[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 21]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 30806-30808]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                          HONORING GORDON WOOD

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. CHARLES W. STENHOLM

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, November 17, 1999

  Mr. STENHOLM. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a great deal of Texas 
pride to recognize

[[Page 30807]]

an outstanding individual, Gordon Wood of Brownwood, Texas.
  In today's edition of the Dallas Morning News, the newspaper named 
Coach Wood, the ``Coach of the Century'' as part of its 100 Years of 
Texas High School Football series. I can think of no one more 
deserving. Coach Wood not only led and inspired many young people 
during his career but also brought great achievements to several Texas 
communities.
  ``Coach'' was an important figure during the formative years of my 
life, and he has remained so. Early in his career, he coached in my 
hometown of Stamford. He led our team to two State championships, and I 
am proud to have been part of his early success. He went on to lead the 
Brownwood Lions to seven State championships and won a total of 405 
games in his 43-year career.
  Coach Wood is a legend in Texas not only for his coaching but for the 
way he has led his life. To me, that puts him in the Ranks of Tom 
Landry, Bear Bryant and Joe Paterno.
  I wish to include in the Record a copy of the article that ran this 
morning in the Dallas Morning News.
  This honor is a great tribute to Coach Wood and his wife, Katharine, 
and I know there are many folks who join me in sending them 
congratulations and best wishes.

             [From the Dallas Morning News, Nov. 17, 1999]

Always in the Game--Football, Gordon Wood Style, Still Absorbs Coach of 
                                Century

                          (Kevin Sherrington)

