I had to seal off my feelings about Stevie while seeing her every day and having to help her, too. But you get on with it. What was happening to the band was much bigger than any of that.
We started with that, basically to help kids, and then we created a pole vault school, which is part of the club and exists to this day. The club and school exist.
I've had many a player tell me all through high school and right up until signing day that they were coming to Alabama, then they signed with somebody else.
Back 12 years ago, when Dr. Mathews was president here, we had a plan that when I got ready to quit, we'd bring a certain guy in and he'd take over that day and I'd leave. But as time wore on, I realized that wouldn't have been good at all.
Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.
I can't see myself leaving the club I grew up supporting... it's one of those things, the money's great but I still get paid reasonably well from the Lions and at the end of the day I think job satisfaction is the No.1 priority and I just love it up here.
I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
