LSUDad Posted December 20, 2022 Share Posted December 20, 2022 Some might remember Phil, he was from Marshall, Tx. Whenever I’d see Odell Beckham, Sr. I’d tell him he was the third best player to come out of Marshall. Y.A. Tittle was number one, then Phil, then OBS. Looks like Phils going to retire, here’s a quote from my good friend. Quote of the year from North Texas interim coach Phil Bennett talking about his wife and whether this is his final game before retirement" "She told me the other day she's going to have a man sleeping in her house next year, and if it was going to be me I better show up." 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Herb Posted December 20, 2022 Share Posted December 20, 2022 I wish him well...good thing his wife has a sense of humor! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSUDad Posted December 20, 2022 Author Share Posted December 20, 2022 2 minutes ago, Herb said: I wish him well...good thing his wife has a sense of humor! Don’t know if you remember, his first wife was struck by lightning and died. Phil was working at KSt. with Bill Snyder. On August 11, 1999, Bennett's 41-year-old wife, Nancy, was killed by lightning while she was jogging near their home in Manhattan, Kansas. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSUDad Posted December 20, 2022 Author Share Posted December 20, 2022 Enjoy: The first time they met, not five seconds after laying eyes oneach other, the young football coach with the strong, handsomeface said, "Hi, I'm Phil Bennett, and I'm never gettingmarried." That's how Nancy would remember their 1981introduction, anyway, years after she'd snagged him and made himher own. Phil's memory of the occasion, though vivid, owes lessto what he said than to what he saw. He saw a beautiful,blue-eyed blonde with a Coppertone tan and the best smile in allof College Station, Texas. She was wearing green khaki shorts, aflowery shirt and sandals. Phil's brother Jim had helped setthem up, and though this qualified as a blind date, Phil knewthat for as long as he lived he would not forget the image ofNancy Harris as she pulled open the door to her apartment andinvited him in. "What is it you remember about the first time you saw me?" Phil used to ask her. "Your hair was too short, but you had on shorts, and I liked your legs," she would reply. "You had great-looking legs." "What about my face?" "You have a nice appearance. You're what I would call a rugged handsome." "That's because I've got so many wrinkles in my forehead. You know how you get those? From coaching." Nancy loved to talk, and you wouldn't be wrong to rank her as one of the world's alltime great talkers. Their two children notwithstanding, Phil was easily her favorite subject, and often when he came up in conversation she abandoned use of the pronoun he and replaced it with we. As in, "We're coaching at Kansas State now." And, "We've got a great group of kids this year." At Phil's games Nancy spent most of the time on her feet, hollering down at the field, singling out players and offering encouragement. "Sometimes it seemed that Mrs. Bennett knew as much football as Coach Bennett did, and he knew just about everything," says Dallas Cowboys linebacker Dat Nguyen, whom Phil coached at Texas A&M in 1995 and '96. Even when the crowd numbered 80,000, most of them making noise, Phil could pick out Nancy's voice from where he stood on the field. It was easy, because they were so tuned in to each other. "Telepathy," he calls it. "Like those times in my office when I'd be sitting at my desk and thinking about something, and suddenly the phone rang, and it was Nancy calling to talk about whatever it was I was thinking about." At games, when somebody sitting close to her was critical of Phil's team or one of his players, Nancy had a way of putting the spectator in his place. "Hey, by the way," she'd say, flashing a smile, "these are all coaches' wives you're sitting with. Now let me explain to you why things happen the way they do." Then she'd launch into an analysis of a blitz package or explain the difference between a 3-4 and a 4-3 front. Phil liked to glance up before the opening kickoff and find her seated with the coaches' wives: Nancy all dressed up in the team colors. She used to joke that she loved it when Phil coached at Texas Christian and LSU, because she looked good in purple. But the truth was that she looked good in any color. When he spotted her, Phil didn't have to nod or wave in acknowledgment. A look was all they needed, especially when they had their game faces on. "I knew if it was a good day and we won, she'd be proud of me," says Phil, now in his first year as defensive coordinator at Kansas State. "But I also knew that if it was a bad day and we lost, she'd be proud of me, too. That was Nancy." As you've probably figured out, this story isn't about football as much as it's about love. So that would make it a love story. And as is the case with most great love stories, this one ends too soon. To Phil, of course, it isn't over and likely never will be, despite the fact that Nancy, at age 41, died on Aug. 28, 17 days after being struck by lightning while she jogged near their home in Manhattan, Kans. Nancy's dead. Just saying it makes about as much sense to Phil as saying the stars have left the sky and the moon has turned to dust. Nancy's dead. Now how can that be true? "Nance, are you going to run?" Phil asked her that morning. It was 6 a.m. The night before, the freshmen on the Wildcats football team had reported for orientation and the start of two-a-days. This was a joyful time for the Bennetts. After years of bouncing from one college town to another, they'd found