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BALLER: A young Alan Leveritt takes the field.

I was the fourth chair drummer in the Jefferson Davis Junior High School Marching Rebel Band back in the ’60s when, at 15, I decided to reinvent myself.

My father had been a remarkable athlete at Arkansas A&M (now the University of Arkansas at Monticello) back in the ’30s. I desperately wanted to follow him into football glory, but my mother was having none of it. So I was in the band.

At Jeff Davis, a boy had to be ready to fight. In fact, it would help if he loved to fight. While my mother had tried to protect me from injury on the football field, I was probably at more physical risk as a band member. In the eyes of the bullies, music marked you as a weakling and a target. I hated that place. So I decided to go out for football the next year at North Little Rock High School, one of Arkansas’s biggest schools with a storied football program. For a 16-year-old boy from my town, it was just a small step below the Arkansas Razorbacks.

Football would mold me, make me bigger and stronger than the bullies, I decided. But I learned quickly that the bullies would have to wait. First, I had to survive football.

That summer, along with more than 100 other rising 10th graders, I showed up in the 100-plus degree heat for August two-a-days. We started every morning from 7-11 a.m., then we were back again from 4 p.m. until you couldn’t see the ball. That morning, Coach Stephens told us to look around. By our senior year, he said, four out of five of us would have quit.

I was certainly a prospect. I had never worn cleats and by the first week my arches had completely fallen, sending daggers of pain though my feet every time I pushed off. I didn’t know how to hit or how to block. I didn’t even know the warm-up exercises. Everyone else had played in junior high, and very quickly I was relegated to being a live tackling dummy or holding one for the more talented players to hit.

My father, who had been a physical therapist at Walter Reed Hospital during the Second World War, took to meeting me at home for lunch, greeting me with encouraging words and a tub full of very hot water. My body was so sore and bruised that he would have to lower me in and lift me out of the tub, then massage my aching muscles. After a couple of weeks of this, one day he said, “Alan, you have given this a really good try. Maybe this is not for you.”

My father was trying to give me an honorable way out, and to this day I love him for it. I watched so many fathers forcing and berating their sons back onto the field, trying to live out their own athletic dreams through their boys.

My definition of success was simply not to quit. Even when I broke my hand during tackling drills, I showed up every day wearing the cast. One of the coaches told me to quit and take study hall. I kept showing up.

Everyone plays and coaches football for their own reasons. It is certainly a career for the coaches, and it makes sense that they often put their time into the players who will make them successful. But many of them lose sight of their less talented players who are there for equally important reasons, be it to overcome adversity, build confidence or to build their bodies. The very worst thing for those less talented players — including me — was to be ignored.

Enter Eldon Hawley, a Little All-American from Forrest City, who came on as our defensive line coach. In an interview many years later, Hawley said, “Back then we coached pretty physical.” That was the only moment I would have described him as understated. Almost 60 years later, I think I still carry his multiple footprints on my butt. He would scream in your ear, slap your helmet until your ears rang, and bounce up and down the line on all fours, alternatively cajoling or threatening, always at the top of his lungs.

I was not only the smallest man on the team, but also one of the slowest. But I would do anything Coach Hawley said and, for the first time in over a year, it felt like someone knew I was there. I knew he knew because when I screwed up, he would come over and push me to the ground and stand over me, screaming my offense, then give me a hand up and put me back in the line to do it over. Unlike many coaches, Hawley would give back to a player as much as that player would put out, regardless of talent. He was incredibly demanding and, in the process, built confidence and character in his players.

I started the Arkansas Times right out of college, and a few years into it, I wrote Coach Hawley a letter thanking him for the attention he gave me. I finally started my senior year, but I wasn’t going to win any championships. Coach Hawley did it because he was building young men as well as players. The news is full of CTE deaths among retired NFL players, and even in the South, parents are pulling their kids out of schoolboy football in fear of injuries. But for me, looking back over a long life, it was the most important thing I ever did. The year after I graduated, I tried to hitchhike to Chile on $150 and I would probably have made it but for the Darién Gap. It never occurred to me I might fail. I had already survived Coach Hawley. Three years later, I started the Arkansas Times on $200 and drove a cab at night to make ends meet. I could do anything because I had spent three years with a man who believed in me.