dick. ``But that notoriety 
     aside, Tim Couch has made Hyden--well, if not a household 
     name exactly, at least people know where we are again.''
       Tim Couch, Elbert's son, is the best high school basketball 
     player in Kentucky. He led the state in scoring last season, 
     with 36 points a game as a Leslie County High junior. He is 
     expected to be named Mr. Basketball of the Bluegrass after 
     this season, which is why most Division I basketball coaches 
     want to upholster Couch in their school colors come 1996.
       Trouble is, Tim is also the most highly sought after 
     football recruit in the nation, one who almost certainly will 
     break the national record for career passing yardage this 
     Friday night in the state quarterfinals. He is 50 yards away 
     from breaking the mark of 11,700 set two years ago by Josh 
     Booty of Evangel Christian High in Shreveport, La., and Couch 
     needs only five touchdown passes to break that national 
     record as well. ``Couch is the best quarterback prospect I've 
     seen in 17 years,'' drools Tom Lemming, who publishes a 
     national recruiting newsletter. ``Better than Jeff George, 
     Ron Powlus and Peyton Manning. He reminds recruiters of John 
     Elway.'' ESPN draft nitwit Mel Kiper Jr. agrees and considers 
     Tim, who is 6'5'' and 215 pounds, one of the best pro 
     quarterback prospects in the nation. And to think that Tim is 
     just 18.
       ``Everybody around here is just so happy,'' Tim says of 
     Hyden (pop. 375). ``They all want to see me go to the NFL and 
     become a big star. It gives me a lot of pride, the way such a 
     small place has rallied around one person.''
       Through it all Tim has remained unfailingly polite, 
     genuinely humble and undeniably charismatic. Everywhere one 
     goes in Kentucky, people talk about the closely-cropped 
     Couch. He's like Gump, with a pump fake. And there's another 
     important difference: ``He's an A-B student,'' says Leslie 
     County High principal Omus Shepherd. ``In fact, to see him in 
     school, you wouldn't know he's an athlete, you wouldn't know 
     him from any other student. I don't know of any problem we've 
     ever had out of the boy.''
       The boy was excused from class one afternoon early in the 
     football season when Governor Brereton Jones came to Hyden to 
     make Tim an honorary Kentucky Colonel, one of the youngest 
     recipients of the state's equivalent of knighthood. The 
     next evening the colonel threw for three touchdowns and 
     ran for two more in a 34-27 win a Woodford County High, 
     after which several opponents wanted a piece of him. ``I 
     saw them coming at me and thought we were in a fight,'' 
     says Tim. Instead, they wanted his autograph.
       The next day Tim drove 124 miles to Lexington to watch the 
     Kentucky-Louisville football game with his folks. En route, 
     they stopped at a diner. Recently retired Los Angeles Laker 
     center and former Kentucky star Sam Bowie approached Tim's 
     table to say how much he has enjoyed following Tim's career. 
     Emboldened, Adolph Rupp's grandson Chip, who also happened to 
     be in the diner, did the same. After the game the Couches 
     repaired to the Lexington home of Miami Heat guard and ex-
     Wildcat star Rex Chapman, who simply wanted to meet Tim.
       ``I told him he was my hero growing up,'' Tim says of 
     Chapman. ``I told him how I dreamed in the backyard about 
     filling his shoes some day at Kentucky.''
       ``Tim used to shoot baskets outside for hours in the 
     winter, until his fingers were 

[[Page S18446]]
     bleeding,'' says Tim's mother, Janice. ``I always had to make him come 
     in before he got frostbite.''
       Come summer, he would throw footballs all afternoon with 
     his older--by four years--brother, Greg. Tim always pretended 
     to be Joe Montana or Dan Marino. Now, Marino aspires to play 
     with Couch. ``I hope I'm still in the league when you get 
     here,'' the Miami Dolphin quarterback told Couch when the two 
     met in Cincinnati, where the Dolphins played the Bengals on 
     Oct. 1.
       Tim never played baseball. ``He told me in ninth grade, 
     `Dad, I don't want to stand there and let them throw a ball 
     60 miles an hour at my head,''' recalls Elbert, who is 
     director of transportation for the county school system. When 
     Greg became the quarterback at Leslie County High, Tim 
     attended practices. ``In fifth and sixth grade he was 
     throwing the ball like a rocket,'' says Eagle football coach 
     Joe Beder, an assistant at the time. ``You knew then he would 
     be the quarterback here.''
       Couch made the high school team as a seventh-grader, backed 
     up his brother as an eighth-grader and became the starting 
     quarterback as a freshman, when Greg went to play football at 
     Eastern Kentucky (where, after redshirtings one season, he's 
     now a junior reserve). Tim points to the utility pole in the 
     front yard of his family's comfortable two-story home. ``When 
     Greg went to college, I used to throw at that light pole,'' 
     he says. ``I'd take a five-steps drop and try to hit it as if 
     it was a receiver on the run, 30 feet out.'' Then he would 
     place two garbage cans next to each other and throw ``little 
     fade passes'' over the first defending can and into the 
     second. ``There's not much else to do in Hyden,'' says Todd 
     Crawford, a physician's assistant who works with the Leslie 
     County team.
