There is no doubt in my mind Coach Fred Dean Selfe would hate this book. I doubt he would even pick it up.

He did not like talking about himself, or being talked about. He was terrible at accepting acknowledgement or praise. God forbid you ever try to compliment him on anything to his face. It was like watching a man being chased by bees the way he would swing his hat around, put his hands on his hips and look up and down and all around.

He was an All-American football player, member of the college’s Sports Hall of Fame, Old Dominion Athletic Conference Coach of the Year, and recipient of numerous awards for teaching and service. Yet, I am willing to wager he strongly disliked every second of receiving those honors—except maybe the All-American award for his play as an offensive lineman. He did not like drawing attention to himself for any reason.

For him the world was all about other folks.

Fred Selfe died January 24, 2003 from cancer. It was one of the few battles he ever lost. This book is inspired by him, about him, and—in a big way—for him. I played football for him as a fullback from 1983-1987, but more importantly spent the many years since understanding and accepting the importance of the simple, powerful lessons he taught me. My senior year we averaged a nationally-ranked 31.4 points per game, played in the NCAA playoffs, and produced three All Americans. He called us “a pretty dad-blasted tough team.” Though he was the offensive coordinator who coached us to the national ranking, new rushing, passing and points-per-game records, and our 10-2 season he refused to take any credit for that success. He told a newspaper reporter that year, “I’m like any old dog who likes to get his head scratched, but [Head] Coach Wacker and the kids deserve the credit.” But, truth be told, he was not like “any old dog.” That selfless, serving attitude is one of the larger-than-life qualities that make him such a giant.

He was the living example of Emory and Henry College and its famed football program—one of the finest small college football programs in the country over the past half century. The school played against the University of Tennessee in the inaugural game of their first football stadium in 1921 and went on to become a national powerhouse during the war years of the 1940s. The “farm boys” of Emory and Henry played in the Tangerine Bowl in 1950 and 1951 when good football mattered more than ticket sales. In its long and venerable football tradition the college boasts 27 all-time conference championships and nine post season bowl games. Since 1982, Head Coach Lou Wacker’s first year, the school won 11 Old Dominion Athletic Conference Championships, and played in five NCAA playoff games. The small, quiet, unassuming college program produced 37 All-Americans and an astounding 71.9 percent winning record.

Emory and Henry grows great coaches too. The college produces many high school and small college coaches, but also helps train men like Jim Grobe who coached there in the late 1970s and is now head coach at Wake Forest University. Coach Grobe is credited with turning the Demon Deacons’ football program around and putting them squarely into the nation’s top 25 teams.

Emory also gave Doug Blevins a start. Blevins, an Abingdon, Virginia native, came to E&H in 1984 as a kicking coach. Since then his resume boasts head kicking coach for the Miami Dolphins and kicking consultant for the Minnesota Vikings, New England Patriots, New York Jets and NFL Europe. Perhaps his most successful student is Adam Viniatieri, who kicked a last second field goal to win the Super Bowl for New England—twice—in 2002 and 2004. Coach Blevins’ achievements are even more amazing when you consider he has the crippling condition cerebral palsy and has never walked a day in his life. His inspiring life has been profiled by The New York Times, People, The Washington Post, Fast Company and HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

The college even has a famous trick play set named for it—The Emory and Henry Formation. Steve Spurrier, while coaching the University of Florida, revived the “ole Emory and Henry shift” and pulled it out when he needed to completely confuse his SEC opponents—even had it used against him once by Western Michigan. Hundreds of thousands of football fans stared at their televisions in disbelief as the Gators shifted into the Emory and Henry on a critical third down against Alabama in the 1994 SEC Championship game. Quarterback Danny Wuerffel took full advantage of the confused Crimson Tide to gain a crucial first down that gave the momentum back to Florida. They marched down the field to win the game 24-23. Spurrier, who grew up in Johnson City, Tennessee, says he became a fan of the formation watching E&H games in the 1950s. Dave Kindred, a writer for The Sporting News, describes the Emory and Henry Formation like this: “To see the oddly gapped spread formation is to be dumbfounded. It looks like 11 guys who got lost on the way to the huddle. There’s a center with a guard on either side. Behind them are the quarterback and a running back. The tackles are split 15 yards wide with ends beside them and a receiver behind them.”

Spurrier introduced the formation to the NFL coaching the Washington Redskins in 2001 and it has since been used by the Tennessee Titans and Buffalo Bills.

I once heard E&H’s football program rightly described as “good old-fashioned, smash-mouth football”—no scholarships, no big endorsement deals, and no massive stadiums—just young athletes playing for the love of the game in a small, simple, tree-lined stadium overflowing with waves of blue and gold clad alumni cheering them on. It is the same for the highly successful basketball team—and baseball team, tennis team, track team, volleyball team, soccer team and on and on. Small college sports with big time heart and soul.

That extra heart comes as payment-in-kind for the opportunity the college offers young men and women. A former student observed Fred Selfe addressing a student-athletic faculty committee and notes how the coach defined his personal understanding of the role of college athletics: “To teach athletes positive virtues on the field and to allow young people who might otherwise never go to college encounter life-changing thoughts and ideas in the classroom. They may come because they are players, but we want them to leave having become scholars.”

Emory and Henry is a small liberal arts college in the classic tradition of schools created in the late 1700s and early 1800s to enlighten and educate the sons and daughters of the young country’s first pioneers. It is a postcard picture of a Southern college with neatly groomed green commons, flowering beds overflowing with yellows and whites, brown bracken-ringed ponds reflecting weeping willows and dirty white geese, and red-orange brick buildings whispering forgotten stories of the Civil War. Founded by concerned religious and education leaders, it served as an important institution of learning as these intrepid people pushed westward over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the great unknown of our new country.

