Color me sorry to see Mack Brown step down
Posted on: December 16,2013
Mack Brown will coach his last game at the University of Texas in the Alamo Bowl. I, for one, will be sorry to see him go. He is a class act, always has been. Our paths crossed early in our careers and we have remained friends since. Here is my memory of Mack as a first-year assistant coach at Southern Miss…
Let’s go back 38 years to the fall of 1975. I was learning on the job as a sports reporter who still didn’t need to shave at The Hattiesburg American.It was my first full-time newspaper job.
Mack Brown, was learning on the job as the wide receivers coach on Bobby Collins’ first staff at Southern Miss.
It was Brown’s first full-time coaching job.
I was 23; he was 24.
He played tennis; I played golf. He tried to convert me, correctly saying I’d get a lot more exercise in much less time on the tennis courts. Besides, he said, assistant football coaches, who aspire to be head coaches, have far too little free time for golf.
So we began a twice weekly game of tennis that began at sunrise. I never won a set, and I didn’t win many games. The talent differential was as enormous as it was predictable. He had been a three-sport high school star and then a starting halfback at Florida State; I had been a second-string point guard at Thames Junior High.
In retrospect, I think the games I won, he let me have. You’d have to know Mack to understand. He’s that nice a guy.
In fact, to this day when people ask me if I ever expected him to be this successful as a head football coach, this is my answer: I knew he had the brains. I knew he had the ambition, because he told me so often. I just thought he was too nice a guy to make it big in such a cut-throat business. I honestly didn’t think he could be mean enough. Interestingly, that has been a criticism of Brown through the years: He’s just too nice.
But Mack Brown has succeeded wildly. He took over terrible programs at Tulane and North Carolina and turned them into winners. He took over a Texas program in disarray and won big there, as well. He began his career making $13,000 a year at USM; he ended it making more than $5 million a year at Texas. He is positive proof that really genuinely nice guys don’t necessarily finish last.
Attention to detail
If you were to approach Collins these days – most likely on the first tee of the Hattiesburg Country Club – and congratulate him on being such an astute judge of young coaching talent, Collins would just laugh. And he’d tell you he hired Mack Brown straight out of college for two reasons: 1) he was a nice kid; and 2) and, mostly, because he came cheap.
Working the phones
Former USM coach Jeff Bower played one year at quarterback under Brown and then served two years as a graduate assistant with him.
“Mack connected with everybody; his ability to communicate was obviously his greatest strength,” Bower says. “He was demanding on the field, but he won everybody over with his personality off it. I remember back then, he really worked the phones and it served him well then and still does.”
When Brown left USM to go to Memphis in 1977, he said he took the lateral move because he was trying to learn from as many head coaches as possible in his journey to becoming a head coach himself.
It opened a full-time job at USM. Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Jeff Bower took it.
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Rick,
As a Hattiesburg native who married into a family of Longhorns, I thank you for such a well written article. There is not a finer coach, or man, than Mack Brown.
Have a very Merry Christmas!
Karen Thomas Thomson