       Brownwood, Texas.--Gordon Wood wears hearing aids in both 
     ears. He had a triple bypass in 1990, and five years ago a 
     stroke punched a few holes in his memory. He's working on his 
     third artificial hip. He's diabetic. A faint white web of 
     scars runs wild over his mottled face, the vestiges of 13 
     skin tumors.
       This is what can happen to you if you live 85 years.
       He can't play golf because of the bad left hip. He won't 
     play checkers anymore because that's what he was doing when 
     the world started spinning, and he walked into a restroom and 
     couldn't find his way out. A stroke, the doctors told him. A 
     woman came to get him in the restroom and asked him to step 
     back with his right foot. He tried to comply but stepped 
     forward instead, right into the toilet.
       Checkers was fun, and he was good at it, but it's not worth 
     it if it reminds him of that. So now the only hobby he has 
     left is football.
       This is what can happen to you if you coach 43 years.
       Or maybe this is what happens if you're Gordon Wood, the 
     greatest coach in the history of Texas high school football.
       A Dallas Morning News panel of college coaches and sports 
     writers chose Wood over a group that included Waco's Paul 
     Tyson, who won four state championships in the 1920s, and 
     Abilene's Chuck Moser, who won 49 consecutive games. Joe 
     Golding got some consideration at Wichita Falls, as did 
     Amarillo's Blair Cherry.
       Wood wasn't a hard choice, though. He won nine state 
     championships, two at Stamford and seven at Brownwood, which 
     in the 40 years before he arrived had won only a single 
     district title.
       He won 405 games overall, which was more than anyone else 
     in the nation when he retired in 1985 at 71.
       But, if you're looking for numbers to define Wood's 
     greatness, you must know that he is the only coach to win 100 
     games in three different decades, and the only coach who won 
     state titles in three decades, as well.
       Those numbers indicate that he never lost his enthusiasm 
     for the game, never thought he knew so much that he couldn't 
     learn more, never won so much that he got enough of it.
       Not when he retired 14 years ago.
       Not even now.
       The numbers say a lot about Gordon Wood. But, if you really 
     want to know why he was so great, you only have to go to a 
     game with him.
       He is better-looking in person than in photographs. 
     Pictures can't capture his vitality or regal posture, his 
     warmth, his habit of extending both hands to someone in 
     greeting, or his habit of holding on to the hand of a young 
     person while he's talking to him. In most pictures, he looks 
     almost sad, or, at best, blank. They couldn't be less 
     telling. Pictures can't show the balletic movement of a 
     curious, inquisitive mind.
       He is sitting in the press box of the stadium named after 
     him, talking about his offense between bites of a ham 
     sandwich.
       Did you always run the Wing-T?
       ``I have since the war,'' Wood says.
       He means World War II. He put in the offense at the counsel 
     of Clyde ``Bulldog'' Turner, once called the toughest 
     football player ever. But it was Turner's old college coach, 
     Warren Woodson, who invented the offense, the same one he 
     used at Hardin-Simmons and New Mexico State and Arizona, and 
     in the process was the only coach ever to produce the 
     nation's top rusher four years in a row.
       ``Warren Woodson was one of the greatest offensive coaches 
     that ever was,'' Wood says. ``Cocky little devil, too. He 
     watched us one time and came up to me afterward and said, 
     `Coach, don't tell anybody you run our offense. You did such 
     a lousy job.'
       ``Yeah, he was the best offensive coach I ever saw.''
       He takes a bit out of his sandwich.
       ``Sorriest defensive coach, too.''
       Warren Woodson is dead. So is Bulldog Turner. They are 
     great names lost to a younger generation that wouldn't know a 
     Wing-T offense from a wingtip shoe. Wood knew Turner and 
     Woodson, and he knows Darrell Royal, who calls Wood ``one of 
     the all-time great football coaches, regardless of the 
     level.'' He is a friend of Bum Phillips, who calls Wood the 
     best coach he knows. Bear Bryant told Wood's son, Jim, that, 
