The Toughest Coach There Ever Was
by Frank Deford

Bob (Bull) (Cyclone) Sullivan was known for his iron fist and his passing game, but there was much more to the man.

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Robert Victor Sullivan, whom you've surely never heard of, was the toughest coach of them all. He was so tough he had to have two tough nicknames, Bull and Cyclone, and his name was usually recorded this way: coach Bob "Bull" "Cyclone" Sullivan or coach Bob (Bull) (Cyclone) Sullivan. Also, at times he was known as Big Bob or Shotgun. He was the most unique of men, and yet he remains utterly representative of a time that has vanished, from the gridiron and from these United States.

Coach Bob "Bull" (Cyclone) Sullivan was a legend in his place. That place was Scooba, Miss. in Kemper County, hard by the Alabama line, hard to the rear of everywhere else. He was the football coach there, for East Mississippi Junior College, ruling this, his dominion, for most of the '50s and '60s with a passing attack that was a quarter century ahead of its time and a kind of discipline that was on its last legs. He was the very paradigm of that singular American figure, the coach--corch as they say in backwater Dixie--who loved his boys as he dominated them, drove off the weak and molded the survivors, making the game of football an equivalency test for life.

Bull Cyclone had spent his own years struggling through a hungry country childhood, getting wounded and killing in close combat as a Marine and then coming home to raise a family and till a tiny plot of American soil he had fought for. Once that would have meant working 40 acres with a mule and a plow. What Bull Cyclone turned was a parcel of earth 100 yards long and about half as wide, scratching out boys as his crop. "There are two reasons people play football," Bull Cyclone was heard to declare. "One is love of the game. The other is out of fear. I like the second reason a helluva lot better."

Robert Victor Sullivan, whom you've surely never heard of, was the toughest coach of them all. He was so tough he had to have two tough nicknames, Bull and Cyclone, and his name was usually recorded this way: coach Bob "Bull" "Cyclone" Sullivan or coach Bob (Bull) (Cyclone) Sullivan. Also, at times he was known as Big Bob or Shotgun. He was the most unique of men, and yet he remains utterly representative of a time that has vanished, from the gridiron and from these United States.

Coach Bob "Bull" (Cyclone) Sullivan was a legend in his place. That place was Scooba, Miss. in Kemper County, hard by the Alabama line, hard to the rear of everywhere else. He was the football coach there, for East Mississippi Junior College, ruling this, his dominion, for most of the '50s and '60s with a passing attack that was a quarter century ahead of its time and a kind of discipline that was on its last legs. He was the very paradigm of that singular American figure, the coach--corch as they say in backwater Dixie--who loved his boys as he dominated them, drove off the weak and molded the survivors, making the game of football an equivalency test for life.

Bull Cyclone had spent his own years struggling through a hungry country childhood, getting wounded and killing in close combat as a Marine and then coming home to raise a family and till a tiny plot of American soil he had fought for. Once that would have meant working 40 acres with a mule and a plow. What Bull Cyclone turned was a parcel of earth 100 yards long and about half as wide, scratching out boys as his crop. "There are two reasons people play football," Bull Cyclone was heard to declare. "One is love of the game. The other is out of fear. I like the second reason a helluva lot better."

Randall Bradberry, who is now the football coach at East Mississippi-most people just call it Scooba-was a quarterback there in 1967. One day a Buckeye jet trainer from the nearby Meridian Naval Auxiliary Air Station went out of control. The pilot bailed out, and the empty plane winged in dead over the campus, missing the boys' dorm by 40 feet before plowing into the ground, miraculously doing no damage to edifice or person, except for muddying N.J. Smith, an agriculture teacher, whose outdoor laboratory-"Mr. Smith's pasture"-abutted the football practice field. But what a God-awful noise! Bradberry heard the jet skim over and then explode. "The only thing that crossed through my mind was that the Russians were attacking us," he recalls, "and that they had decided they had to go after Corch Sullivan first. I mean that."

Except possibly for the story about how he made his team scrimmage in a pond full of man-eating alligators, none of the tales about Sullivan have been exaggerated. "I mean, everything you hear is true," says Joe Bradshaw, who played guard for him in the early '50s. Bull Cyclone did sometimes run scrimmages in the pond, except the only gator certified to have been in it was an itty-bitty one the coach's family had brought back from Florida as a souvenir. And maybe it did grow up.

