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long article on Charley Pell... I found it interesting that
Feb 21, 2017, 6:03 PM
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the annual salary when he took the Clemson job in 1977 was $40,000. You plug that into an inflation calculator and it's about $160K today. Certainly not chump change, but nowhere near the jack they pull down nowadays. He died a couple months after this article in The State.
Rage Against Darkness
Former Clemson football coach Charley Pell has turned his battle over to God
By BOB GILLESPIE
The State
March 4, 2001
"Your dinner OK, honey?" the middle-aged waitress asks. Charley Pell looks up from the table, the constant pain visible only in his eyes, and manages a wan smile.
"I've eaten all I can right now," he says.
She persists: "You want me to box that up for you, then?"
Pell nods, knowing the remains of his shrimp scampi will go in the garbage at home.
"The radiation treatments burn bad cells and good ones, too," he says. "They attacked the lymph nodes around my esophagus, and it affects swallowing. Even a sip of water feels huge."
Pell sighs again. In a lifetime of battles, this one – lung cancer – is the most trying.
Lines crease his forehead like furrows. His hair is white, thinning. The former football coach at Clemson and Florida is nearly 60; he looks 10 years older.
"Aggressive" treatments Pell has received to combat the cancer make him feel as wrung-out as an old washrag. The disease drained 60 pounds from his 6-foot frame in three months, forced him to keep oxygen handy, and bent him double with nausea until he seemed permanently bowed over, eyes shut, lips clinched.
The man who once, with a stare, could – in the words of former Clemson lineman Jim Stuckey -"scare the living doo-doo out of you," now appears old, tired and resigned to his fate ... until he speaks. Then his voice, raspy because of his tortured throat, hits you with unexpected resolve.
"I've been blessed with a great life," he says. "I've been knocked down, too. But it'd be hard to say you've lived if you hadn't been knocked around, wouldn't it?"
Charley Pell has been knocked down, all right. Cancer is the latest, perhaps the worst, but the feeling is not unfamiliar.
Some 25 years ago, Pell took a Clemson team that was 5-15-2 over two seasons and won 18 games in 1977 and 1978, leading the Tigers to their first bowl games in two decades. But days before the second bowl, he quit, leaving Clemson fans angry and betrayed, and went to Florida – where he was 0-10-1 his first season.
The next four seasons in Gainesville, Pell won 33 games and built a foundation for the powerhouse now run by Steve Spurrier. But to many, his legacy was a harsh NCAA probation and a reputation as a cheater.
Later came failed businesses, family heartaches and, in 1994, a suicide attempt. Now, just as life seemed ready to let him relax and enjoy old age, comes this: cancer.
"This is the toughest, and yet ... "says Ward Pell, his wife of 32 years. "When the doctors told him he had a 30 percent chance, I told him, 'Charley, you've taken on football programs with less chance. We can whip this, too.'
Says Pell: "If it's meant to be, it will. If it's God's plan."
He looks back on what was, what might have been. Regrets? Some, yes. But he always has done what he's doing now: the very best he knows how.
LIVING WITH FAMILY
Last October, feeling lethargic, Pell gave in to his wife's insistence that he get a physical. X-rays revealed a large, advanced tumor on his lung. At Birmingham's Kirkland Clinic, doctors at first gave Pell only a 5 percent survival rate.
Oncologists determined the tumor was inoperable, and Pell was referred to a University of Alabama-Birmingham study, where for 10 weeks he underwent 15 chemotherapy doses and 30 radiation treatments.
"I was fatigued, nauseated, sick all over, 24 hours a day," Pell says. "You'd think you were feeling a little better, and it'd be time for the next treatment."
Still, Pell usually drove himself the hour to and from Birmingham. And he returned to his job as vice president of The National Auction Group, Inc., a "trophy property" outfit handling only properties worth $1 million or more.
In mid-February, Charley and Ward left for an auction in the Bahamas. They planned to return by Wednesday, when doctors will tell him if "I'm one of the three (who survive) or one of the seven."
Pell talks about "fighting cancer" with a wry chuckle.
"I've turned it over to Jesus Christ," he says. "I can't win, the doctors can't win, so I'll let Him decide. I don't want to over-preach, but that's what I believe."
He says it helps to be here, close to where he was raised, surrounded by family. His son, Chas, and grandchildren are in Birmingham. His daughter, Sloan, lives in Huntsville.
"And of course," he adds, "95 percent of my family is still on 'The Mountain.' "
GETTING INTO COACHING
To understand Charley Pell, you have to go to Sand Mountain, an area 20 miles west of Gadsden that is largely as rural as when he grew up there 50 years ago. Albertville, Guntersville and Boaz are population centers, but mostly "The Mountain" was small farms and farming families like Pell's parents.
Youngsters worked first and worried about education later. "My mother and dad, like most in the country then, didn't go far in school," Pell says. "I never saw a daily newspaper until high school, first saw a TV when I was 15."
And he didn't play high school football, a luxury for farming families, until Bobby Golden became coach at Albertville High in 1958. Golden, a deacon in the local Baptist church, convinced Pell's religious parents it would be all right for their strapping son to play his senior year.