Early Virginia pioneers left the safety of Williamsburg, Richmond, and Charlottesville to journey headlong into the undiscovered. What today takes six or seven hours by car was then the great unknown area listed on early colonial maps simply as “plentiful hunting and trapping.” It was America’s earliest frontier attracting stout, individualistic men and women willing to hunt, dig and scratch out an existence from a true wilderness.

Extreme Southwestern Virginia is an area perhaps best known for being unknown. It quietly sits in the extreme western reaches of a state that once stretched from shore to shore of this unexplored country. Here Virginia’s tallest mountains jut up from the neatly cultivated fields like giant dragon’s teeth eating the world from within. These mountains that surround the college are the ignored younger sibling of the famous Smokies to the west and the rugged Cohuttas to the south—a Cherokee word meaning poles of the shed as these indigenous peoples believed the peaks held up the very sky. The mountains that ring my college are known, or unknown as it seems, by less ambitious names like White Top, Iron and Pond. Even Virginia’s highest point, Mount Rogers at 5,729 feet, which can be seen from almost every entrance to the college, gets little respect and is named for an obscure professor from the University of Virginia some 250 road miles to the north.

Emory and Henry sits quietly tucked away in a fertile agricultural valley at the center of the area Teddy Roosevelt once called a “wild border democracy.” It was founded in 1838 by descendents of those brave pioneers who needed to keep their sons close to the farm. It has the distinction of being the first institution of higher learning west of the main Blue Ridge Mountains and is squarely in the path of the second frontier—whatever lay over and beyond the very edge of the 18th Century American experience—the original gateway to America’s West—the great Cumberland Gap. Fred Selfe was a son of these mountains and this “wild border democracy” was the ideal place to attract and train his scholar-athletes.

The “Gentle Colossus”
In all my travels, experiences and encounters Fred Selfe is still one of the most extraordinary people I have the privilege of knowing. He was a tall, exceptionally strong and athletic man. He was quiet and humble. He worked hard and rarely showed fatigue. The Reverend David St. Clair referred to him as a “gentle colossus.” Since his childhood in the small town of Castlewood, Virginia, Fred Selfe lived a good life serving others without thoughts of reward or praise. He spent his youth in the fields, was the valedictorian of his high school class, played every musical instrument except the flute and drums, and spent his college summers doing the work of three people unloading freight in the nearby town of Abingdon.

He was vintage—old school—a throwback to simpler days—a solid rock of unchanging values.

He played on the Emory and Henry football and baseball teams and excelled at both—starting every game of his four years achieving All-American honors as an offensive lineman. He graduated from Emory and Henry in 1969 with a B.S. in economics then received his M.A. from East Tennessee State University before coming back to Emory as an assistant football coach.

He was a loyal husband. He and wife Becky Selfe, an equally dedicated teacher and track coach, were quietly married her senior year in high school—his freshman year in college. He hitchhiked over 100 miles every weekend to be with her. She remained the love of his life and he referred to her as “my bride” for 38 years. He was a loving, encouraging, sometimes overly-protective father to their only child, Paige, and fell over himself being the doting grandfather to Paige’s children, Samantha and Fred Jr. All of this may make him seem a normal, average man who loved his job, wife and family, but as you read this book you will find he was so much more. He was extraordinary in a world of average.

His friend, coaching colleague, former Ranger platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division and decorated Vietnam War veteran, Bob Johnson says through his experiences he has known many fine men, “some of whom are buried in Arlington.” Johnson’s father, Gen. Harold K. Johnson, served as President Lyndon Johnson’s Army Chief of Staff during a crucial period of the war in Vietnam. Yet, Bob Johnson calls Fred Selfe “the best man I ever knew.”

So many people across our country, from Los Angeles to Rhode Island, feel the same about this exceptional man; a man who lived simply, served his community, coached the college’s Division III football and baseball teams, and shaped the lives of countless men and women. As Tom Fletcher, a former assistant football coach at Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, and the University of North Carolina told a Roanoke Times newspaper, “In my lifetime, with all the people I’ve been associated with, he absolutely stands among the top people. He was just a wonderful person.”

Fred Selfe lived his life with the important principles most of us lack. He did small things that took root in the hearts and minds of those who witnessed them and shaped us in lasting ways. These small acts of kindness, courage, consistency, character, strength, poise, compassion, and selflessness become great big things in our timid, tepid world. In one of his missives on leadership, Harvard professor Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr. quotes business executive and former U.S. Congressman Bruce Barton: “Sometimes, when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things—a chance word, a tap on the shoulder, or a penny dropped on a newsstand—I am tempted to think there are no little things.”

I agree with Mr. Barton. I also agree with Bob Johnson when he says it is difficult—sometimes heart-wrenching and hand-wringing—to talk about Fred Selfe because, “He died unexpectedly—too soon—while we still need him.” I firmly believe our families, schools, communities, cities and our country need Fred Selfe and people like him—people who do Great Big Small Things each day just because they are the right things. We should honor them and learn from their actions. People should have clamored for Fred Selfe’s autograph and erected statues of him in public places for the all good he did. It would have irked him to no end to pass by a towering image of his own likeness, and he would have fought it every step of the way, but it is what should be.

Crowfoot, a warrior of the Blackfoot tribe, described the kind of life Fred Selfe lived with his dying words in 1890, “What is life?” It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” These are images of simplicity, strength and beauty—images that remain in the mind’s eye when the event is long over. Living things go on forever. Fred Selfe’s life continues through the small things—the Great Big Small Things.