The Patriot Post® · So Long, Coach Skinner

To any hot-blooded man who has ever nestled in the bucket seat of a flying “rag top” Corvette or upped the throttle to full on a pan-head Harley-Davidson, the song “Free Bird” is the anthem of the open road. Back in the ‘70s, when singer Ronnie Van Zant would scream at the end of some raucous concert, “What song you wanna’ hear?” that really meant, “Grab two more two long-necks because we’re fixing to play Free Bird long and hot!”

Actually, Free Bird was more than a song. It was about a time in life, the start of when some high school boys began taunting authority by wearing their hair long, and to this day, whenever a bunch of four-wheel drive trucks or snarling motorcycles are gathered, or when somebody even quietly whispers “road trip,” it won’t be long before that ghost of a voice cuts in over the slide guitar with the ageless croon, “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?”

And so it comes with a noticeable pang that just this Monday an immortal soul called “Coach Skinner” died because he’s as much of the story as anybody. You see, once he was a cigar-smoking basketball coach at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Fla., and he detested long-haired hippies, rock ‘n roll music and anything else that threatened the establishment. He was a zero-tolerance kind of guy, a crusty disciplinarian and generally a tough cookie.

So, back in the day when the boys would come to his gym class, he’d angrily boot out the ones with long hair. That’s right, he’d send 'em straight to the principal’s office and they’d be quickly suspended; thus a delicious little war of sorts started. You see, a couple of the boys had started a fledgling rock band called “One Percent” and felt they had a “need” for the shaggy look, just as their soon-to-be followers had “a need for speed.”

They even tried to hide the long hair by pasting it down with Vaseline at one point, but the coach, renowned for his own tight crew cut, gruffly told 'em to go out and buy some wigs. Well, the name of the coach was Leonard Skinner and the boys were so peeved they defiantly changed the name of their band to “Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

They laughed with glee that it was correctly pronounced “leh-nerd skin-nerd,” with a heavy accent on the “nerd.” Soon they hooked up with a keyboard player named Billy Powell, and then drummer Allen Collins’ girlfriend slipped him a piece of paper that read, “If I leave here tomorrow would you still remember me?” That message would become the opening line of the song Free Bird and, within months, Lynyrd Skynyrd was the hottest “southern rock” band in the country.

By then Coach Skinner had gotten out of coaching and was living out of town. He didn’t listen to rock ‘n roll, either, but a friend called him and told him his name was being blared over just about every radio station in America. “Well, there wasn’t much I could do about it,” he would later say, admitting he was pretty mad at first, but then “I just went along with the flow.”

As the band sky-rocketed to fame, another huge hit came with “Sweet Home Alabama” and – always – a huge Confederate flag billowed behind every set at the wild concerts. Coach Skinner, meanwhile, opened a bar called “The Still” in Jacksonville – he was also selling real estate – and, well, he mellowed a little bit.

He even picked up on his own notoriety, adding his name to the sign out in front of “The Still” to play off the band’s popularity, and soon became friends with those “little hippies” who once tried to make his life so miserable – and got the last laugh indeed.

That almost caught up with the Coach, though. The boys asked if they could put his real-estate sign on the front of their third album cover and he said something like, “if we’ve gone this far it suits me.” The trouble was, it included his actual phone number and, as the band laughed hysterically, the chagrinned Coach Skinner got thousands of telephone calls from all over the country.

Even though he’d “been had” again, he laughed the loudest, especially when the Lynyrd Skynyrd boys would drop by “The Still” and – just like the big concerts – end each show with the legendary Free Bird, a song when performed properly always lasted 10 or 15 minutes.

There is no telling what might have happened if the band’s private plane hadn’t crashed near McComb, Miss., in fall of 1977. Ronnie Van Zant, the lead singer, guitarist Steve Gaines and four others were killed but, since then, there has never been a rock concert of any kind in the South to this day where, towards the end, some prankster doesn’t yell, “Play Free Bird!”

After the crash, Coach Skinner was quoted as saying, “They were good, talented, hard-working boys. They worked hard, lived hard and boozed hard.” Later this week they’ll bury the “real” Leonard Skinner, who died at age 77 with Alzheimer’s disease.

Maybe he, too, will now fly as high as a Free Bird.