By Raymond Linex II
Hair flopping with every bounce, the count grew, “One ... two ... three ...,” minding my own business, doing my jumping jacks. Then came the pain.
No, not a torn ACL. I hadn’t sprained an ankle, or even stubbed a toe.
Coach Cummings had me by the ear, my left ear, and man did that old crotchety you-know-what have a grip!
Turns out my business wasn’t the only one being minded that day. I remember yakking with the guy next to me, even through the motions of calisthenics, and that was horse play Jesse Cummings wasn’t about to tolerate.
The coach that led the Tigers baseball team to state title in 1958 and prepped hundreds of Corsicana kids like me for sports beyond junior high passed away this week. He was 90.
For a guy not real big in stature, Coach Cummings’ reputation towered above incoming students at Drane. You knew the name, and expected to see someone with the bite and growl of a grizzly bear ... standing.
He did demand results. If you came out for athletics, he expected you to accept all the responsibilities that went with that commitment. He loved to push us in the weight room (the universal system we had that took up about 20 square feet of the gym), he lectured us on fitness and man did he love to run. Literally, he ran us, and ran with us.
The run around Drane’s playground and practice area, the big lot behind Olé (former Brookshire’s, and a Safeway when I was at Drane), had a name, but I cannot recall it. We often had to make one or two treks around that fenceline. By my math, Coach Cummings had to be 66 or so then, and he would run those laps with us.
Or, for some of us, in front of us. He did things at that age that astounded us, including gently ribbing those of us that couldn’t keep up with him. He had a sharp, witty tongue.
Often, we’d slip over to Safeway for a cola after practice. We knew better.
“What the heck did you go over there and get a Coke for,” he’d often ask us, sternly. “You just ruined everything you did the day before.”
He had a way of making you feel like Coca-Cola had snake guts or battery acid or girl cooties in it.
My class was the last to run the straight T at Drane. I remember going to games the next year and seeing seventh graders in the I-formation, and wondering why we didn’t get to run it. But looking back, learning the T from Cummings was priceless. It was the basis for all of football, old school, where it all began. So was Coach Cummings, with his horn-rimmed glasses, pulled up socks and sarcastic — yet actually to-the-point — explanations of schemes and fundamentals.
With every passing day, age slowed Coach Cummings, but it never fully stopped him until this week.
In 1999, when Navarro pulled the tarp back on its new softball program, it honored Cummings, a longtime baseball assistant — volunteer, I believe — by naming the field after he and his wonderful wife, Lou. I remember the Bulldogs swept the opening series, winning one game in dramatic fashion on a home run. What I remember most was Coach Cummings stealing the show during the pregame ceremonies.
At 82 or 83 at the time, he stood on his head at home plate. That was classic.
For years and years afterward, as my sons worked through the ranks as little leaguers, Coach Cummings would venture into the Daily Sun to have his picture taken with his Senior Olympic medals, of which he won many. As he would leave, he would always encourage me to bring my boys over to the house, so he could school them on the fundamentals of baseball.
I never did, I guess in part because I thought the old grizzly bear might scare the daylights out of them! But to be so demanding, he was equally caring.
The ear-jerk scared the you-know-what out me. The shock, I guess, brought me to tears. Coach Cummings pulled me into his office, one-on-one, and talked to me until I calmed down.
He didn’t shout. He left the sarcastic comments outside. He simply showed compassion, and it had a profound effect.
Coach Cummings was one of a kind.
—————
Raymond Linex II is publisher of the Daily Sun. His column appears Sundays. He may be reached via e-mail at rlinex@corsicanadailysun.com.
