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  Initially, doctors wanted to amputate Erwin’s right leg up to the knee. But he persuaded the doctors to only amputate half of his right foot; he told them they could come back later and take the rest if necessary. Erwin was hospitalized for the next two months, and doctors were encouraged as his body fought off infection. When Erwin was discharged from the hospital, doctors told him he would walk with a severe limp, couldn’t run, and, of course, would never play baseball again.

  “My life was all about baseball, and it went up in a puff of smoke,” Erwin said. “I found myself asking the big questions of life, like What do you do when your dream goes up in flames?”

  At least Hank Erwin didn’t have to go far to find encouragement and inspiration. His father, Henry Eugene “Red” Erwin Sr., was a World War II hero who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism that saved the crew of his B-29 Superfortress as it flew a bombing mission over Japan on April 12, 1945. Red Erwin, who was a radio operator on the B-29 called City of Los Angeles, was also responsible for dropping phosphorus smoke bombs through a chute on the floor of the plane when it reached enemy territory.

  On the morning of Red’s eleventh combat mission, the B-29 was supposed to bomb a chemical plant at Koriyama, about 120 miles north of Tokyo. As the plane was being bombarded by antiaircraft fire, Red was given the signal to start dropping the smoke bombs. He pulled a pin and dropped a bomb into the chute. The bomb’s fuse malfunctioned and ignited the phosphorus, which was burning at 1,100 degrees. The canister flew back up the chute and into Red’s face, blinding him, searing off one of his ears, and badly burning his nose.

  Smoke quickly filled the B-29’s cockpit, and Red feared the bomb would burn a hole through the floor of the bomb bay. Unable to see, he picked up the bomb and crawled toward the copilot’s window. As Red cradled the bomb between his bare right arm and ribs, the phosphorus burned through his flesh and set his body on fire. Somehow, he stumbled into the cockpit, tossed the bomb out the window, and then collapsed between the pilots’ seats.

  The B-29 crew flew Red to Iwo Jima for medical treatment. The doctors there were convinced he wouldn’t survive the night. After learning of Red’s heroism, Army Air Force officials approved awarding him the Medal of Honor while he was still alive. A medal was flown from Guam to Iwo Jima for the bedside ceremony.

  Miraculously, Red survived his injuries. He was flown back to the United States and underwent forty-one surgeries over the next thirty months. Doctors were able to restore his eyesight, and he regained use of his left arm. For thirty-seven years, Red worked as a benefits counselor at the Veterans Hospital in Birmingham. He was an inspiration to injured veterans until his death on January 16, 2002.

  “His character was the biggest thing,” Hank Erwin said. “Dad was a very humble man. He never lied, cheated, or stole a thing. He hated debt. He never cursed and he never drank. He loved America. He wanted to honor the Medal of Honor. He believed in excellence in everything.”

  So, as Erwin knelt on the floor of his dormitory room at Troy State University—contemplating the probable loss of his promising baseball career—he recalled the lessons of perseverance and determination he’d learned from his father. Erwin hadn’t totally given up on his baseball career after his injury; he’d fought hard enough to run and pitch again. But the pain in his right foot was so unbearable that he was beginning to think it was too much to overcome. Then he remembered the seemingly insurmountable odds his father faced.

  “My father never griped about it and never said, ‘Why me?’ ” Erwin said. “He always said, ‘I survived the war. I knew a lot of guys who didn’t come back.’ He was thankful. He was a towering figure of influence and a measurement of what men could be like.”

  For the first time in his life, Erwin prayed to God for strength and direction.

  “God, I don’t even know if You’re real,” Erwin prayed. “I don’t know if Jesus is real, but if You can make me happy and change my life, You can have it. Whatever I have to do, come into my life, be my personal Savior, be the Lord of my life, and whatever You want, I’ll do.”

  That night, Erwin slept better than he had in a long time.

