Woodlawn Page 5

  Stearns looked at Gerelds like he was speaking French, not knowing that a 50 defense was an alignment with five defensive linemen and two linebackers behind them.

  “When I graduated from school, I thought I knew a lot about football,” Stearns said. “I couldn’t even draw up a 50 defense. I’d heard of it, but I didn’t know anything more than who I was supposed to block when I was playing in college. I didn’t know anything about where the secondary was or where the linebackers were supposed to go. It really embarrassed me that I couldn’t even draw up a 50 defense.”

  While other coaches might have fired Stearns on the spot, Gerelds encouraged him and told him they’d learn together.

  “From that point forward, I was bound and determined that it would never happen again,” Stearns said. “I read every book I could get my hands on, talked to a lot of people, and watched a lot of football.”

  Eventually, Gerelds trusted Stearns enough to turn his entire defense over to him. Gerelds’s coaching philosophy was simple: limit the game plan so the players could run a select number of plays to perfection. On offense, the Colonels ran a Wing-T offense, which was very popular at the time. Eventually, they would switch to an I-formation, which was similar to the offense the University of Southern California was running.

  “Every play and situation that you have in the Wing-T offense is directly related to the belly series on the weak side and the buck series on the strong side,” Gerelds wrote before his death. He went on to say:

  Before you can venture out of these two series, you have to know that every player who will ever play has a good, almost perfect understanding of these two basic plays. The third-string guard has to know these two basic plays, as well as the first-string guard. You have to know that when everything else is uncertain, these two plays can be run effectively by everyone. You have to always plan everything you do as if the starters are all hurt and you have to rely on the subs. If you do this, when a few get hurt, you will not digress. Players do not always have to be great athletes, and they won’t be, but they have to know what to do all the time.

  Gerelds also wanted his team to be one of the most well-­conditioned squads in the state. It didn’t make him the most popular coach among his players, but it enabled his teams to fight through fatigue in the fourth quarter, when the outcome of many games would still be in doubt.

  “Consistency and endurance are the key to any great program,” Gerelds wrote. He continued:

  Any team can have spurts of greatness. Any team can make a run or build some momentum. Only great teams maintain momentum for long periods of time. To get consistency, the most important facets of a program have to be repeated until it is second nature to the team. It has to be something they do like walking and talking. It can’t be something they doubt they can do; it is something they know they can do. Endurance is achieved by working hard when you are tired. It is developed gradually over a period of time.

  Gerelds wanted his teams to be rough and tough, but he wasn’t going to become a raging madman to make it happen. It wasn’t his personality. During a moment of self-reflection, Gerelds promised himself he would be a positive coach, a mentor and leader who would make a lasting impact on his players.

  “You have to have an order of everything you do if it is going to work,” Gerelds wrote. He went on to say:

  Everyone has to follow the same rules and regulations. Everyone has to feel like they are part of the program. Every player has to have a status. It is better to have an identity that is low than to have no identity at all. It is better to say little and do more than to say a lot and do little. You cannot fool kids; they know when you are fair. You have to tell the kids the truth and be fair. Everything that you make kids do is ­important—­it can affect their lives. Do a few things excellent, not a lot of things good. God put everyone on earth with a winning spirit. Kids don’t start out losers. Parents and environments dictate the track a young person takes. Everyone would like to feel special and needed. Team sports give a group of young people the feeling of being special that they ordinarily wouldn’t have.

  From the very beginning of his career, Gerelds showed a lot of promise as a head coach. The Colonels beat Western-Olin High School 40–20 in his head coaching debut on September 10, 1971. Then they posted back-to-back 21–0 shutouts of Vestavia Hills and Ramsay. Just like that, the Colonels were 3–0 and ranked No. 7 in the state in Class 4A. It couldn’t be this easy, could it? With tailbacks Lloyd Alford and Rick Pike running the ball, and quarterback David O’Hare directing the Wing-T offense, the Colonels looked like a well-oiled machine to start the season.