Few of the stories were written down. Instead, as if from some other age, an oral history of the coach developed, and whenever old players or other Scooba minstrels gathered, they would share Bull Cyclone stories, telling the same ones over and over, word for word, liturgically, as the wives drifted to the corners and shook their heads. Nobody even knows how many games Bull Cyclone won, although the best detective effort puts his record at 97-62-3. That was over 16 seasons, his life's work. However, he never had any real fame outside of Scooba and environs, he never won a national championship, never even won a Mississippi Junior College Association title, and he was too ornery, too cussed independent, for any big school to take a chance on him.

A lot of folks recall that Bear Bryant himself was on record, way back when, saying he wasn't near so tough as Bull Cyclone. As early as 1959, Jim Minter, now the editor of The Atlanta Constitution and The Atlanta Journal, wrote in fascination about the growing Scooba fable. Minter had heard some coaches talking about tough. Their opinion, wrote Minter, was that Wally Butts, "The Little Spartan...was left at the gate.... Bear Bryant failed to win, place, or show.... General Bob Neyland was not even mentioned." Instead, when it came to old-fashioned tough, "without dissent.... Shotgun Sullivan." And Minter's story went on: "'I can tell you one thing,' offered one college coach who has seen Shotgun Sullivan in action. 'If you get a boy who has survived him for two years, I can guarantee he will make your team.'"

Though many football people acclaimed him as a genius, and everyone accepted him as a man of integrity, no one would dare hire him in the big time, because Bull Cyclone sure as shooting wasn't going to be a football assistant for any mother's son. It's apparently true that Norm Van Brocklin, an old pal of his, did once ask him to take over the Atlanta Falcons' offense when Van Brocklin was head coach, but Bull Cyclone declined, saying, "Now, Norm, why should I come up there and work for you when I already know more football than you do?" So he stayed in Scooba, eking out a living for his family, hunting and fishing, developing offenses that big-city coaches would make fashionable a generation later, and driving his players, whom he tricked out in skull-and-crossbones helmets and short-sleeved jerseys he designed himself. The shirts were known as star jerseys because below the black shoulder trim and above the numerals, there across the chest, were arrayed five stars. As far as anybody knew, no one, not even his wife and children, had any idea what the stars signified, and, of course, no one dared ask Bull Cyclone prying questions such as that. He was some coach. Curiously, as you shall see, he was also beloved.

He was 32 years old, a veteran, husband and father, when he returned to the Deep South in 1950 to assume his first head-coaching job. East Mississippi had gone winless the autumn before and, for that matter, had seldom ever won a game. Even as the years wore on, as he produced 31 J.C. All-Americas, Bull Cyclone would tell his players they were suiting up for the smallest football-playing college in America. That might well have been true. Scooba had only about 250 to 300 kids then, a third of them girls. So in any given year, a substantial proportion of the male enrollment was playing for Coach Sullivan.

The hamlet of Scooba (Choctaw for "reed brake") then boasted 734 souls, which made it a metropolis in Kemper County. The county must look exactly the same now, only less so; when Bull Cyclone arrived in Kemper in 1950, the population was 16,000; today only 10,000 remain, planting a little cotton or soybeans, cutting pulpwood-"pu'pwood," as everybody says. Even into the '60s Scooba's main street had hitching posts, and it still has a big faded sign that reads SERVE COKE AT HOME. For more substantial spirits, the folks would go out to what were known as "jig joints," illegal roadhouses in a state of Baptists and bootleggers that nevertheless winked at Prohibition, which remained the law in Mississippi until 1966. More than that, of course, Appomattox had yet to be acknowledged anywhere in Mississippi, especially not in Kemper, its most antediluvian, impoverished outpost.

Bull Cyclone had been reared nearby-"So far out in the country you could still smell pu'pwood on his breath," according to his old friend Carlton Fleming. Sullivan moved his wife, Virginia, and two daughters-another daughter and a son would come later onto campus into what was known as The Alamo, a broken-down dormitory that housed the football players. It was reputed to be the only three-story public building in the county. The old place was so ramshackle that the Sullivans had to practice "leak drills." But it was home, and Christmastime they'd set up the tree out where the boys on the team could share it.

