When Bill Curry came to Hilton Head: Blessed are the coaches who learn the final score

Editor’s note: Longtime columnist David Lauderdale retired in July, and we are reprinting some of his columns as a tribute to his career. This column originally was published Feb. 20, 2015.

Bill Curry returned to Hilton Head Island this week with a different playbook in hand.

As a young man in the 1960s, he was photographed on the beach of Port Royal Plantation hiking a football to Fran Tarkenton.

At the time, both of them were deep into the playbooks of the NFL.

Curry had won the first Super Bowl with Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, hiking the ball to Bart Starr. He had just lost a Super Bowl with Don Shula’s Baltimore Colts, inexplicably beaten by “Broadway” Joe Namath. Tarkenton was scrambling his way into the Hall of Fame with the Minnesota Vikings.

“Those were heady times,” Curry said as he returned to Port Royal to speak at the annual banquet of the regional Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Back then, Fran and Elaine Tarkenton invited Bill and Carolyn Newton Curry to bring the children and spend a week or two on Hilton Head.

Since then, Curry said at the banquet, his childhood sweetheart who now has a doctorate degree and a book out called “Suffer & Grow Strong: The Life of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas (1834-1907),” has been married to him for 52 years, moved 34 times, built four houses, raised a Golden retreiver and him.

Curry, 72, has been head football coach at Georgia Tech, his alma mater, Alabama, Kentucky and Georgia State.

That’s a lot of football for someone who hated the game as a child and was always more stubborn than talented.

His father taught soldiers hand-to-hand combat during the day and boxed with his 4-year-old son at night.

Curry said his father saw religion as a form of weakness. But Curry also saw it transform his father’s life.

The audience had already heard how teenagers are crying out to be transformed into a life of structure, discipline and belonging. FCA leaders said the growth of the organization in schools all over the county proves it.

The playbook Curry brought to the island this time was in his heart. He brought words he memorized against his will. He told me he was squirming in the pressure cooker of head coach at the University of Alabama when he heard a voice within. He told the voice he needed to be studying goal-line defense. But he eventually gave in and started rising early in the morning to read, and then memorize, the Beatitudes — the “blessed are ...” statements of Jesus in the book of Matthew.

He told me, “It gave me peace. It gave me inspiration. It gave me a sense of closeness to God I had never felt before.”

Curry recited the Beatitudes on stage. The silent crowd was told it was the salt of the earth and the light of the world. They were about to burst out the door and roar onto the field when Curry asked:

“Who was the coach of the year the day those words were uttered on that hillside 2,000 years ago?”

Who was the Super Bowl champion, the MVP?

“You don’t know. I don’t know either. We don’t care.

“What really lasts, what really matters, is what’s in your heart.”