Spurrier How the Ball Coach Taught the South to Play Football

“We all like to prove people wrong who say we’re no good,” says the eternally driven Steve Spurrier, the 1966 Heisman Trophy winner and NFL quarterback who took off his helmet, put on his coaching visor, and turned three downtrodden universities into winners. Spurrier’s Fun ’N’ Gun offense at the University of Florida flummoxed defenses and rewrote playbooks across the Southeastern Conference, transforming SEC football into a modern phenomena. Spurrier tells the story of a preacher’s son from the Tennessee hills who has been overwhelming opponents with “ball plays” for nearly six decades.

The climax of his storied career is uplifting the University of South Carolina, a school that lost more football games than it won between 1892 and 2005, and was believed for over a century to be cursed. The only Heisman Trophy winner ever to coach another Heisman Trophy Winner, Spurrier dared to enter the “graveyard of coaches” at South Carolina and confront his destiny, turning the USC Gamecocks into an unlikely winner. Spurrier is the biography of the Ball Coach who has forever changed college football—and its impact on our culture.

  -Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fifties

“Ran Henry has written an all-American story of grit, talent, and triumph. This meticulously researched biography details the life of one of college football’s most iconic and galvanizing figures, Steve Spurrier. You may love him or hate him, but after reading this riveting tale, you will admire him. . . . Spurrier is more than the story of one outrageously talented and preternaturally determined athlete; it’s the story of how football came to be America’s game, and it should be required reading for all SEC football fans.”

—John Dufresne, author of No Regrets, Coyote and Louisiana Power & Light

"Ran Henry takes his subjects so personally that the depth of the details he reveals is packed with originality and an uncanny insight into the human condition. His journey into the heart and soul of a Southern football legend is a marvel.”

— T. M. Shine, author of Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You and Father's Aren’t Supposed to Die: Five Brothers Reunite to Say Good-bye

Legendary player and coach Steve Spurrier is recognized as the driving force who transformed the once mocked Southeastern Conference (SEC) into a dynasty that has won the last six national college football championships while dominating television coverage. From 1990-2001 Spurrier led the University of Florida Gators to six SEC championships and one national championship, and today he’s working miracles with the long-cursed University of Carolina Gamecocks, coaching them to their best record in 119 football seasons and their first Top Ten finish in school history.

Spurrier has a reputation as the most demanding coach in all sports; he designs and calls his own plays and he could probably even run them, surpassing even icons Bear Bryant and Vince Lombardi as the only Heisman Trophy winner ever to coach a Heisman Trophy winner. Spurrier is a master technician and a strategist whose wildly acclaimed “Fun ‘n’ Gun” passing attack, and innovations such as his “no huddle” offense, have permanently changed both amateur and professional football. But it’s his astounding ability to confound critics and expectations that lifts him above all other football men and makes him the perfect subject for a big, complicated, and absorbing biography to stand aside such classic sports titles as David Maraniss’ When Pride Still Mattered and Mark Kriegel’s Pistol. Unpredictable strategies, down-home quips and an uncanny ability to beat almost anyone at anything make Steve Spurrier a showman no sports can ignore.

This is the great American football story, by an author who can chronicle—and explain—Steve Spurrier like no other writer. Author Ran Henry, a longtime journalist for such papers as the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times and a writing instructor at the University of Virginia, first interviewed Spurrier in 1986, and Spurrier is fully cooperating with him on this book, which he sees as a part of defining his legacy (he will probably retire in 2015). Ran Henry has followed Spurrier through the dark years leading to his unprecedented success at Florida and South Carolina, all the while gaining insights to awe the legions of football fans and lovers of good sports biography who think they know Spurrier’s legendary capabilities.

Ran Henry grew up rooting for “that Spurrier kid” his father revered three mountains over in Johnson City, and spent his life as a writer at the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, the Florida Times-Union, the St. Petersburg Times and Tropic, the Sunday Magazine of the Miami Herald. Henry has an MFA in creative writing at Florida International University, where he began teaching undergraduate writers in 2000, and was a Ralph McGill Scholar at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.  He currently designs and teaches writing courses for the  Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Virginia and offers a course in Football Writing at the nation's number one Honors College at the University of South Carolina.  Henry first officially interviewed Steve Spurrier in 1986 in Tampa and as a Miami Herald writer interviewed Spurrier in Gainesville in 1997 to begin work on this definitive biography. Henry divides his time between Charlottesville, Virginia, Columbia, South Carolina and a home in the mountains of West Virginia.