  But then the wheels started coming off. Woodlawn lost five of its next six games, scoring seven points or less in four of the contests. In a 27–0 loss to Phillips High School, the Colonels ran for only 49 yards and passed for only 41 on four completions. Woodlawn blew a 17–7 lead in the second half of a 28–17 loss to Ensley. No matter what Gerelds did, he couldn’t get his offense turned around. Despite how hard he tried, he couldn’t find an answer.

  Somehow, the Colonels ended the season with a 21–18 victory over Banks High, which helped erase a lot of the disappointment during Gerelds’s first season. He’d led Woodlawn High to a victory over its biggest rival, which carried a lot of weight with the school’s administration, alumni, and community leaders. The Jets nearly came from behind to win, after freshman quarterback Jeff Rutledge returned from an injured throwing shoulder to lead two scoring drives in the second half. Rutledge’s gutsy performance would be an omen of things to come in the rivalry.

  After finishing his first season with a 5–5 record, Gerelds was determined to become a better head coach. So much so that his competitive drive and will to win consumed him over the next couple of seasons. He later admitted to being overconsumed with winning in a testimony that he wrote shortly before his death:

  My decisions now affected many people. For the first time in my life, I felt stress and pressure. The need for success and the drive to be the very best completely engulfed my personality and changed my way of living, both personally and professionally. Professionally, I cared as much about success as I did the young men I was coaching. I became obsessed with competition and winning. Nothing else seemed to fulfill my wants or ego. I considered a defeat a personal flaw in my armor.

  I decided I wanted to be the very best coach, and I would push myself, assistant coaches, and players until I reached my goal. At the same time, I was teaching science. Unfortunately, I was not interested in science or, for that matter, the students. However, I did an adequate job of teaching, for fear that my principal or fellow workers would think that I was not doing the job.

  I worked about sixteen hours a day. Coaching became an obsession with me. My success came slow, but steady, but not near enough to satisfy my inward drive for personal success. I involved myself so deeply in my job that I had very little time for my family or friends. I know now that I was never going to fill the void in my life. I thought it would be filled by winning football games. I did become a good football coach. I learned my lessons from better coaches than myself, who usually beat my team. I learned to be sound at what you do and to have an order of football, or anything else for that matter. I wanted to be well organized and became upset if anything or anyone got out of order.

  During the next three seasons, Gerelds would learn that he wasn’t really in control of anything. It would take the influence of a reluctant superstar and two strangers to make him realize it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE EVANGELIST

  The first thing Woodlawn High School football coach Tandy Gerelds noticed when Wales Goebel knocked on his office door in August 1973 was his height—and his bushy hair. Goebel was quite an imposing figure; the former college basketball player was six-foot-four. Gerelds guessed he might have been even a few inches taller because of his thick, wavy hair.

  “Tandy said his hair nearly filled the entire doorway,” said his wife, Debbie. “He never forgot
his hair.”

  Gerelds, who was about to begin his third season as the Colonels’ head coach and his first year as the school’s assistant principal, didn’t recognize Goebel.

  “Who are you?” Gerelds asked.

  “I’m Wales Goebel,” Goebel told him, with a Southern drawl as thick as mayhaw jelly.

  At the time, Gerelds couldn’t have imagined the impact Goebel would ultimately have not only on his players’ lives but also his own. Then again, Gerelds didn’t know anything about Goebel.

  For more than a decade, Goebel had been changing young people’s lives across the state of Alabama. However, he had never encountered challenges like those he was about to walk into at Woodlawn High, which had been ripped apart by racial tension following the government-mandated desegregation. Others warned Goebel about what was happening at Woodlawn High. He knew there was only one answer to the problems—Jesus Christ.

