From today's Times and News-Star
Scott
Boatright – we call him “Boat” -- wondered where his friend and co-worker Buddy
Davis, Ruston Daily Leader sportswriter and man about town, was on that
Saturday morning this past July.
The
reason Boat missed him was because Buddy was here most every Saturday for the
past 40-plus years, including the few years Boat had worked at the Leader.
Unless he was on the road, Buddy, a one-man sports staff since pre-Watergate,
was in the office to get the Sunday sports pages out.
But
not this Saturday.
Long
and tough story short: Buddy had suffered a stroke. Early Friday afternoon
after work, he’d come home to the house he’s lived in since his parents died a
decade ago. He had the stroke in the kitchen, struck his head on a counter
falling and was flat on the floor, immobile and in and out of consciousness,
for almost a calendar day when Boat arrived. The paramedics were there shortly
after.
No
one missed Buddy until Saturday because this happened on one of maybe three
Friday nights a year when Buddy didn’t have to be somewhere covering something.
He’d
had better nights off.
It’s
been a battle for Buddy, these past four months. But this past Saturday was
different than that one in July. On Nov. 9 on the Louisiana Tech campus, Orville
Kince (O.K.) “Buddy” Davis (Class of 1969) and four others were inducted into
the University’s Athletics Hall of Fame.
This
is notable because all across the state, especially in North Louisiana and
Lincoln Parish, thousands of people have pieces of Buddy’s stories in their
scrapbooks, in their wallets or displayed with magnets on their refrigerators.
Before the stroke, Buddy had admirers like Fort Knox has gold bars. Since this
setback, he’s been elevated to rock star.
Cards.
Visits. Calls. Facebook likes. (Buddy didn’t know Facebook from phone book in
the spring, but now he’s constantly asking Tech’s athletics media relations
director Malcolm Butler, Buddy’s personal Facebook manager, how many “likes” he
has. It’s a bit embarrassing.)
Before
he could take calls himself, we’d play the messages off his cell phone in his
hospital room. One day I played him Doug Williams/Terry Bradshaw/Archie Manning
back-to-back-to-back, each wondering how Buddy was and wishing him well. The
late Eddie Robinson once told Sports Illustrated that Buddy was “like a son to
me,” and if the rest of us were older, maybe we’d feel the same way. As things
are, Buddy is like a friend you don’t want to go to the game without, even with
the bad puns and name-dropping and his constant losing battle with Twitter
operations.
Saturday’s
induction offered Lincoln Parish’s version of a Big Foot photo op: Buddy, owner
of a T-shirt/polo collection that reaches into the thousands, in a borrowed
suit and tie. Wow. He came into the room in his motorized chair, his first
public appearance since going on the disabled list. People beamed, asked him
where his hair had gone, then talked with others behind his back about how
great it was to see their friend again, and outside a hospital for a change.
Buddy,
who struck out in Little League every time he faced classmate and fellow
inductee George Stone, hit a homer with his speech. The highlight around the
jokes might have been his comment that while his legs and left hand were still
feeling numb due to the stroke, his whole body was feeling numb because of the
day’s honor.
He’s
writing his Sunday column, “O.K.’s Corral,” again. He scribbles them on a legal
pad from the assisted living center, and Boat types them in. Baby steps. It’s
good for us to see him in person again, but it’s good to see him on the page,
too.
For
his career, his calling, Buddy has always been the perfect guy in the perfect
place at the perfect time. The perfect name is just icing on the cake.
O.K.
Buddy.
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