BATON ROUGE – It had been 20 years since John Ed Bradley, co-captain of LSU head football coach Charles McClendon’s 18th and final team, visited the man who impacted his life in numerous ways.
But in early December 2001, two days before McClendon died at his Baton Rouge home at age 78, Bradley paid his last respects as did many of McClendon’s former players who loved him dearly.
“It was the most sentimental I’d ever heard him,” said Bradley, a novelist who has lived in Mandeville for the last 15 years. “He used to call everybody `Buddy.’ He said, `Buddy, I’m always going to be with you. I’m going to be with all my boys.’
“Almost every day, I still think about what he said. He knew that his legacy lived in us. He may have anticipated the day would come when he would be revered, when he understood what he had given.”
Tuesday marked the 100th birthday for McClendon, who remains the winningest head coach in LSU history with 137 wins in 18 seasons from 1962 to 1979. The native of Arkansas, who played collegiately as a University of Kentucky lineman for legendary coach Bear Bryant, became an LSU assistant in 1953 three years after closing his college playing career.
While McClendon never won a national title as a head coach (he won one in 1958 as an assistant on Paul Dietzel’s staff), he established LSU’s standard as a consistent winner.
Before McClendon replaced Dietzel after Dietzel left to coach Army, no LSU head coach had ever had more than four straight winning seasons.
McClendon not only had 12 consecutive winning seasons at one point but also finished with 7 bowl wins and 13 bowl appearances (still the most in both categories by an LSU head coach). Prior to his becoming head coach, LSU was 3-5 in bowls.
Though McClendon’s 1970 team won the SEC and finished 10-3 (the three losses by a combined 10 points), his best team was in 1969 when LSU went 9-1 and was shut out of playing in a major bowl when Notre Dame decided to end its self-imposed bowl ban.
“We took a team vote not to accept a bid from a lesser bowl,” said George Bevan, an All-American linebacker on LSU’s ’69 defense that gave up fewer points (91) in the entire 10-game season than LSU’s current defense recently did in back-to-back games vs. Ole Miss and Missouri. “We knew the coaching staff would get bonuses if we went to a bowl. But Coach Mac never told us how to vote. He let the team run the team.”
But beyond the wins and losses, McClendon remains beloved as someone who subtly taught lessons to his players applicable to their future lives.
“He was a straight shooter,” said former LSU All-America running back Charles Alexander, who remains the ninth leading rusher in SEC history with 4,035 yards in 44 games from 1975 to 1978. “If he told you something, he meant it. Everybody respected him. He never raised his voice. He hardly ever cursed.”
Alexander’s greatest memory of McClendon happened in August 1986 when his NFL career ended as he was cut by the Cincinnati Bengals after playing seven seasons with them.
“I didn’t find out until years later that after I was cut, Coach Mac made several calls to different NFL teams to try and get them to take a look at me,” said Alexander, who returned to live in his hometown of Galveston, Texas. “Not too many guys would do that. It meant a lot to me.”
Bevan remembered when he became the father of twins 31 years ago. He was living at the Country Club of Louisiana when McClendon stopped by for a visit on a Saturday afternoon.
“He wanted me to come out to the front gate and bring the twins,” Bevan said. “I drive out to the front. In Coach Mac’s pickup truck, he’s got a giant teddy bear and a giant rabbit to give to my kids. Who else would have done that?”
McClendon’s loyalty to his assistants, many of them who had been with him almost from the beginning, was legendary. When he refused to fire any of them after the Tigers fell into a lull of 4-loss seasons, he was told during the 1978 season he would be forced out as head coach at the end of the 1979 season and given an administrative assistant job to director of athletics Dietzel.
“I’m amazed how loyal Coach Mac was to the people who worked for him,” Bradley said. “There wasn’t a traitorous bone in his body. He surrounded himself with great men on his staff and the women who worked behind the scenes.
“His brilliance was his nobility in how he dealt with crises all around him. In his last season, he carried on the best way he could. He had a lot of detractors, but there was no quit in him. He kept fighting every day. He always kept his chin up.
“He wasn’t an articulate guy. He just communicated through action. He showed so much to us about humanity without him knowing he was doing it. It was natural for him.”
After his final college game Bradley helped give McClendon a victory ride to midfield when he closed his LSU career with a win over Wake Forest in the 1979 Tangerine Bowl. McClendon was just 56 years old.
He had much more to give college football but in a different manner. He bypassed the LSU administrative job and became the executive director of the Tangerine Bowl for two years where he delivered the bowl’s first two sellouts.
“Then he became executive director of the American Football Coaches Association (from 1982 to 1993) and worked hard to get a pension plan for former head and assistant coaches,” Bevan said.
It wasn’t a surprise that McClendon, long after his head coaching days, kept battling for everyone around him. This is why he’s eternally loved by the people he touched.
“I read a poem in college and I remember the very end of it,” Bradley said. “It goes `Sometimes I wonder how we survive when so much is given for no reason, and for no reason it’s taken away.’
“I think of that and apply it to Coach Mac. He gave us so much and they took him away from us.
“As the years pass, he’s bigger than ever to us. We revere him.”
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com