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Greetings!
On this Memorial Day, we wanted to share something extra special with you. As many of you know, Auburn Head Football Coach Tommy Tuberville and four other coaches have been on tour since last week to visit U.S. troops in the Middle East. After landing at Andrews Air Force Base this afternoon, the coaches will be welcomed home by President Bush at the White House.
Coach Tuberville says he has met "tons" of Auburn fans on the trip.
Yesterday, the SEC flag-football team coached by Coach Tuberville and Georgia's Mark Richt won
the UnderArmour Bowl, 14-12, on a U.S. Air Force Base in Southwest Asia. It has been reported that after the game, the SEC team lifted the winning coaches and carried them to midfield...and Coach Tuberville held up 7 fingers.
ESPN's Ivan Maisel has been traveling with the coaches and including stories from the trip in an online diary. He plans to write about the journey in more detail, beginning tomorrow (Tuesday). But there was one particular entry that caught our attention and we wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to read it. In an SEC world more focused on Game Day Saturdays, recruiting and bowl games, it's a personal story not often heard from Coach Tuberville. You will find it below.
The Auburn Family is blessed to have many U.S. service men and women in its ranks - both active duty and retired - and still more Tigers have grandfathers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends who have fought for and served our nation proudly. Our thoughts are with all of you today -- and every day.
War Eagle! The Atlanta Auburn Club
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Coach Tuberville visits U.S. Troops in the Middle East & Remembers His Dad
From Ivan Maisel's ESPN Diary
SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. -- The college football coaches who are leaving to visit U.S. troops in the Middle East are doing so to bring a piece of home -- the Saturday-afternoons-in-the-fall piece -- to the young men and women working so hard so far away. Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville is going in order to honor the troops. But he's also going in order to honor his father.
"I was fortunate," Tuberville said. "I grew up with a military dad who fought in World War II. He was in the Army and drove a tank. He drove a tank down the middle of Paris when they liberated it."
Tuberville and his fellow coaches, Mark Richt of Georgia, Randy Shannon of Miami, Jack Siedlecki of Yale and Charlie Weis of Notre Dame, are the unusual stars of this trip, organized by Armed Forces Entertainment and a private firm, Morale Entertainment.
The typical AFE trip features a comedian or a musical act and consists of six to eight people for as many as 30 days. On the coaches' tour, those numbers are pretty much reversed. A traveling party of 25 will depart from here Tuesday afternoon (May 20) to go and return to Andrews Air Force Base on the afternoon of Memorial Day. In those seven days, the coaches will travel across the Middle East. Through it all, Tommy Tuberville will be thinking of his dad. Charles Tuberville went into Europe days after D-Day. He fought in the bitter winters in Belgium. He suffered shrapnel wounds, went into a hospital in Switzerland and returned to the front.
"He was in the battle of Ardennes," Tuberville said. "He wouldn't talk about it too much. He said, 'You can imagine being 18 years old, in a foreign country, not knowing anybody, freezing to death.' He said it snowed all the time. It snowed all the time. He said [they] didn't have anything to eat, you know, very little. He said your boots were about half worn out. You didn't have things back then like they do now.
"He said he was scared slap to death. 'Everybody was getting killed, right of me, left of me,'" Tuberville recalled his dad telling him. "'You didn't know when your time was coming.' They're all wars. But that wasn't a bombing war. That was a lot of combat."
Charles Tuberville returned home, started a family and joined the National Guard, in which he rose to the rank of master sergeant.
"I used to shine his boots," Tommy Tuberville said.
Tuberville recalled how his family ate dinner at 5:30 p.m. every weeknight so that it could watch the CBS Evening News and see anchor Walter Cronkite announce the number of American dead and injured in Vietnam. As Tuberville prepared to leave for the Middle East, his father returned to his side.
"It brings back a lot of memories of being around him and what he liked," Tuberville said. "I mean, he thought a lot of the military. It put him in harm's way, but it also saved his life, in terms of learning how to deal with a lot of things. He was a hard worker. It taught him discipline, work ethic. It's a lot of what we teach them in coaching."
In the summer of 1977, at National Guard camp at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Tuberville's father suffered a heart attack and died. He was 53.
"Same age as me," Tuberville said.
Click Here to Read More from Ivan Maisel's diary on ESPN.com
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The Atlanta Auburn Club is recognized as a not-for-profit corporation by the state of Georgia, and the club's Roy B. Sewell Memorial Scholarship Fund, Inc. holds 501(c)(3) non-profit status from the IRS. The AAC raises thousands of dollars annually to fund scholarships for metro Atlanta area students to attend Auburn University. In 2007, we were able to raise more than $27,000 to fund our regular and newly established endowed scholarships. The Greater Atlanta metro area is home to 20,000 Auburn alumni, fans & friends....and still growing. War Eagle!
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