Football Pilgrim : A Grambling Man Finds Calling at Village Christian

The transition from a high school youngster with aspirations of playing in the NFL to 40-year-old, small-time football coach has not been an easy one for Mike Plaisance.

During the long journey he has been part of a team whose practice field was a median strip dividing a busy New Orleans roadway. He has learned that being a black athlete in the South during the 1960s meant never having to say you’re enrolled in very white Louisiana State University. And in his first game of his senior season at Grambling State, he learned in a flash of pain what a spinal injury is all about.

Plaisance never fulfilled his childhood dreams, which revolved around playing someday in the NFL. But he is fulfilling new dreams, dreams that began as a young adult, dreams of staying involved in football while getting involved with religion. He is the football coach at Village Christian High in Sun Valley and, in his mind, he’s sitting on top of the world.

“I think this is where I was destined to be,” said Plaisance, who also serves as the school’s athletic director. “I’ve found my little niche in the world. As crazy as it might sound, I see myself staying here for the duration. I see myself right here in this office in the year 2020. Maybe still as a coach, maybe just as the athletic director or maybe just as somebody the kids can turn to, a counselor. Who knows? But I think this is where I want to spend my life.”

Plaisance was a bruising player, a 6-1, 210-pound high school quarterback who knocked down tacklers like bowling pins. In 1965 he was named the Louisiana State Athletic Assn.’s Player of the Year, most valuable player of his St. Augustine High team and of the Coast League in which it played, and a Parade Magazine second-team All-American. His team routinely practiced on the center strip of a major road because the school was too poor to have a real field.

“It was about 20 yards wide and lots of cars zipping by,” Plaisance said. “It was pretty dangerous. Let’s just say we didn’t practice any end sweeps.”

When his senior year began to wind down, he didn’t want much, just a shot at making the football team at his favorite college, nearby LSU.

“I started getting letters from all the schools, but nothing from LSU,” Plaisance said. “I couldn’t understand why. I guess I was pretty naive then. My coach, Eddie Flint, saw the disappointment I guess and told me about LSU. He told me I had the athletic ability and the grades to go to any school, anywhere. But he told me, ‘It’s not going to happen at LSU, so look somewhere else.’ He never actually told me why and I was too young and naive to figure it out. But I wasn’t going to LSU because I was black. In 1965, no Southeastern Conference schools were recruiting black players.

“None. It didn’t change until late in the ‘60s, when Bear Bryant was at Alabama and he got beat bad by USC and Clarence Davis. When he found out Davis was from Tuscaloosa, he vowed to never let a good black athlete out of the state again. That’s when the other SEC schools opened up for us.”

But it was too late for Plaisance. He went to all-black Grambling, where he became a power-running fullback for Eddie Robinson, the winningest coach in college football history. Plaisance had a decent junior year but said he didn’t feel that he was ready to become a good player until his senior season. He weighed 226 pounds, could bench-press 460 pounds and squat 600 pounds. But that season ended in a big hurry.

“It was our first game, and I got popped,” he said. “I went down and was numb for 20 minutes.”

A neurologist in New Orleans told him he wasn’t sure how much damage he had sustained in his spine, but he was sure about one thing: If Plaisance ever attempted to play football again, there was a tremendous risk of suffering permanent paralysis. Fifteen years later, after calcium had built up and began pinching the nerves, Plaisance woke up one morning and the entire right side of his body was paralyzed. He underwent a 6 1/2-hour operation in which several vertebrae were removed and the spinal cord was fused back together. He has lost about 15% of the mobility in one hip and walks with a noticeable limp, a scar from a very tough sport.

But nothing like the emotional scar he carries from the day he was told his football career was over.

“I had to hang ‘em up, and then I went home,” he said.

Home to the most trying time of his life, a period he calls “traumatic” and a period that Plaisance isn’t very fond of discussing. He hooked up again with his high school buddies, guys who had never left the neighborhood, and he was heading quickly down a dangerous road.

“My best friend is right now doing a life stretch in state prison in Louisiana,” Plaisance said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “He was involved in a liquor-store holdup and a police officer and a lady were killed. That was my crowd.”