     had he stayed at Texas A&M, ``I would have given your dad a 
     heck of a run for the best coach in Texas.''
       Wood knows Bill Parcells. Maybe you remember the story that 
     came out a couple of years ago, when Parcells took over as 
     coach of the New York Jets after going to Super Bowls with 
     two different organizations. Parcells told reporters about 
     the time he coached linebackers for Texas Tech in the 1970s. 
     They had 20 spring practices, and at more than a dozen, he 
     saw the same leathery old man in a maroon cap with a ``B'' on 
     it. Parcells introduced himself and asked the old man where 
     he was from.
       ``A little town down the road here,'' the man said.
       ``Outside Lubbock?'' Parcells asked.
       ``No, a little further.''
       ``How far is it?''
       ``Well, it's 2\1/2\ hours one way.''
       Wood drove five hours a day to watch Tech's linebackers. He 
     drove every day for two weeks to learn something from a coach 
     half his age. Parcells said Wood had as much influence on him 
     as Halas, Lombardi, Noll or Landry, and he thinks about him 
     every summer when training camp starts, thinks about the old 
     man with more than 300 wins ``driving five hours a day to 
     find out something.''
       Wood has gone farther than that. Every year, for 43 years, 
     he has traveled around the country to the American Football 
     Coaches Association meeting. He has lectured at coaching 
     clinics in 18 states, most of them more than once. He spoke 
     in Tennessee last summer.
       He went to Canada three times, in the summers of 1967, '70 
     and '71. He was guest coach for the CFL's Winnipeg Blue 
     Bombers, coached by a man named Jim Spavitol, who played at 
     Oklahoma State and first met Wood in the Navy.
       After one of his summer trips north, Katharine, his wife of 
     56 years, asked him what it was like working with 
     professional players.
       ``They're just overgrown boys,'' he said.
       He only had a few players who went on to play professional 
     football. The best probably was Lawrence Elkins, the Baylor 
     receiver, his career ruined by injuries in the NFL. The best 
     set was the three Southall brothers--Si, Terry and Shae--all 
     quarterbacks, the sons of his long-time assistant, Morris 
     Southall.
       Southall helped run the offense. In the Wing-T, the Lions 
     flipped the offensive line to double their number of plays 
     and simplify blocking assignments. Wood told Royal about it 
     in 1960, when Royal invited him on a trip to New York. Royal 
     used the flip-flop in 1963, when he won his first national 
     championship.
       ``We ran more formations than most teams run plays,'' Wood 
     says. ``We'd run 36, 39, 42 plays a week in practice, and the 
     second team got just as many reps as the first team.''
       And, always, the rules were the same.
       ``Kid makes a mistake in practice,'' Wood says, ``we run it 
     over again.''
       Wood hates mistakes. He made a point in his career of 
     making players believe in themselves. He won a state 
     championship his first season at Brownwood, in 1960. He says 
     that, if you severely criticize a player at practice, you 
     have to make sure you do something to build him up again.
       But it is his obsessive perfectionism that drives him. He 
     watches anxiously from a press box cubicle as the Lions play 
     host to Joshua, a heavy underdog. He talks until a play 
     starts and then stops talking until it's over. If the play is 
     a success for Brownwood, he might say nothing, most likely 
     picking up his speech where he left off. If the play favors 
     Joshua, it might give him fits.
       Like, say, a 10-yard burst on a trap play by Joshua.
       ``You go back to our state championship teams,'' he says, 
     irritated, ``and see how many zeroes it has there for what 
     the other teams scored.''
       He is up from his press box seat, talking to someone about 
     how in the world Joshua can be moving the ball at all when he 
     suddenly realizes that the Joshua band is playing.
       ``Did they score?'' he asks, incredulous.
       Forty-one-yard field goal, someone says. Makes it 21-3, 
     Brownwood.
       ``Gaw-dang,'' Wood says.
       He settles down and goes back to talking about offense. He 
     got plays everywhere. He'd see something in a college game on 
     Saturday