Even then, his ambitions were limited to a local junior college. But Golden spoke with the new coach at Alabama, and to the Pells' disbelief, Bear Bryant offered their son a football scholarship.
Pell, who played on Alabama's 1961 national championship team, made an early impression on the legendary coach. He was bright, enthusiastic and a hard worker.
And he had something Bryant recognized: the ability to be the center of attention when he walked into a room.
When he graduated in 1964, Bryant called Pell to his office. "What are you going to do next year?" the coach asked. Pell conceded he had no real plans. "I'll tell you what you're going to do: You're going to stay here and work for me," Bryant said.
"Yes sir," Pell replied.
"It's not like I had 14 different careers to choose from," he says now.
Pell went to Kentucky in 1965 with former 'Bama assistant Charlie Bradshaw, where he met Ward, a student working in the athletics department. In 1969, Bradshaw announced he was resigning, and Pell got a lesson in the coaching game.
The Jacksonville (Ala.) State job was opening up, so Pell called Jimmy Smothers, sports editor of the Gadsden Times, who had covered him in high school.
"He asked me how he could get the job," Smothers says. "I told Houston Coles, the president, that I'd like to see Charley be the coach."
One problem: JSU didn't want a bachelor coach. So Pell and Ward became newlyweds – she says the events are directly linked; he denies it – and he became, at 27, a head coach.
JSU's Gamecocks went 10-0 in 1970, his second of five seasons, and beat Florida A&M in the Orange Blossom Classic, the first predominantly white team to play in the historically black bowl.
In 1974, he joined the Virginia Tech staff of ex-Alabama assistant Jimmy Sharpe, where he would take his first step toward college football's big time – and big-time heartaches.
VICTORY CIGARS AT CLEMSON
Ward remembers a cold Blacksburg night around Christmas 1975, she and Charley and 5-year-old son Carrick huddled in the bedroom watching TV. The phone rang, and she heard her husband saying "Clemson" and "salary" and finally, "I've got to talk to Jimmy (Sharpe) and the athletics director."
Soon, Pell was defensive coordinator for Red Parker, Clemson's embattled fourth-year coach. The Tigers were 2-9 in 1975, and struggled again in 1976, going 3-6-2, but upsetting South Carolina in the finale, 28-9, behind sophomore quarterback Steve Fuller.
Afterward, Parker was ordered to fire several assistants. When he refused, athletics director Bill McLellan fired Parker, then approached Pell about the job, which paid a princely $40,000, "TV and everything," Pell says.
Pell calls the episode "one of the dark chapters of my life." A bitter Parker later accused him of "stabbing me in the back" to get the job. McLellan says that wasn't so.
"Red was a good recruiter," he says, "but Charley could take his and beat yours, or take yours and beat his.
"I called Bear Bryant, and he couldn't say enough good things about Charley."
Even so, Pell says McLellan at first asked if he would stay on if Clemson hired Auburn's Pat Dye. "I said, 'Hell, no.' I told him, 'I can do the job as well as Pat Dye.'"
In 1977, he lived up to that claim. The Tigers, after an opening loss to Maryland, upset No. 17 Georgia, 7-6, the start of an 8-3-1 season. Jim Stuckey remembers the Clemson tradition that began that day.
"On the way out of Athens, coach Pell told the bus driver to pull over at this country store," Stuckey says. "He went in, came back and passed out victory cigars."
From then through the Danny Ford era, Clemson teams always lit up stogies after wins. "I've still got all eight of mine from that season in a Gator Bowl mug," Stuckey says.
Pell already had made an impression in off-season workouts, Fuller says.
"Maybe 75 percent of the team was in the bathroom afterward, throwing up. We were thinking, 'Good Lord, what have we gotten into?'"
But Pell won most players over. "He had just an absolute business-like attitude," Fuller says. "I was one who bought into that. There were players who weren't pleased with him, but even they respected his ability."
Stuckey is more succinct. "Clemson's rise started when we won that Georgia game," he says.
He's equally direct about his relationship with Pell: "He made me a man."
INTO THE SWAMP
In 1978, Clemson went 11-1, losing only to No. 8 Georgia. The Tigers won their first ACC championship since 1967, beat Ohio State in the now-famous Woody Hayes Gator Bowl, and finished ranked No. 6. But Pell wasn't around to see the end.
Days before the team left for Jacksonville, Pell was on a plane to Florida, where he was introduced as the Gators' new coach.
"He told me 30 minutes before he left that he wasn't going," McLellan says. "Next thing I knew, he'd made the decision. He called me from the Anderson airport before he flew out with the Florida president."
Pell's face flushes when he hears that account.
"They got mad when I left, told the press a bunch of lies," he says. "They knew all I knew about the Florida situation."
Pell says he was contacted, then informed McLellan the Gators were interviewing him, Arkansas' Lou Holtz, Texas' Darryl Royal and Steve Sloan, then at Mississippi.
"I did what I was supposed to do as an employee," he says. "I was up front every step of the way."
