Sidelines
Admit it. You were scared. You were worried. You didn't know what to think. Jones turns life
into an X-sportYes, June Jones had pulled through. He was out of the coma and out of the hospital, and getting better all the time. He was on his way to recovery. It was a miracle. His second miracle.
But as he got better, we began reading more and more things that made us stop in our tracks. Outrageous, disquieting, disturbing things. Macho pronouncements. Crazy quotes.
A couple months after crushing his car on some poles off the H-1, Jones was talking about how he had already zoomed around at 70 mph on his motorcycle, and a return to 120 wasn't entirely out of the question.
He talked about how the pain he was in made him feel like a football player again.
He was talking about "guts." About living on the edge, and taking risks for the thrill of it.
About how he admitted that some of the dangerous things he has done and will do again might not be the smartest things in the world. But he did them anyway. It was how he operated. In his world, it was how he lived.
It was the edge he needed to succeed.
It sounded like an interview from the "X Games."
Admit it.
You were worried.
I was worried.
Don't be.
I finally got a chance to sit down with the coach the other day. And I could see, as I looked into his eyes -- just like with George W. Bush and that Russian guy -- a sense of his soul.
Or something.
And I'm not worried any more.
June Jones isn't crazy.
He's a football coach.
Close, true. But he's still on our side of the fence.
Maybe it's a matter of context. Maybe those kinds of things just sound better coming from an in-control coach than from a guy just out of intensive care. Maybe they just looked a little striking sitting there on the printed page.
Maybe they were said at a time when he needed to believe how brave he was.
The thing that got to me most was the golf. Here, a man who could hardly walk was out forcing himself to swing the sticks. This was, of course, pure torture. But that didn't stop him. It only encouraged him.
Which brings us to the burning question, which I finally asked Jones the other day: Is golf supposed to hurt?
Our "Like Try?" adventure writer Chris "Danger" Dudley counters with, "He's single-handedly turning golf into a sport." Of course, Dudley has recently tried to ride a raging rodeo bull.
Jones is OK.
It's Dudley I'm worried about.
So Jones is a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. So what? Who do you think coaches football at the Division I level and in the NFL?
When you find a person who has dedicated his life's work to competition, whose livelihood depends on the performance of 18-23-year-olds, whose career can rise and fall with the sway of momentum and the sweep of chance, that's what you get.
Don't worry. Jones is normal.
He's just single-handedly turning life into a sport.
Kalani Simpson's column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
He can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com