Getting those quarters in The Alamo was crucial because all Bull Cyclone was paid for being the football coach-and the baseball coach and athletic director-was $3,600 a year, plus $75 for every game he won. Most of the latter went for gas so he could go on recruiting trips. Bull Cyclone couldn't do much work over the phone inasmuch as there were only three in all of Scooba, one at the drugstore, and one each at the president's house and the president's office.

What Scooba had above all was homogeneity. The students were all the same: free, white, going on 21, mostly penniless. They were bound together in a way that most of today's diverse student bodies couldn't conceive. The girls were only allowed out one night a week, and on the Sabbath girls and boys alike were "urged" to attend both Sunday school and church and then, for good measure, to observe a "quiet hour" from two to three in the afternoon. "At this time," the school catalog explained, "students are to be in their rooms. It is suggested that they write their parents during quiet hour and that they spend some of this time in meditation." The college library had only 4,500 volumes. A football coach could be a gigantic personage in that sort of place.

And he was. For amusement Scooba had jig joints and bad girls, hunting and fishing, and, in season, football. It has always been Dixie's game. Bradberry, who was raised close by in the little town of Sturgis, says, "If you were a boy and grew up in Sturgis, Mississippi and didn't play football for the high school, your daddy didn't get credit at the grocery store."

Said the East Mississippi catalog the year that Bull Cyclone arrived, "Athletics may be justified as part of the physical culture program, as a recreational feature and as disciplinary measure.... We also teach good sportsmanship and self-denial in habits and attitudes:'

Armed with that mandate, Bull Cyclone got in his old station wagon and, like some preacher or salesman, hit the highways and byways in search of football players. He had only one returning from the winless '49 season. Sullivan ranged far and wide and, brandishing the GI Bill, even induced some soldiers at various posts to abandon service for their country to play for Scooba. Tales of such outlanders arriving on motorsickles can still be heard. "They'd put 'em in jail for tearing up, and then they'd tear up the jail," Fleming recalls with a guffaw. But on his field, Bull Cyclone, who peaked out at around 6' 5" and 285 pounds, brooked no backtalk.

His first team assembled, coach Sullivan called up and got a game with Little Rock J.C. to open the season. And what was Little Rock J.C.? Only the '49 winner of the Junior Rose Bowl, the junior-college champion of America. Bull Cyclone was scared of no one, and he would prove it.

When the Scooba team arrived in Little Rock, it was told to practice at the stadium itself. Bull Cyclone, who was especially attuned to spies, suspected that some would be hidden in the stands, so he had his players run all sorts of goofy plays. After a while, Bull Cyclone called over his manager. Managers were very important to Bull Cyclone, and he expected almost as much of them as he did of his quarterbacks. "The trouble with being a manager for my father," recalls Bobbie, his oldest daughter, "is that he assumed a manager would know what he wanted before he asked." Bull Cyclone instructed this first manager to play dumb and to go over to the Little Rock J.C. locker room and tell the coach that Scooba had forgotten to bring kicking tees. He then was to ask whether he could borrow some. Sure enough, the manager saw that the Little Rock coach was drawing all the ridiculous East Mississippi plays on a blackboard for his players.

Bull Cyclone was pretty sure, then, that his first game as a head coach would be "like taking candy from a baby." One of his major tenets was to strike fast with surprise. He knew Little Rock wouldn't know what hit it.

Back in Scooba that night, the postmistress, who had a good radio, picked up the game all the way from Little Rock. Bull Cyclone had promised that he would call in the outcome to the phone at the president's house, but during the game the lady with the radio started going around town giving everybody updates. Pretty soon a lot of townspeople were congregated around her radio in the Sullivans' apartment at The Alamo, listening to the game. This was the biggest thing that had ever happened to Scooba, and Bull Cyclone had only just come to town.

He beat the defending national champions 34-14, and his legend was in the making in that grateful little crossroads. As best we can tell, Bull Cyclone went 8-3 that first season, and 21-9 for three years, which was more victories than Scooba had enjoyed in its history. The college had been chartered in 1927, a step up from a county agricultural school. However, in 1953 Bull Cyclone departed Scooba, taking his family up to Nashville, where he wanted to finish up work for his bachelor's degree in physical education at Peabody College.