I ONLY MET SANKY Dixon once, for about two hours a year and a half ago just before the lunch hour at the Seville Retirement Home in Orem. Well into his 80s, and in spite of what they were serving for lunch, he was a remarkably upbeat man in his 80's. I commented on this and I still remember his response. All his life he'd felt the shadow of his successful older brother, Buck, a tennis champion among other things, but now, in his old age, Sanky was evening the score.
"I finally beat him at something," he said with the smile of the triumphant. "I outlived him."He said it with that mellowness that seems to be the province of the old - at least the lucky ones - who have figured it out that there really is plenty of time, after all.
I told him I was there because I was writing a book with LaVell Edwards and today I was going for deep background. He said I couldn't go much deeper than this. LaVell was his team captain almost 50 years ago when he was the head football coach at Orem's Lincoln High School. They lost one state championship game together, in 1947, and won one together, in 1948.
As proof of the one they won, Sanky turned toward the end table next to the couch, where a framed black and white photograph showed the Lincoln High players hoisting him to their shoulders. Sure enough, front and center, holding the left leg, was LaVell, looking back then a lot more like his youngest son, Jimmy, who wasn't even born yet, than the guy you can see currently on the BankOne ads.
Next to the photo was a copy of Refuge, the new best-selling book by Terry Tempest Williams. Kind of an odd coupling, I thought, a grainy old football photo next to a book of genuine '90's Awareness. Wrong again. Terry Tempest Williams, it turned out, is Sanky's granddaughter. The influence of the old coach, who passed away this week, went well beyond the gridiron.
He talked about LaVell at length, but not much of it was about football. He talked about how LaVell called him on the phone every week or so, how he'd often stop by and visit him now that they'd wrestled his car keys away from him - not to mention his car.
"He always leaves tickets for me," said Sanky. "He takes care of me."
At lunchtime I left and drove to the BYU football offices, where LaVell Edwards said he was 8 years old when he first met Sanky Dixon. He used to walk home from the Orem elementary school past the high school practice field so he could watch his older brothers play football. Sanky picked right up on his uncommon interest - and made him his water boy.
From that moment on, LaVell wanted to be a football coach.
He never set out to intentionally become a passing wizard, but he did set out to intentionally become a Sanky Dixon. The BYU coaches' insistence on organization? His penchant for fundamentals? His obsessiveness about repetition? Don't blame him. Blame Sanky.
"I remember working on blocking drills the morning before our state championship game," LaVell said.
Mainly, he said he wanted to be like Sanky in dealing with others; he wanted to have the kind of respect Sanky always got.
He remembered a day when he was a sophomore in high school, already on the varsity. He and some teammates were horsing around in the locker room. Somehow, LaVell smacked Sanky, his coach, in the side of the face with a wet towel.
"He called me into his office," remembered LaVell. "And said, `You may be a good athlete, you may come from a fine family, and you may have a lot of friends. But, you know, that does not give you license to be a jerk.' "
"I've never forgotten what he said, or the embarrassment I felt," LaVell said. "To this day, when I have to deal with those kinds of things, I'll call kids into my office and give them the same speech Sanky gave me, almost verbatim."
"And you know, most of the time it works."
The BYU coach, a remarkably upbeat man, leaned back in his chair. "Next to my father," he said, "Sanky Dixon's probably had more influence on my life than anyone. He's just a great man."
What goes around comes around. That's what they say.