  “It’s all I knew to do,” Erwin said. “I didn’t know much about the Bible and didn’t know much background. But the Lord honored my prayer. I didn’t see any chairs rumbling across the floor and didn’t hear angels. But I felt a peace that I’d never felt before. Over the next few weeks and months, the Lord did little things to let me know that He’d heard my prayer and had accepted it on face value.”

  Despite the pain in his leg, Erwin was able to finish his baseball career at Troy State. As his right leg became stronger, his velocity returned, and he became a much more effective pitcher. Something else about Erwin changed dramatically, too. Before Erwin’s prayer, he was an introverted young man—deeply shy, perhaps because he had a severe stuttering problem that began in childhood. But as Erwin grew stronger in his faith, he became a more confident speaker, and his stuttering mostly stopped.

  “When Jesus changed my life, He also changed my heart and my outlook,” Erwin said. “And He changed my speech. It was like the shell broke off. I started enjoying people and enjoying life. People would say: ‘Here comes happy Hank Erwin.’ ”

  Erwin used baseball—he was able to continue playing by fighting through the pain in his foot—as an opportunity to share with others how God was changing his life. He started attending Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings and then joined Campus Crusade for Christ, which was founded by Bill Bright in 1951 as a ministry for college students at the University of California, Los Angeles.

  “I wondered if there were other players on my team who were like me,” Erwin said. “I started going down the roster one by one and sharing Christ with them. Some rejected it and thought I was off my rocker, but some accepted Christ. As a result, our bond and performance level went up like never before. I began to wonder what would happen if an entire team accepted Christ. I always kept that in the back of my mind.”

  Erwin expanded his on-campus ministry and helped organize Challenge Life, a church-oriented organization, which met on campus every Sunday night. It grew from only three students at the first meeting to more than three hundred in just a few months. At one meeting, Erwin noticed a pretty blond girl, Shelia Daniel, who was leading the ladies’ Bible study. She had a boyfriend at the time, but Erwin started dating her after the couple broke up. They went on several dates in December 1971 and were married the next year.

  “I’d been praying to the Lord, asking to find a girl who had a special love for Jesus that was beyond the normal love,” Erwin said.

  Together, Erwin and his young wife helped spread the message of Jesus Christ and God’s saving grace on the Troy State campus. Erwin met Wales Goebel, a popular youth minister from Birmingham, who made a lasting impression on him. At the time, America was still heavily involved in the Vietnam War—Saigon wouldn’t fall until April 30, 1975—and the antiestablishment and hippie counterculture of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll was flourishing among the country’s youth.

  It had been nearly a decade since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and four years since his brother Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated within three months of each other in 1968. Six days after King was murdered by a white supremacist in Memphis, Tennessee, African Americans rioted in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and dozens of other U.S. cities. The civil rights struggle was an international black eye for the United States, and anxiety over atomic weapons still weighed heavily on the minds of most Americans. The country’s political unrest reached its pinnacle at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, where antiwar protesters clashed with police.

  Time magazine later called 1968 “a knife blade that severed past from future . . . the more complicated Now that began when the U.S. saw that it was losing a war it should not have been fighting in the first place, when the hug
e tribe of the young revolted against the nation’s elders and authority, and when the nation finished killing its heroes.”

  “The ’60s were what I would call a cauldron of change,” Erwin said. “If there was any era that was the basic pivot point of the United States and its culture, it was the 1960s. We had just come out of World War II and most of our daddies were veterans. There was a lot of patriotism and flag-waving going into the 1960s. But when we got into the Vietnam War, there was a shift in patriotism. It was a war no one wanted. It kept escalating. You had an era of international focus on Vietnam, and America being drawn into it. It was a time when your dreams were being battered by the realization that you might have to go to war. We were tired of war. It all came to a head on the streets. It was the left versus the right, and old America versus new America. We all wondered if America would survive.”