[[Page 30808]]

     afternoon and put it in the game plan Sunday night.
       He has spoken at so many clinics that most of what he says 
     seems as if he were reading it off the walls of a locker 
     room.
       On a coach who wouldn't leave his team for a week: ``If you 
     can't leave for four days, you've got a poor group of 
     assistant coaches. And if you leave for four days, the kids 
     will listen to you more when you come back.''
       On the variety of offenses available: ``It doesn't make a 
     dang what you line up in; it's what you do after you get 
     there.''
       On his coaching philosophy: ``It's not the big things that 
     beat you; it's a million little things.''
       The little things might surprise you. He watched a coach in 
     practice one day and noticed that, on every offensive play, 
     he put the ball down on a yard line. Wood couldn't believe 
     it. How often does that happen in a game? Move the ball 
     around, he told them. Make the players look to see where the 
     ball is, and maybe they won't draw foolish penalties for 
     lining up offsides.
       His assistants knew what he wanted. Southall, the only 
     assistant over elected president of the Texas High School 
     Coaches Association, worked for him 31 of his last 38 years 
     in coaching.
       Southall left him only a couple of times, once to be head 
     coach at Winters after Wood left from Stamford, where he won 
     state championships in 1955 and '56.
       ``If I'd had him at Stamford . . .'' Wood says of Southall 
     and stops in mid-sentence when a ball bounces off a Brownwood 
     receiver and into the hands of a Joshua defensive back.
       ``That's two balls they've dropped,'' he says.
       He shakes his head.
       ``If I'd had him at Stamford,'' he says again, ``I'd have 
     won three state championships there. No doubt. He was the 
     best quarterback coach in the state.''
       He thinks about the interception again and winces.
       ``That kills me when they do things like that,'' he says.
       He sees mistakes everywhere. He watches the Cowboys every 
     Sunday. He is a friend and ``great fan'' of Tom Landry, a 
     reluctant admirer of the impersonal Jimmy Johnson and a 
     defender of Barry Switzer.
       But he is amazed at what happens on a professional football 
     field. He cites a play in a recent game where Emmitt Smith 
     fumbled on a pitch.
       ``You know why they fumbled and lost it?'' he asks. ``Damn 
     poor coaching, that's what.''
       He says he thought about writing Cowboys coach Chan Gailey 
     and telling him so. Wood is big on writing letters. They 
     appear occasionally in The News and the Abilene Reporter-
     News, mostly defending teachers of U.S. Rep. Charles 
     Stenholm, a former all-state end for Wood at Stamford. 
     Sometimes he just writes to correct mistakes of any nature.
       He'd write Gailey, he says, but he's not sure it would do 
     any good. He pulls out a sheet of paper and diagrams his 
     trademark play, the power pitch. Any team that wanted to beat 
     his, he says, first had to stop the power pitch. They'd run 
     it 20 times a game and never fumble.
       Here's why the Cowboys fumble, he says, whether it's Tony 
     Dorsett or Emmitt Smith: Coaches teach the running back to 
     run at an angle toward the line of scrimmage before taking 
     the pitch. Wood says they should have backs run parallel with 
     the line, which would better allow them to catch the pitch, 
     then square their shoulders before they hit the hole.
       But wouldn't the Cowboys argue that a back gets to the hole 
     faster if he runs at an angle?
       ``Might be quicker to the hole,'' Wood says tersely, his 
     eyes returning to the field, ``but you aren't gonna get to 
     the hole with the ball.''
       He stares straight ahead.
       ``Just a fundamental mistake,'' he mutters. ``S'all there 
     is to it.''
       Asked his favorite college coaches, he immediately cites 
     Texas Tech's Spike Dykes and Texas' Mack Brown. He is 
     intrigued by Oklahoma's comeback under Bob Stoops, he's 
     impressed by Kansas State Bill Snyder, and he's a great 
     friend of Florida State's Bobby Bowden.
       In his 1992 book, ``Gordon Wood's Game Plan to Winning 
     Football'', he lists 36 coaches who have contributed to his 
     beliefs, ranging from former assistants to Bo Schembechler, 
     W.T. Staple, Gene Stallings and a high school coach from Ohio 
     named Bron Bacevich.
       Wood's education in football seems funny, considering how 
     he started. His father was a farmer outside Abilene who 
     didn't believe a man needed much in the way of schooling.
       ``If you get to third grade and can read and write,'' A.V. 
     Wood told his eight children, ``you're wasting your time 
     going to college. You'll just be a teacher or preacher, and 
     you'll starve.''
       Gordon Wood was the only one of A.V.s four sons to earn a 
     high school diploma. He went on to Hardin-Simmons and never 
     starved. But he didn't get rich, either. The most he ever 
     made coaching and teaching, he says, was $42,000. He had an 
     offer in the '50s to be an assistant coach at Texas Tech, but 
     he didn't like the travel required in recruiting.
       He and Katharine, who reared a son and daughter, live in a 
     little three-bedroom house just two blocks from the high 
     school, the same place they've lived since the early '60s, 
     two doors down from Southhall. The day that Wood retired, he 
     fulfilled a promise to himself when he bought a luxury car 
     and the best golf cart he could find.
       He drove the car into the garage, and Katharine told him it 
     was nice. She also told him she'd never ride in it.
       ``There are too many hungry people in this town,'' she told 
     her husband.
       So he took the car back. He listens to Katharine, as long 
     as she's not trying to send in a couple of new plays. He says 
     he probably would have coached one more year, but she 
     insisted that he retire, and he reluctantly agreed.
       ``It was time for me to quit,'' he says.
       He sounds sincere. But he still has a radio program on 
     Thursday evenings to talk about high school football, still 
     has coffee with friends to talk about it. He watches it on 
     television, reads about it in newspapers, visits coaches and 
     players.
       And, nearly every week, he goes to a game. ``I enjoy 
     watching,'' he says. ``I really do.''
       Most of the time, anyway. With five minutes left in the 
     Joshua game, he gets up to leave the press box and beat the 
     rush. Brownwood is up, 35-6, and sitting on Joshua's goal 
     line.
       At one of the exits, he says to hold up a second. ``Let's 
     see if they score,'' he says.
       As if on cue, a Brownwood player is flagged for illegal 
     motion.
       ``Aw, crap,'' Wood says, and turns for the parking lot.
       Mistakes kill him, and always did. ``I'd die if we had two 
     or three penalties a game,'' he says.
       Mistakes kill him, but he says he didn't make one by 
     staying at Brownwood all those years. Katharine had put it in 
     perspective earlier. ``You take Tom Landry and Spike Dykes 
     and Grant Teaff and Hayden Fry,'' she said. ``They're all 
     great coaches, but they were all just kids who played high 
     school football in Texas.''
       And Gordon Wood was a Texas high school football coach, the 
     best ever, his peers say.
       Even an old perfectionist couldn't beat that.
       ``I wouldn't change anything,'' he says softly, sitting in 
     his driveway in his sensible sedan. ``No.''

     

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