Johnny Parker recalls the Christmas gift that led to his Hall of Fame career as a football strength coach
By Rick Cleveland | Originally published by Mississippi Today
Shaw native Johnny Parker, the soon-to-be Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer, rates as quite likely the most influential strength and conditioning coach in American sports history. That is no exaggeration.
Parker, 79, remembers the Christmas gift from 65 years ago that started him on a career path that led to four Super Bowls and three Super Bowl championship rings.
“My momma and daddy got me a set of weights and changed my life,” Parker recalled. “Part of the instruction book told me to measure and weigh myself before I got started, and so I did. I was 5 feet, 11 and a half inches tall. I weighed a robust 105 pounds. My arms were 10 inches around.”
Older folks will understand this: Parker was skinnier than the poor guy always getting sand kicked in his face in the “before” part of the before-and-after Charles Atlas magazine ads. When Parker first got started with his new set of weights, he could only lift the bar. The weights were too much for him to handle.
“I was so skinny you could almost see through me,” Parker has said. “I had no self-esteem, no confidence in myself. My dream, like a lot of Mississippi boys, was to play high school football. I never became a great player, but I played. And however good I became, it was because of those weights.”
Parker, a Methodist preacher’s son, added 75 pounds of muscle. He became a starting lineman in football and threw the discus in track and field. His self-esteem soared. He still wasn’t college football material, so he attended Ole Miss and eventually got his degree in history. His plan was to teach, but the opportunity to also coach football presented itself, and that meant a few more bucks a month.
So he became a history teaching assistant football coach at Indianola Academy, a few miles from his hometown. And there, he set out to change lives just as that Christmas present from his parents had changed his.
One life he changed was that of Steve Yarbrough, the acclaimed Mississippi novelist from Indianola who has won far more literary awards than Parker won Super Bowl rings. Yarbrough stumbled into Parker’s Indianola Academy weight room as a ninth grader in 1971. He now says that day changed his life.
“I didn’t necessarily need to succeed at football, but I longed to succeed at something,” Yarbrough has written. “I am convinced that if I had not met Johnny Parker when I did, the rest of my life would have taken a very different course.”
Long story made short: In Parker’s weight room and on the football field, Yarbrough gained the self-confidence he had lacked. He became a star high school lineman, good enough to earn a college scholarship to Delta State. Football wasn’t his future, but now he had one. He found a reason to believe in himself.
The same lessons he learned in Parker’s weight room – lessons about hard work, dedication, persistence – would serve him in writing literature. “Johnny Parker changed my life,” Yarbrough says. “I am by no means the only one who feels that way.”
Another is longtime high school football coach Joey Hawkins, who won four state championships at Jackson Academy and is now the head coach at Columbia Academy. Hawkins played for Parker at Indianola.
“The main thing that Coach Parker taught us was how to have a commitment to excellence on a daily basis,” Hawkins said. “He showed us how much hard work would pay off. He was a disciplinarian that showed tough love. He touched all of our lives. I love the man.”
So, you might ask, how does an assistant coach/history teacher at tiny Indianola Academy go on to helping NFL teams reach four Super Bowls and win three? Turns out, Parker practiced what he preached in terms of dedication, persistence and hard work. To all that add this: an insatiable thirst for knowledge. The more Parker learned about the science of strength and conditioning, the more he wanted to learn, which took him to Russia, where he studied under Russian Olympic coaches.
Understand, strength coach is a relatively new term in sports. As recently as 50 years ago, there weren’t many at all. Parker was South Carolina’s first in 1976, hired by Paul Dietzel. Indiana hired him in 1977, where he worked with Lee Corso in football and Bobby Knight in basketball. Then it was on to LSU. Then Ole Miss under Steve Sloan.
When it comes to career advancement, connections help, too. In 1984, with his injury-prone New York Giants struggling to win football games, Bill Parcells knew he needed to try something different. The Giants had never had a strength and conditioning coach, but Parcells decided they needed one and launched a nationwide search. Parcells was good friends with Knight, the Indiana basketball legend. Knight told Parcells about Parker. Halfway through a subsequent job interview, Knight knew he had his man.
The rest is NFL history. From 3-12-1 in 1983, the Giants advanced to 8-7, then 10-6 and then, in 1986, 14-2 and Super Bowl champions. I covered that 1987 Super Bowl, when Parcells credited Parker’s strength and conditioning program as the most crucial element in the Giants turnaround. Parcells said Parker’s program made his team bigger, stronger and more durable. But it was more than that, Parcells said. “The weight program has unified our team,” he said.
The Giants won another Super Bowl in 1990. And when Parcells moved from New York to the New England Patriots, Parker went with him and coached in another Super Bowl. Later in his career, Parker earned another Super Bowl ring with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and John Gruden.
Since his 2008 retirement, and especially in recent years, Parker has struggled mightily with his health, battling cancer among other serious health issues. Friends had been hoping against hope Parker could make the trip from Cleveland, Ohio, where he now lives, for Saturday night’s induction. A private plane had been secured for the trip. On Monday, Parker’s doctors made the final decision that Parker is just too sick to make the journey.
Nevertheless, his former Indianola Academy Colonels from more than half a century ago will fill several tables at Saturday night’s ceremonies at the Clyde Muse Center in Pearl. They will hear his taped remarks where he is asked about his career accomplishments.
“I don’t know that I did much of anything,” Parker will say. “You know, good coaches coach football. Great coaches coach people. … If I have anything to be proud of it would be that I did fairly well at coaching people, not football.”
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More to read:
• Steve Yarbrough on Johnny Parker.
• Hall of Fame Induction weekend activities.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