  During this time of turmoil, something called the Jesus People Movement began spreading like wildfire on college campuses from coast to coast. Led by the “Jesus People” and the “Jesus Freaks,” Christianity was suddenly becoming a popular alternative to the antiwar movement of the ’60s. Instead of smoking marijuana and dropping LSD, many flower children were getting high on Jesus. While it’s unclear exactly who started the Jesus People Movement, many historical accounts credit the 1968 opening of a small storefront evangelical mission called the Living Room, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. A young Bay area couple, Ted and Liz Wise, and other Christian families opened the Living Room to minister to the street people of the district.

  The Living Room opened in the same area of San Francisco that spawned the hippie counterculture and 1967’s Summer of Love. Members of psychedelic rock groups like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane lived within a short distance of the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets.

  Soon thereafter, other missions, Christian coffeehouses, and commune houses opened on the West Coast. Arthur Blessitt, who is perhaps best known for carrying a cross through every country of the world, opened a coffeehouse called His Place next door to a topless go-go club in Hollywood. He ministered to hippies, Hell’s Angels, and would-be actors and became known as the “Minister of Sunset Strip.” Around the same time, Chuck Smith, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, allowed a long-haired convert named Lonnie Frisbee to move into his house. Frisbee brought so many converts home that thirty-five men were soon living in their house, and many of them were baptized in the Pacific. Smith and Frisbee called their commune the House of Miracles, and they eventually opened 187 of their Shiloh communities around the country.

  Kent Philpott, a student at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, opened the Soul Inn in Haight-Ashbury, along with David Hoyt, a former Hare Krishna. Jack Sparks, a former Campus Crusade for Christ missionary at the University of California, ­Berkeley, formed the Christian World Liberation Front and published one of the first Jesus People newspapers, Right On!. In Seattle, Linda Meissner, a young Methodist evangelist from rural Iowa, organized the Jesus People Army. Her group soon grew to include more than five thousand members, and she opened a counseling center called the Ark, and then the Catacombs, a Jesus People coffeehouse, near the Space Needle.

  “Kids still walked around in blue jeans and tie-dyed shirts,” Erwin said. “But instead of trying to burn things down, they were embracing Jesus. The national media called them ‘Jesus Freaks.’ Instead of doing drugs, they were doing Jesus.”

  About a year before Erwin was married, he and his future wife registered for Explo ’72, short for Spiritual Explosion, which was a six-day evangelistic conference in Dallas sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. Ten days after they were married, Hank and Shelia Erwin left for their honeymoon at Explo ’72. Once they arrived in Dallas with a group of students from Troy State, the newly married couple attempted to check into their hotel. They’d called the conference organizers in advance to tell them they were now married and wanted to room together. For whatever reason, the hotel didn’t have a reservation for them.

  “The hotel was packed,” Erwin said. “There wasn’t a room left. In fact, there wasn’t a hotel room left in Dallas. The lady at the front desk told us we’d have to stay with others. I looked at my new wife and she had tears in her eyes. This was our honeymoon.”

  As the Erwins started to walk away in disappointment, the telephone at the front desk rang. The clerk answered and then signaled for them to wait.

  “I’ve got good news,” she told them. “We have a room—if the newlywed suite will be sufficient.”

  “We’ll take it!” Shelia Erwin screamed.

  On the first night of their honeymoon, about eighty thousand other college students from all over the United States and seventy-five other countries surrounded Hank and Shelia Erwin as they sat in the Cotton Bowl. The students, who flocked to Dallas as if on a pilgrimage, were mostly white, largely middle-class, and heavily conservative.

  “It was my first time in the Cotton Bowl, and I’ll never forget looking at the whole stadium and seeing that it was completely full,” Erwin said. “The whole field was covered, and it was a sea of people. I’ll never forget the sight of so many young people coming together from across the country. It was etched in my mind that this was an unbelievable moment in history.”

