Coach

The Army's Morale Welfare & Recreation program (MWR) is in charge of giving U.S. Servicemembers things to do that take their mind of their mission. MWR here at Anaconda does supports and coordinates a lot of events for soldiers. Everything from softball leagues to Toby Keith concerts are MWR functions. A couple days ago MWR brought some college football coaches to visit us here at Anaconda - one legend, and one arch enemy of mine.

Lou Holtz was great. He's much smaller in person than I imagined - 5'7" or so, maybe 150 lbs. Fiery as heck though. When I stopped by his table, I told him it was an honor to meet him. Holtz replied with, "No sonny, the pleasure is all mine". That pretty much sums up Coach Holtz right there. Every soldier that stopped to talk to him got a firm handshake, a warm smile, and kind words of thanks for what we're doing over here.

Here is my arch-enemy, Les Miles from LSU. Les was the head coach at Oklahoma State for a number of years, but moved on to LSU a couple years back. Since his arrival at LSU, Coach Miles has been a burr in Nebraska's side. He has signed a number of blue-chip recruits that NE was also chasing. One high-profile example was about a month ago, when a highly rated high school quaterback from Texas, Jarret Lee, spurned the Huskers in favor of the Tigers. I couldn't help but give Coach Miles a hard time over this. When I asked him about Lee, Miles initially tried to play coy as if he didn't know NE was recruiting him. I pressed him harder, and Miles admitted that he knew NE was indeed recruiting Lee hard, and knew that Lee had basically chosen LSU over NE. His story was that location was big to Lee's parents, because they wanted to travel to alot of Lee's games. Baton Rouge is a 5 hour drive from Lee's home town. Lincoln is over 14 hours away. LSU wins. I tried convincing Miles that it would be most benificial for him to stop recruiting against NU, but I think he was too busy waving over the security folks to listen to my rant. I should give Les a little credit overall - he seemed genuienly thankful for my service over here, and looked me in the eye when I talked to him and never once gave me the impression he was bummed out to be in Iraq's sweltering heat instead of sitting on his deck in Baton Rouge, LA.

All in all it was a fun afternoon, highlighted by meeting Lou Holtz (Lou Holtz!), a living legend of college football.