'Dog' gone after a life of smiles and wins and friends

Billy Brewer was the coach for Louisiana Tech football for three years beginning in 1980, when as a student I met him and got to know him better than most. He earned a spot on the All-Century Ole Miss team and is the second-winningest coach in his alma mater’s history.

When Billy Cannon made the Halloween run in 1959, he’d just walked to the sideline and had his back toward the field when the Tiger Stadium stands exploded and he turned his college-aged body around just in time to see Cannon speed past his bench on his way to what would be the winning score in a 7-3 Tigers victory. The defending national champs, LSU would play Ole Miss a couple months later in the Sugar Bowl; this time, Brewer and the Rebels won, 21-0.

Coach Brewer got Archie Manning to sign for me the poster that hung in my room while I was growing up, and one icy winter night years later in Oxford, after I’d covered an Ole Miss win over LSU in basketball, he introduced me to one of my favorite writers, Willie Morris, who took me and others back to his home and read us stories he’d written, including a couple about a team he loved deeply, the Ole Miss Rebels.

But out of all those things, what I remember most about Coach Brewer is — how he fried an egg. Had it been football, it would have been a trick play. But first…

Tech played at Oxford in 2011 and won, 27-7, and it wasn’t that close. “You can name your score tonight,” Coach Brewer said after he’d fried four perfect eggs that morning; he’d invited me over for breakfast.

Tech had played the fall before in Starkville and I drove to Oxford first on Friday, to see him the night he was inducted into the Ole Miss Hall of Fame. It was a Divinely Blessed Appointment: I walked in — imagine clumps of people in suits and pretty dresses everywhere, all of them about to go into a banquet hall — and there was Archie Manning and longtime Ole Miss sports information director and World’s Nicest Man Langston Rogers, two of the only three people I figured I’d know and two of the only three I wanted to see. I talked to them and went to find Coach Brewer; but first, a bathroom stop. And there he was, coming out of the bathroom.

“Even when you’re a Hall of Famer,” I asked him, “you still have to go to the bathroom?”

He was mid-70s now, but he still had the wide smile, the bright eyes, the wavy college hair. Still an Old Miss hero.

Maybe because I’d showed up to represent the Tech guys who couldn’t be there that night, he invited me over for breakfast the next year before the Tech-Ole Miss game. It’s a neat house, a single story that sort of sprawled around with open spaces and trophies and football stuff everywhere and a lot of letters on his kitchen table. The house was sort of in the middle of town but back off the road on several acres of land, and when he’d coached, this yard was filled with cars and trucks and Rebel fans after games, friends of Coach Brewer’s and his wife, Kay.

Today it was just me and him and his dogs and these eggs and this cast iron skillet, and what he did was gently drop the egg, biggest side down, into the pan so it would break, then he lifted the shell and the egg sprawled out, like the house. It was a scientific method he’d perfected; I watched him do it four times, dropping the egg from the same height, then lovingly and patiently and slowly, picking up the shell.

He'd already fried the bacon and the biscuits were in the oven. Those he ate with apricot jelly from Wal-Mart. Lots of jelly. More apricot jelly than biscuit. At one point I just put my fork down and watched.

“You didn’t know I liked apricots?” he said.

I took to sending him three jars each fall after that.

He showed me around the house, this picture and that. Kay and their sons, Brett and Gunter, my friends from Ruston days. Introduced me to the dogs; he had two, and one, he explained, really loved, like romantically, the gas grill and shins, so I should be on my toes. I was.

Thirty years before, my dad had painted a Tech Bulldog on a piece of pine and woodburned TOP DOG on it, and I was proud to see it hanging in one of the hallways.

We talked about how as the football student manager, me and Sam, not far into his 30-year career as Tech’s trainer then, would drive him around the unfamiliar countryside and let him unwind and we’d talk about anything but football. We ate burgers or chicken fried steak and the next day at practice after hollering at either me or somebody else he’d say to me, quietly, “Where we going later?”

At one point the Ole Miss came out in him and he talked about a swivel-hipped freshman defensive back of promise, even mimicked a movement of a back covering a wide out, something he’d done in real life hundreds of times. And well.

It wasn’t the last time we talked, but it was the last time I saw him. Dog was on a knee in his driveway, smiling, rubbing his dogs with one hand, waving goodbye with the other.