  With a presidential election looming that fall, President Richard Nixon asked to speak at the event, but Bill Bright—founder of Campus Crusade for Christ and one of the sponsors of this event—turned down his request. He did, though, read a telegram from Nixon on the event’s opening night, in which the president told those in attendance, “The way to change the world for the better is to change ourselves for the better through . . . deep and abiding commitment to spiritual values.” On the last day of Explo ’72, five men were caught breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

  Over the next five days, the Erwins attended evangelism and discipleship training, Bible study classes, and other seminars during the morning. They went door-to-door in Dallas spreading the Gospel in the afternoon and then were back at the Cotton Bowl each night to hear musical acts, well-known preachers, professional athletes, and other Christian celebrities. The Reverend Billy Graham addressed the crowd six times.

  On the last day of the conference, a crowd estimated to be between one hundred and two hundred thousand people gathered on a huge tract of rain-soaked mud north of downtown Dallas for a “Jesus Music Festival.” It was dubbed the “Christian Woodstock” by the press. The performers included Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Larry Norman, and Children of the Day. As students sang and danced to the bands, many of them pointed their index fingers to the sky, mimicking the popular “one way” symbol of the Jesus Movement.

  Explo ’72 made a lasting impression on Erwin—one he would carry with him to Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama.

  “The message of Explo ’72 was quite simple: people need Christ,” Erwin said. “If you want to change the world, help bring people to Christ. The more people you bring to Christ, the more you can change the world. It resonated because young people wanted to do something, wanted to make a difference, and wanted to make their lives count. They wanted to do it in a way that was positive. We wanted it to have a lasting effect.”

  After returning to Birmingham to start his life with his new bride, Erwin was hired as youth director at Shades Mountain Independent Church. He attended classes at Southeastern Bible College to learn more about Scripture. Erwin started working closely with Goebel at youth Bible studies and eventually agreed to accept a full-time position at Wales Goebel Ministry. Erwin helped organize a Challenge ’72 revival at his alma mater, with students packing the school’s gymnasium to hear Goebel preach.

  Then on a hot, humid August day in 1973, Goebel called Erwin and asked him to meet him at the gymnasium at Woodlawn High School. Goebel was going to speak to Woodlawn’s football team and needed Erwin’s help.

  “I had a tremendous amount of enthusiasm going into that
meeting,” Erwin said. “I knew we were going to change the world for Christ. I was so excited about the potential and the future. I knew great adventures were coming. Once we walked into the gymnasium at Woodlawn High School, history began to change.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “CHICKEN BIG”

  Steve Martin, a defensive back at Woodlawn High during the early ’70s, remembers the first time he saw Tony Nathan on the football field. Martin and Nathan were teammates on the Colonels’ freshman team in 1971.

  “He was the best athlete I’d ever been around,” Martin said. “He could play anything. He was incredible. In a lot of ways, it was like a man playing with boys. He was bigger, faster, and stronger and was an incredible athlete. He was probably 190 pounds and could run like a deer.”

  The only problem: Nathan didn’t want any part of running with the football. And, more important, his mother didn’t want him even touching the football.

  When Nathan informed his mother, Louise, that he wanted to try out for Woodlawn’s football team, she told Coach Tandy Gerelds to make sure her son was as far away from the football as possible.

  “I never liked football until Tony started playing,” Louise Nathan said. “I didn’t have a problem with baseball or basketball, but all I ever saw in football was everybody piling on top of somebody. I never wanted him to play on a team.”

  Despite having never played organized football, Nathan made the B-team as a freshman and started at safety on defense. He didn’t play on offense and stood on the sideline when the Colonels had the ball, even though he was easily the team’s most gifted runner. Nathan was equally talented as a defensive back and always seemed to be in position to intercept passes. But instead of catching the ball, Nathan knocked it down so he wouldn’t have to run with it. When he mustered the courage to intercept a pass—and disobey his mother’s wishes—he ran straight toward the sideline to avoid would-be tacklers.