       So the Hydenites watch Couch. County judge-executive Onzie 
     Sizemore was a star high school quarterback in Hyden in the 
     early 1970s. ``Time is the best athlete I've ever seen in 
     Kentucky,'' says the judge, deliberating on Tim down at the 
     county court and jailhouse. ``He's the best thing that ever 
     happened to Hyden. I just hope he doesn't run for county 
     judge-executive, because then I'm out of a job.''
       They come from all over Kentucky to see Tim play. On Friday 
     nights cars back up for a mile at the toll booth that guards 
     the Hyden exit of the Daniel Boone Parkway. And when the 
     Eagles play an away game, says Rick Hensley, whose son Ricky 
     is Tim's favorite target, ``last one outta town turns out the 
     lights.''
       There is a sign outside of town that reads Hyden: Home of 
     Osborne Bros. Stars of the Grand Ole Opry, the Osbornes wrote 
     ``Rocky Top,'' which is the football anthem at Tennessee, 
     whose Volunteers are unanimously reviled in Kentucky. When 
     Tim engineered a season-opening 44-42 upset of Fort Thomas 
     Highlands High in Lexington, he came home to find 
     that benevolent vandals had altered the sign so it read 
     Hyden: Home of Tim Couch.
       This season Couch has thrown for nearly 3,500 yards and 37 
     touchdowns in 12 games. Clearly, his numbers are 
     preposterous. Last year he completed 75.1% of his passes, a 
     national record. Against Clark County High in the 1994 season 
     opener, he completed 25 of 27 passes. Against Shelby Valley 
     High this fall, he threw for 533 yards and seven scores and 
     was pulled four minutes into the second half. Likewise, in 
     October he played only one half against one of Kentucky's 
     top-ranked teams, Hopkinsville, when the badly outmanned 
     Eagles were bused seven hours each way and lost 61-0.
       Even that defeat didn't cool the ardor of the Couch 
     potatoes, as Hyden's residents have come to call themselves. 
     As he drives home from football practice in his Mercury 
     Cougar on an autumn Thursday, Couch waves like a parade 
     marshal to every passing pedestrian, then enters his house 
     and is handed the telephone. ``Tennessee,'' says Janice, and 
     Tim chats cordially with Volunteer football coach Phillip 
     Fulmer. Bobby Bowden, Terry Bowden, Lou Holtz and Joe Paterno 
     check in weekly as well.
       There is enormous pressure on him to play football at 
     Kentucky, and the Cats are on Couch like cats on a couch. 
     Here is a front-page Lexington Herald-Leader headline: Couch 
     To Watch UK Scrimmage. Kentucky basketball coach Rick Pitino 
     met with Tim and promised him a spot on the basketball team 
     if he sign to play football for the Wildcats. And Kentucky 
     football coach Bill Curry, although forbidden by the NCAA to 
     talk about recruits, called him ``the best high school 
     prospect I've ever seen.'' Every Omus, Onzie and Elbert in 
     Kentucky expects Tim to make the Cats an instant football 
     power. ``I may be crazy, but I believe Tim Couch is good 
     enough to get this program back to the Sugar Bowl,'' writes 
     columnist Dave Barker in The Cats' Pause, a Kentucky sports 
     weekly. ``Yes, that's right. From 1-10 to 10-1.''
       ``Lord God, if Tim goes to UK they'll be namin' babies for 
     him before he plays his first game,'' says Elbert's friend 
     Vic DeSimone. ``Every kid in Kentucky will wear a number 2 
     jersey.'' DeSimone--a candy manufacturer's rep who has 
     dropped by Leslie County High to chat--furrows his brow 
     before giving voice to every Kentuckian's darkest fear. ``You 
     wouldn't let him go to Tennessee, would you?'' he asks 
     Elbert. ``I mean, the boy can go to Liberty Baptist and still 
     become a pro.''
       ``Have to take the Fifth Amendment on that one,'' says 
     Elbert, who later concedes: ``If Tim does go out of state, 
     we'll have to move out of state.''
       Wherever Couch goes, if he plays basketball at all in 
     college, it will be as an afterthought to football, and a 
     great many disappointed people will be left in his wake. 
     ``It's hard for an 18-year-old kid to tell a coach whom he's 
     grown up adoring that he isn't going to play for him,'' says 
     Tim, who is still considering Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, 
     Notre Dame, Ohio State and (sigh) Tennessee. ``I'm thinking 
     about it all the time,'' he says of his impending decision. 
     ``Even if I'm just lying in bed, it never leaves my mind.''
       He has made certain of that. Taped above the light switch 
     in his bedroom is a two-sentence note from a football 
     assistant at Northwestern. ``Your talent is God's gift to 
     you,'' it reads. ``What you do with your talent is your gift 
     back to God.''
       It is the last thing that Tim sees each night when he turns 
     out the lights.

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