Jimmye Laycock, then an assistant under Pell and now head coach at William & Mary, says he'd heard "rumblings" about Florida, but only knew for sure when the staff was called into Pell's office.
"He told us he was going to Florida, and he was out the door and on the plane and gone," Laycock says.
Stuckey and Fuller say they were betrayed when Pell left just before the Gator Bowl, but rallied behind new coach Danny Ford.
"I was absolutely crushed," Stuckey says. "But in retrospect, I fully understand now that in his profession, those things happen. It was a good move for him."
Bobby Robinson, Clemson's athletics director, was the Tigers' golf coach and business manager in 1978. "Red Parker got the players here, but Charley showed us how to win," he says. "I took it (Pell's leaving) as he gave us two great years and put us on track to great things."
At Florida, Pell again went into a rebuilding mode. The Gators were 4-7 in 1978,but the real challenge was Florida's run-down facilities, which left it behind the rest of the Southeastern Conference. Pell's first success was in convincing Wendy's hamburger baron Dave Thomas to contribute $50,000 for a new weight room.
Wealthy alums such as Ben Hill Griffin, after whom Florida's stadium is now named, helped finance work on the south end zone. Pell also oversaw the creation of statewide Gator Clubs, which raised money for football.
"It was like awakening a sleeping giant," Pell says.
Norm Carlson, Florida's longtime assistant athletics director for communications, says it took Pell to do that.
"It was the force of his personality," he says. "He convinced the right people if we wanted to be competitive, they had to get in there (and donate money)."
For four seasons, it seemed a match made in heaven. But in January 1985 the NCAA hit Florida with a two-year probation, including bans on TV appearances and bowl games. By then, Pell was gone, fired three games into the 1984 season.
The NCAA report listed 24 cases of violations in its report. The "head football coach" was linked to eight of those, most damning the operation of a $4,000 "slush" fund and lying to NCAA officials.
Pell's voice rises sharply when that time is brought up.
"I took the blame for every coach, every charge leveled at Florida," he says, anger biting off each word. "I made a deal with the president (Florida's Marshall Criser) that I'd admit I ordered or instructed coaches to do what they said we did."
For that admission, Pell says, he was supposed to be allowed to coach the remainder of the 1984 season. Instead, assistant coach Galen Hall replaced him on Sept. 15, 1984.
"I should've fought them," Pell says, the anger simmering, weariness taking over. "I lied to the NCAA, yes. It was wrong, illegal. But I should've fought for my career."
He stares that stare and says, "I would not have lost."
SUICIDE ATTEMPT
The significance of February is not lost on Ward Pell. In the midst of her husband's battle with cancer, she remembers that seven years ago this past month, she almost lost him to his own hand.
"Until this," she says, "that was the worst time ever."
On Feb. 2, 1994, Charley Pell drove his car into a wooded area near Jacksonville, Fla., drank vodka, swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe into the back window, and lay down to die.
It had been coming for a while, he says. Several business deals went sour, and he worried about debts. His father and a close friend had died. One day, he decided, "There's got to be a better place than this."
Typically, Pell spent nine months planning his suicide. He made financial arrangements for Ward, wrote good-bye letters, even left a map for a friend so his body could be found afterward.
"Being as obsessive as I am, I planned every detail," Pell said later.
The attempt failed because Pell, thinking he wasn't slipping away quickly enough, tried to hurry the process by putting the hose in his mouth. Sickened, he semi-consciously stumbled from the car, where a friend, Malcolm Jowers, discovered him.
When he woke up in a hospital, "anger was the first emotion I felt," he said. "It was the biggest failure of my life."
In fact, it was the scream for help of a man suffering from clinical depression.
Pell spent 17 days in a mental health facility, getting treatment, medication and understanding. Later, he found out his brother, Myles, had been on similar medication for 26 years.
Pell became a spokesman for depression awareness. "The message I want to get out is that it's an illness (but) it's manageable, it's treatable," he said in 1996. "When all our worth has to come from outside ... "
OUT OF HIS CONTROL
These days, Pell looks around and finds worthiness everywhere.
On a recent Sunday, he and Ward welcome their three children, grandchildren Buddy and Anne, and a handful of close friends who have dropped by to say hello. Ward moves around, talking in her soft accent, inquiring, laughing.
Charley sits on the sofa, a smile beneath the oxygen tubing that runs to the clip on his nose. It all seems so serene, comfortable and comforting, despite the specter of death.
Ward says they intend to keep it that way, no matter what. "I told Charley when we were at Kirkland, 'God didn't want you seven years ago, and you've done nothing to change since then. So we'll get through this.' "
Pell is asked if, indeed, this is the toughest battle of his life. He chuckles softly.
"I don't worry about this (cancer). There's less stress now than with some other situations. In those, we had some input, some part in making decisions. In this, we don't have any."
He says he has thought about death. "Part of faith is, you can't have it without accepting what the Bible says about life, about death, about life after death. When I tell you I've accepted that, that's a finale, complete."
He pauses, then laughs again. "And there are no more (other people's) opinions you have to worry about."
Whatever comes, the boy from Sand Mountain figures he can handle it. For sure, he'll do the best he knows how.
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