Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [74]
Holmes began practicing law locally, and also worked on a handful of political campaigns. His true passion, however, was assisting the Southern Miss athletic department. Oftentimes alongside Phillips, he combed the state looking for high school gridiron stars worthy of playing for the Golden Eagles. The Southern Miss brass came to trust Holmes, who compensated for his lack of athleticism (he was a high school cheerleader) with a keen eye for talent and a confident swagger that sold his alma mater to dozens of youngsters. Holmes also put his legal knowledge to use, representing Southern Miss athletes in various minor skirmishes.
Before long Holmes was an established part of the Southern Miss family. In 1969, he was asked by the school to negotiate a deal with the New Orleans Saints, a four-year-old NFL franchise, to relocate its training camp from Bowling Green, Ohio, to the Southern Miss campus. Two years later, the team was in Hattiesburg. “I succeeded, and that helped my reputation a great deal,” he said. “It made a statement.”
Shortly thereafter, Ray Guy, Southern Miss’ all-American punter, approached Holmes about representing him in the 1973 NFL Draft. Guy remains the only punter in NFL history to be selected in the first round. A year later another Southern Miss player, defensive end Fred Cook, asked Holmes to be his agent. Cook was taken in the second round. “I didn’t do anything special,” Holmes said. “But I was honest and up-front with those boys. They appreciated that.”
From the very beginning, he had a different perspective on race. With his father’s commitment to decency, Bud was never one to condemn blacks, or demand segregation, or openly fear the coming of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. As far as Bud was concerned, to deny someone a piece of the pie based solely on skin color was sinful. When D.W. died, Bud’s first call was to Lawyer Cox.
And yet, his take is complicated. As far as Holmes was concerned, blacks were blacks and whites were whites, and the societal divide was—to a certain degree—a key to harmonic living. “I grew up in a town where, at most, you had one or two murders per year,” he said. “Nobody had a lock on their door. If a black man didn’t support his family, the black community had a group of preachers and hardworking men called a spirit group. And they’d visit him and say, ‘Listen, if you don’t take care of your family, we’ll take action.’
“Well, today there’s killing, there’s dope, there’s fighting over the welfare checks. I don’t mean to say we necessarily should go back to a segregated society. But when you had segregation, you let the blacks come forward and control their people. And they did. There are a lot of negatives to the problems integration brought. A lot of older blacks would say that if they could do it over again, they’d take it back. There were black movie theaters, black banks, black funeral homes. The blacks took great pride in themselves. And if a kid screwed up at school, the black teacher would call home and say, ‘I wore him out.’ Then the parent would wear the child out, too. Today they learn all you have to say is, ‘That white teacher called me a nigger.’ And the teacher gets in trouble. So they learn all they have to do is holler ‘Racism! Racism!’ And the school system went to shit. People try to run and hide from that, but it’s the truth of the matter.”
Dating back to his youth, Holmes has tossed around the word” nigger” with the casualness of a throw pillow. From his viewpoint, it isn’t stated with contempt, merely as a word that’s no less inappropriate than “apple” or “hello.” A nigger can be a nice black or a jerk black, a successful one or an utter failure, male or female, young or old. In the heart of rural Mississippi, Holmes is beloved by many blacks as an honest, straightforward