  Wales Goebel was born in Tallapoosa, Georgia, which is about fifty miles west of Atlanta and sits in Haralson County on the Alabama border. He was the sixth oldest of eight sons. His father, A. G. Goebel, a German immigrant, remarried after his first wife died. Goebel’s mother, the former U.Z. Jones, had three sons with his father and helped raise five boys from his first marriage. Wales’s father owned a grocery store and meat market. Religion and faith were rarely discussed in their home.

  “I grew up in a home that was not Christian,” Goebel said. “My father was from Germany—the old country—and he was an atheist. He was a very hard man and a very stern German.”

  Goebel can only recall his family attending church one day every year. His mother took her sons to Christmas Eve services because churches in the area handed out fresh fruit. Most of his friends’ families attended church every Sunday, and Goebel once asked his father why they didn’t go more often.

  “My dad had an old German word he liked—humbug,” Goebel said. “Everything he disagreed with was humbug, and he thought religion was humbug.”

  When Goebel was seventeen, he became involved in the lucrative, yet illegal, business of bootlegging in Haralson County. The county was once home to a thriving wine industry before Prohibition in the 1920s, and then moonshine or corn mash became the county’s most profitable export over the next couple of decades. Goebel and a close friend worked as taxi drivers in Tallapoosa, which they figured out was an effective cover for bootlegging. Before long, they were buying gallons of moonshine from distillers, bottling it into smaller quantities, and then selling the hooch out of their taxis. Goebel made a nice living for a teenager, until a friend warned him that Haralson County sheriff’s deputies were aware of his illicit business.

  “It was an easy thing to do at the time to make money,” Goebel said. “You don’t consider yourself doing something bad or crooked when you’re a kid. When somebody says, ‘Hey, Wales, we can make a little money doing this,’ you don’t think twice about it. But I was concerned that if I did get caught and went to jail, it would affect my mother greatly.”

  After his friend’s warning, Goebel decided to get out of the moonshine business. Two nights after dumping what was left, he was pulled over by police, who searched his 1946 Ford Coupe. They didn’t find any moonshine. Two of his best friends weren’t so lucky and ended up serving time in federal prison.

  After graduating from Haralson County High School in 1946, Goebel enlisted in the Navy and worked as a radio operator aboard ships. For two years, he served on boats that swept for mines up and down the East Coast following the end of World War II. Once Goebel was discharged from the Navy, he returned to Tallapoosa and enrolled at West Georgia College in nearby Carrollton.

  Goebel played on the school’s basketball team, along with his cousin Ivan “Buddy” Goebel, and was elected president of the student body. He started dating a girl, Jean Duff, and took her home to meet his mother. Goebel told his mother he wanted to marry Jean. But Goebel didn’t believe Jean would accept his proposal because she was aware of the secret he was keeping from his mother—he was an alcoholic.

  “I couldn’t quit drinking,” Goebel said. “It started to affect my ball playing, and they kicked me off the basketball team. The dean of students called me in and told me I was going to be expelled. Shortly thereafter, Jean gave me my walking papers.”

  At twenty-one years old, Goebel hit rock bottom. After he was expelled from college, he returned to live with his mother. It was then that he finally told her about his drinking problem. One of his good friends on West Georgia College’s football team called him. He wanted Goebel to attend church with him the next Sunday.

  “My buddy was always trying to encourage me to go to church with him,” Goebel said. “It was the last place I wanted to be on Sunday mornings. But he was a good friend, and I knew he was different. I didn’t know why he wanted to be involved with me.”

  Goebel’s friend drove him to a Methodist church in LaGrange, Georgia. On the way, Goebel asked his friend to stop at the county line so he could buy a beer.

  “Wales, you don’t want a beer before you go to church,” his friend said. “Let’s get one on the way back.”

  When they arrived at the church, Goebel didn’t want to go inside. But his friend persuaded him to walk through the doors, and they sat and listened to the preacher’s sermon. The pastor was a student from Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. A group of students from the college were traveling to churches across the Southeast as part of their mission. At the end of the service, the preacher asked the congregation, “If you have a choice of going to heaven or hell, which one would you choose?” He gave his audience a few minutes to consider the question.

