TERRELL LESTER Column

Scouting around ... Hall of Fame football coach Phil Ball is recuperating and undergoing therapy in Oklahoma City after sustaining a broken hip and a broken shoulder at his home in Edmond.

Ball was inducted into the Oklahoma Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 1978 after wrapping up a three-decade career that took him to Wewoka, Walters, Seminole and Muskogee before landing at Central State College in 1964.

A child of the Depression and a veteran of World War II, the 82-year-old Ball said the therapy sessions are a little taxing.

“I never had anything in football that compared to some of the pain I’ve been having with this,” he said the other day.

“There were some losses that shook me to the bone. But I guess I’ve got to approach it like football, that you have those great games and everything works out fine, and there’s going to be those other games, too. I hope I can forget about those bad ones, and not dwell on them.”

Ball won the 1960 Class A state championship at Seminole, and two years later he moved to Muskogee, succeeding the legendary Paul Young.

Ball, who taught math, was a football coach who placed academics above athletics.

Another Hall of Fame coach, John Scott, played for Ball at Wewoka and earned All-State honors as a lineman.

Scott closed out his coaching career at Owasso, where he had served as athletic director. He remembered Ball grading math papers on bus rides to and from football games on Friday nights.

“He would sit up there at the front of the bus, with nothing but a little overhead light,” Scott said. “He wouldn’t say anything, going or coming. He’d just grade those papers. He was a dedicated teacher. And, a heckuva football coach.”

Thinking about those road trips, Ball laughed and said: “I hope that I never did grade those papers right after a loss. My scheme of things would have been distorted.”

Ball then said: “I know that some of the players said that they would never go into coaching because I’d be taking along my math papers and be grading them on the bus.”

Still, Scott was just one of many Ball proteges to follow him into the coaching ranks. And many have been visiting with him in recent days in the Oklahoma City hospital. ...