Plaisance’s father died when his son was a youngster. His mother remarried and moved to Los Angeles. Plaisance was left with his grandparents, and after he dropped out of Grambling, his grandfather saw nothing but bad times ahead for his grandson. So he packed Plaisance’s bags and sent him to L. A., back to his mother.

Plaisance enrolled at Pepperdine and began study at the school’s downtown campus. And his life began a rather remarkable transformation.

“I had never been on a real Christian campus before,” he said. “We had mandatory chapel and Bible study. I had never been exposed to that. It was a bright light. In 1971, I became a Christian.”

He also came away from Pepperdine with a degree in biology.

Plaisance doesn’t smack people over the head with his beliefs. His discovery is one that provides an inner calm. Don’t look for him at L. A. International Airport, chasing people through the terminal, trying to sell a wilted flower or a religious book. Look for him on a football field.

“I have a strong belief that everybody was put here for a reason,” he said. “Life doesn’t take arbitrary twists. Everything happens for a reason. It took me a long time to see why football was taken away from me with that injury in college, but now I see clearly why that happened. He wanted to steer me towards this little, tiny school. He knows that this is where I can do the most good.”

In Plaisance’s life there was an even smaller school than Village Christian, a coeducational school with a high school enrollment of 500. It was called San Fernando Valley Christian School, which had 60 students in the late ‘70s and wanted a football team. Plaisance’s religion teacher at Pepperdine was the head of the tiny private school and knew of Plaisance’s football background.

And it was then that Plaisance realized that football could be much less than a life-or-death proposition, that it could actually be fun. And funny.

“We had a blind kid at the school who came out for the team. Said he wanted to be the kicker,” Plaisance said. “I told him, ‘Look, excuse me for being stupid, but you’re blind. How do you intend to be our kicker?”

The youngster, Doug Davidson, showed him how. He kicked the ball 35 or 40 yards, not bad on an 80-yard field used by the school’s eight-man team. But the tough part was teaching Davidson how to run quickly to the sideline after he kicked so he wouldn’t be trampled on the kick return. And everything went fine. Until the last game of the season.

“He gets turned around and instead of running to the sideline, he starts running right down the middle of the field, right into all the action,” Plaisance said, a smile lighting up his face. “Our kids are trying to block for him so he won’t get killed, and they forget about the guy returning the kick. But Doug, well he just wades into the middle of all this action and slam , he runs right into the ballcarrier and they both go down hard. Doug gets credit for the tackle.

“That was 10 years ago. You don’t think that poor kid still gets comments from his buddies about the time he was tackled by a blind kicker?”

Plaisance built a successful program from scratch at San Fernando Valley Christian. His teams were 43-13 during his six seasons there. Often, he had to improvise as he taught young boys the basics of football. But then again, adjusting to the situation was always one of his best talents.

“In New Orleans, we played a game once in rain so hard you couldn’t see 10 feet,” he said. “And the mud was unbelievable. I took a snap and these three defenders are all over me in a second. They got me wrapped up and ready to lay me down, so I just reached up through all their arms and grabbed my own face mask and yanked myself down into the mud real hard. And here come the penalty flags. Those three guys went berserk. All the ref saw was a hand on my mask, yanking me down. I guess he never figured it might be my hand.”

At Village Christian, though, the progress has been slower. He entered this season with a 40-30 mark in seven seasons at the school. But he doesn’t measure his success in numbers.

“My life here is to work for God,” he said. “And my job for Him is to turn out kids who understand that life isn’t all fun and games, that there’s something out there and we have to deal with it, that we can’t hide behind drugs or alcohol or anything else. These kids have to understand the seriousness of the world, that there are people out there who can push a button and start a nuclear attack and kill us all. Today. When the kids understand that, and understand how to learn to deal with it, then the world becomes a better place for them.”

On Plaisance’s desk sits a small trophy. On it are the signatures of all of his 1986 varsity football players. And on the small metal plaque is this message: To Coach Plaisance. Thanks for being more than our coach.

“I think I can help these kids if I stay here,” he said. “I think that’s why I was brought into the world and why I was guided to this school.”