COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’87 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH THIS SEASON : ANOTHER JUNKYARD : Erk Russell Moves to Georgia Southern and Teaches Some New Dogs All His Tricks

Six years ago, when the school announced its new coach and the resumption of a football program that had been dormant 41 years, someone thought to visit the equipment room and produce an actual football, the better for photo opportunities. There wasn’t one, there or anywhere else on campus.

The people at Georgia Southern tell you this to emphasize how far they’ve come in this sport. Five years later, the university won its first Division I-AA football championship; six years later, its second.

Think about it: Six years ago, they didn’t have a football; today, they have rings on their fingers and a $6-million stadium with luxury boxes Al Davis might envy. The program has gotten so big in that time that the local newspaper was forced to begin a Sunday edition just to report Saturday’s games.

Six years ago, nothing; today, Georgia Southern has even a body of lore, various traditions so hoary you’d think the Eagles introduced the game. Why, it’s gotten to the point that Beautiful Eagle Creek, whose banks the players practice by (and sometimes in, but that’s another story), has become a body of water to rival the Mississippi in importance. Certainly, it’s as famous.

Credit Erk Russell, a bigger, balder and slowed-down replica of Don Rickles, with this instant football. A longtime Georgia assistant coach, whose sideline quirkiness was already legend, Russell has done more than create a football power from scratch; he has hatched a full-blown program, complete with its own anecdotal history.

Remember the time, they ask at Snooky’s, when Coach lofted that rattlesnake in the team meeting? How about when he took a jug of water from Beautiful Eagle Creek and sprinkled it in the end zone up in Tacoma? Remember when he marched the team through Beautiful Eagle Creek (that damn creek again) to make them mean, and then read that poem?

Six years ago, no football; today, a coach legendary enough to retire the Bear’s ghost.

Strange that things should happen so fast for Erk Russell now, when they had always happened so slowly. Russell, 61, was Vince Dooley’s defensive coach at Georgia for 17 years and looked to be there another like span. Not that it was so bad a thing to be. Even as defensive coach, he was beloved and famous in the state, an institution in Southern football.

Followers of Georgia football nostalgically recall Russell butting heads with his players, the most famous of whom came to be called the Junkyard Dogs in the 1970s, in pregame drills. It was a sight. Afterward, there’d be Russell ranging up and down the sideline in that black Georgia jacket with the sleeves cut off--a junkyard coach--blood trickling down his forehead.

It might have stayed that way forever. But Georgia Southern’s then-president Dale Lick got it in his head to revive football. In his travels to promote the college, he was always hearing the same two things. Build a nursing college and bring back football. He did both, the latter against some resistance. The faculty had voted, 2-1, to prevent it, but Lick promised that no football money would come from their academic funding.

If the faculty had known Russell was going to make himself available, even they might have embraced the notion. But his availability was something of a surprise.

“The idea of starting something from scratch,” Russell says slowly, between puffs of a cigar Reggie Jackson might lug to the plate, “rather than some sick program, had a great appeal. And I just felt I needed some new experience.” That is to say, Dooley had shown no signs of moving on, himself.

And so Russell came to town, the most famous visitor since Sherman stormed through, although Russell was somewhat more welcome. Still, who’d have thought he would stay longer.

“We had 135 walk-ons that first year,” he recalls, “I should say, the most enthusiastic non-athletes you ever saw.” It was strictly a volunteer force. You could have made the team (yes, you).

On the other hand, why would you want to. The team played, when it played at all, at Statesboro High, a field with some slope to it, it is said. In addition, it was disquieting for the home team to arrive for a game, driving under a blue arch that said: “WELCOME TO BLUE DEVIL COUNTRY.” Why, they were Eagles, weren’t they?

And who did the team play, anyway? That first year, each other mostly, although they got a bona fide game from Magnum Force, the Jacksonville police force (Georgia Southern’s first win, for you dynasty-watchers).

In 1982, Russell had them classified NAIA, and his first class of actual recruits--players who would later win two national championships--tuned up for glory by playing Florida State JV.

Then in 1983, he stepped up the competition with a schedule of four-year colleges. Emboldened after winning 6 of 11 games, Georgia Southern quickly went to NCAA Division I-AA, a collection of 88 schools who disdain the football factories.

It got better and better, quicker and quicker. A Savannah businessman wrote a $1-million check to begin work on a new stadium. Boosters swelled to 1,300, raising a half-million dollars themselves. And Russell, the baldest Eagle ever, continued to win.

“Was I surprised to win so much, so fast?” he asks. “No, I wasn’t surprised. I was shocked.” But he insists it wasn’t any of his genius in the doing. “You just get lucky, that’s all. You get some good athletes and then you get lucky again by staying healthy.”