  “Some of you have said you would choose heaven,” the preacher said. “No one would possibly say they’d choose hell. Why don’t you come down and accept heaven?”

  Goebel couldn’t find the courage to stand and walk to the altar. He told his friend he wanted to talk to the preacher. Finally, after a second invitation from the pastor, Goebel walked to the front of the church. The preacher asked him, “Do you know if you’re going to heaven?”

  “I don’t know that I am,” Goebel said.

  Several people from the congregation knelt around Goebel and prayed with him. One of them told him, “Just ask Jesus to come into your heart.”

  Goebel prayed, “Lord Jesus, please come into my heart.”

  Goebel stood after praying and immediately something felt different. He looked at the preacher and said, “Brother Cochran, I know I’m all right.”

  As Goebel’s friend drove him back to his mother’s house later that night, he didn’t ask him to stop to buy beer at the county line. Once inside his mother’s house, Goebel found her sitting alone in a chair in the living room. Since his father had died a few years earlier, Goebel suddenly felt sorry that he had been adding to his mother’s sorrow by the way he was living. Goebel knelt before his mother and told her, “Momma, I want you to know that I’m never going to get drunk again. I’m never going to fight again, and I’m never going to get in trouble again.”

  “Well, what happened?” his mother asked.

  “I accepted Jesus Christ into my life tonight,” Goebel told her.

  The next morning, Goebel woke up early to milk his family’s cows. When he finished, he rushed back to the kitchen to share his newly found faith with his mother. Although she didn’t accept Jesus Christ as her Savior that morning, she did become a Christian several years later before her death.

  As a born-again Christian, Goebel was eager to share with others what he’d experienced in the church the night before. Goebel didn’t know much of anything about the Bible, but he knew what God’s grace was already doing for him. He didn’t want to drink anymore, and he had a new outlook on life. Goebel also knew it was his duty as a Christian to share God’s Word with everyone he came in contact with. As Mark 16:15 teaches us, “He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.’ ”

  As Goebel prepared to leave his mother’s
house the morning after he’d shared his faith with her, he set his sights high. He was going to share the Gospel at Bruno’s, which was one of the popular watering holes on U.S. Highway 78. Because Tallapoosa was located between Fort McPherson in Atlanta and Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, Bruno’s was a popular pit stop for Army soldiers.

  Goebel had spent many mornings at Bruno’s, since patrons could buy a mug of beer for a nickel before noon. Now he only had a never-quenching thirst for what was written in the Bible. The bartender, Essie May, was sitting at the corner of the L-shaped bar when Goebel walked in. When Essie May saw him, she reached for a cold mug.

  “Essie May, I don’t want a beer today,” Goebel told her.

  “You don’t want a beer?” she asked. “Well, what do you want?”

  “Essie May, I want to tell you about what happened to me last night,” he said.

  Goebel started to share his experience with her until she interrupted him. “Wales, I don’t want any of that talk in here,” she said. “You won’t talk like that in here.”

  “Essie May, I’m a Christian now, and the Lord has forgiven me,” he said. “I want you to be a Christian, too.”

  Two of the three patrons sitting at the bar got up and left. Goebel looked at the remaining man sitting at the bar and noticed tears in his eyes. “You know, what you’ve been saying to her is what my momma has told me one hundred times,” the man said.

  “You’re not saved?” Goebel asked him.

  “No,” the man said.

  “Well, why didn’t you listen to your momma?” Goebel said. “Do you want to be saved now?”

  “I think I do,” the man said.

  “Well, I’m going to tell you what I did in that church last night,” Goebel said. “All I did was ask Jesus to come into my heart, and I’m saved this morning. He’ll do the same thing for you. Bow your head and ask Him.”