DMN's Kevin Sherrington: Storied SWC Trainers Still Mum

[MrMustang1965]

FORT DAVIS, Texas – Way out here in the elbow of West Texas, on a serpentine road through cedar-stubble hills where traffic is deer or elk or the occasional family of wild hogs, it's probably fitting to find remains of the wild, wild Southwest Conference.

"Unsung Heroes of the SWC" is how the program reads, and you wouldn't get any argument from a couple hundred athletic trainers who came all this way for the 20th annual Davis Mountains Sports Medicine Clinic.

One minute it's a slide show on "autologous chondrocyte implantations" and "osteochondral allografts."

The next, it's which of the half-dozen honorees led the old SWC in ex-wives.

An athletic trainer culture primer: In my formative years as a reporter, trainers were always cultivated. Less migratory than coaches and far wiser, they made invaluable resources. They worked on bodies and knew where they were buried, too, though the statute of limitations apparently hasn't run out.

Hey, Cash Birdwell: Got any stories about the SWC's good ol' days?

"Better not," says Birdwell, who just retired after 33 years at SMU. "That's how I stayed employed at one place so long."

Anyone got any stories?

"Tom Wilson," says Spanky Stephens, Texas' longtime trainer, "he's got some stories."

But the Houston legend couldn't make it. The Ahab of the profession, a one-legged trainer with a single-minded passion for his job, Wilson fought for water breaks in the '50s when coaches thought they made players soft.

When he tired of mixing it up with coaches, the former Golden Gloves champ took it out on his assistants.

"He hit me so hard in the chest one time," Birdwell once said of the sparring sessions, "I thought my heart was going to come out of my mouth."

At 78, Wilson no longer gets around. But mercifully his stories still do.

As a student trainer, Wilson worked for the Dallas Texans, giving him a close-up look at an exchange between a defensive lineman named Paul Lipscomb and the Texans he hadn't already flattened.

When the Texans' body count had reached three – and Lipscomb had invited the entire Dallas bench to come get him – the young trainer approached his head coach.

"If you don't shut these guys up," Wilson said, "Lipscomb's gonna kill all of us."

He wasn't shy. Took a player to the training room, hooked him up to a machine and said he'd electrocute him if he didn't confess to what drugs he was using.

Worked, too. Unbeknownst to the kid, the machine didn't.

Longevity gives you that kind of latitude. The six trainers who made it to Fort Davis – Birdwell, Stephens, Texas A&M's Billy Pickard, Texas Tech's Ken Murray, Arkansas' Dean Weber and Baylor's Mike Sims – represent nearly 200 years experience, most of it in the SWC.

"The old SWC was a great conference," Weber tells his audience. "I'm sorry we defected first.

"But if it hadn't been us, it'd have been Texas or somebody else."

The league was doomed long ago, even before members ratted each other out.

You'd never guess any animosity listening to the stories, though. The trainers miss the camaraderie. Maybe the times, too.

"Some of us gave up drinkin'," Stephens tells the crowd, "and some of us gave up smokin' and some of us ..."

"Gave up," Birdwell says.

Rest in peace, SWC. Your secrets are safe with these guys.