To Russell’s way of thinking, the entire success rested on the slim shoulders of that first recruiting class, which included players like Tracy Ham, who had gotten zero offers elsewhere. Russell must have a shrewd eye. Running a weird kind of option offense--known as the Hambone--Ham rushed for 4,253 yards and passed for 7,259 more in his remarkable career. “Who’d have thought we’d get anybody this naturally suited to run this offense?” Russell asks. Actually, nobody.

But Russell had a lot of players like that. “Take a guy like (All-American tackle) Fred Stokes,” he says. “He played in the band for three years. We had a couple of guys who played in the band, now that I think about it. These were all people a step too slow, an inch too short. But I could give them an opportunity to play, and any kid appreciates that. They had nobody to beat out.”

In 1985, playing in their new stadium, this rag-tag bunch went 9-2 and was chosen for the 12-team playoffs. The team won its first two playoff games and moved on to Northern Illinois for the semifinals. Russell got to musing over at Snooky’s, a diner that overlooks the practice field, that his players, some of whom had never been on a plane, might get to feeling homesick. And so, instant tradition was born.

Russell got to gazing, specifically, at the banks of the Beautiful Eagle Creek, and it finally occurred to him. “It was a natural,” he says. He bottled the water, carried it on the plane himself--”I wouldn’t trust the airlines with that”--and took it to the stadium, where he anointed the end zones with the water. And he did it again for the title game.

And for the final two games of last year’s championship season.

At first, he says, “it was just something to remind them of home, to bridge the gap.” But soon it became ceremonial, including processions and incantations, the potent waters of the Beautiful Eagle Creek. In any event, the Eagles are 4-0 with this water, including an amazing come-from-behind win (from 6-28 to 44-42 in the final 22 minutes) in the 1985 championship game.

Now, about this water: It is a foul runoff, this water, slime and swamp. For BEC is not a creek at all. Not the Blue Danube of Bulloch County. It’s a drainage ditch, the apparent purpose of which is to breed gnats and mosquitoes. “We thought those larvae would hatch overnight,” Russell explains, “and make us feel at home.”

The other day, before the final practice of the week, Russell marched his players through the creek, explaining that water changes you, makes you mean and resistant to losing. A defensive lineman with a broken foot loped through the waters hoping for a cure. Alas, the waters are only lucky, not holy.

But special. In last year’s playoffs, opponents resorted to their own waters, Nevada Reno trucking in water from the Truckee River and Arkansas State bringing some Indian pond water that Coach Larry Lacewell promised would “disinfect” Russell’s sludge. Neither worked, the Eagles beating both handily. As the sign above their dressing room read, “It’s the water that makes the difference.”

Snooky’s, where Russell stops every morning to have coffee with the 7:30 philosophers, is justly celebrated for being the rural think tank that inspired the jugging of BEC (which merits its own official-looking sign). It’s also known as the place where Russell got the snake idea.

Snooky’s, actually, is kind of a 1980s cracker barrel, men drifting in for coffee, a look at the sports pages and conversation. On the wall are instructions for the Heimlich maneuver, class pictures of the high school graduating classes and a plaque for the Annual Hawg Bass Fishing Classic. It is obviously a good place to think up things.

One day, sitting around the table as he does every morning, Russell was wondering how he might impress his players with the dangers of drugs. This is where he thought of a way. The idea was, he’d show his players some white powder, give a little lecture. Hardly attention-getting. Then, some folks from the rattlesnake farm down in Claxton came in with a rattlesnake and flopped it on the table with the phony powders. “How many athletes,” Russell asked his players, in the chaos that followed, “have died recently from a rattlesnake bite? How many have died of cocaine?”

Sports publicist Ken McClellan wasn’t in the room but he said, “All of a sudden, I heard chairs tipping over and people trying to get out of a room.” Point made.

Now that Ham is gone (he was a ninth-round draft choice of the Rams but is playing for Edmonton in the Canadian Football League), Russell despairs of repeating as champion, with four from the offense in the pros. “It will not be difficult,” he assures. “It will be impossible.” But it is silly to discount the chances of a team with practice fields astride Beautiful Eagle Creek, the supernatural spa.

Meanwhile, think of what he’s already accomplished. The school, its name bandied about on a 31-station radio network (not to mention occasional stories in the national press), has grown from 6,000 to 9,000 since Russell arrived. The struggling farm community reports added income, not all of which passes through Snooky’s first. Certainly it has a focal point where there was none before. Home attendance averages nearly 13,000 in a county of barely 30,000.

With this vast forum, he thus spreads the word “that we’re in Statesboro, 50 miles from Savannah; the co-eds are pretty, outnumber the men and are rich.”

Russell vows more, more wins and more tradition and propaganda. To bolster his ‘bone offense, he went after a quarterback named Veal. “Didn’t get him, wasn’t very good, but I’d like to have coached the Vealbone all the same,” he says. Instead, he will coach the Spambone. “Spam is the perfect substitute for Ham,” he explains.

He thought that up at Snooky’s.