a place that promised to be more than just a whistle-stop. In his 20-year career Phil had worked at one high school and seven colleges, building a reputation as one of the top defensive coaches in the country. In the last decade alone he'd pulled gigs at Purdue, LSU, Texas A&M, Texas Christian and Oklahoma. At Kansas State, which hired him last January, he was working for one of the most respected coaches in the game, Bill Snyder, who'd made a winner of a program that only 10 years ago was named by this magazine as the worst in Division I-A. Phil took an apartment in family student housing until June, when Nancy and their children, 11-year-old Sam and nine-year-old Maddie, moved up from Fort Worth. They settled into a house only about a mile from the football stadium. At night when the stadium lights were on, a wash of electric white bled into heavenly black, and the whole amazing spectacle was visible from the street in front of the Bennetts' house. "When you're a coach's wife, home is where you happen to be living at the moment, and every move is only as good as you make it," says Sue Fello, whose husband, Bob Fello, coaches defensive ends at Kansas State. "Nancy would walk across the street and introduce herself to the neighbors. She was so friendly, how could you not want to get to know her? She and Phil had been in Manhattan for only a few months, but already everybody knew her." Nancy's day started with a walk/run that took her several miles from home and usually lasted about an hour. That morning as he showered, Phil heard what he thought were artillery exercises at nearby Fort Riley, but when he left the bathroom and started to dress, he realized that he'd been hearing thunder. Weeks before, he'd helped Nancy establish a jogging route, so he knew where to look for her. He got in his car, and after cruising around awhile he entered a subdivision with new construction and passed a police cruiser parked by the curb. He pulled into the freshly poured driveways of three unfinished houses, hoping she'd ducked inside to wait out the storm, but there was no sign of her. At last he headed back to Meadowood Drive, which led out of the subdivision, and up ahead he saw a policeman in a slicker. It had begun to rain harder. "Officer," Phil called out. "Hey, Coach," said the policeman. "Have you seen a good-looking blonde out jogging around here?" The policeman hesitated, and in his eyes Phil saw the answer. "Coach, did you know that woman?" "What woman?" Phil said, raising his voice even though the man stood only a few feet away. In that moment a picture of merciless clarity came to him. Phil Bennett, 43 years old, with two young children to raise, understood that his life would never be the same again. She came from a little place called Alvarado, Texas, just south of Fort Worth, and she came from class and money, or what seemed like class and money to a rough-and-tumble tomcat like Phil Bennett. Nancy's dad was a doctor, whereas Phil's old man made his living as a pipe fitter in the oil fields. Alaska, California, Louisiana, Texas--if there was oil in the ground, in all likelihood Jim Bennett Sr. and his family had lived there at some time or another, establishing a nomadic pattern that prepped Phil for his future as a college football coach. "I knew Dad didn't have a job when we'd move in the middle of the night because he couldn't pay the rent," Phil says. The Bennetts eventually settled in Marshall, Texas, in 1962, after a doctor in California informed Phil's mother, Faye, that she had cancer and needed to be close to her family. Faye got a job selling cosmetics at Wiseman's department store, and after an operation she gathered enough strength to cast the disease from her body and live for three more decades. To Phil, her victory over cancer served as a lesson: You are as strong as you will yourself to be. Heavily recruited out of high school, he went to Texas A&M on a football scholarship, and as a senior, in 1977, he made second-team All-Southwest Conference at defensive end. "Phil was about as tough as anybody on our team," says R.C. Slocum, his position coach at the time and now the Aggies' head coach. "He had this competitiveness and this quick temper, and they made him incredibly motivated, an overachiever. I always thought Nancy was good for him because she was so friendly and engaging and even-tempered, while Phil's got that short fuse." In 1982, a few months after Phil and Nancy began living together, he got into a fight with a biker who'd dared to toss an empty beer bottle in Phil's vicinity. The biker was getting the better of the battle until Phil split the man's forehead open with his Southwest Conference championship ring. Awash in blood, the biker slumped to the ground, and Phil jumped on him and forced his hands into the man's mouth and pulled outward until the lips seemed to stretch from ear to ear. The man squealed in surrender, and Phil kicked him in the ribs as a final gesture of contempt. Phil left the duel with a grotesquely swollen eye, the flesh all around it an iridescent mosaic. "Y'all have to help me with Nancy," he told a couple of friends who'd witnessed the fight. "To any other girl I'd have said, 'Ah, don't worry about it,' and I wouldn't have cared what she thought," Phil says now. "That moment was when it came to me that I was in love with Nancy." At home later Phil told Nancy, a registered nurse, that he'd run into a tree while jogging. "Phil?" she said. "A tree did that?" "I got poked," he answered with all the sincerity he could muster. They'd planned to go to a movie, and when Phil went into the bedroom to change his shirt, Nancy saw scratches and other abrasions on his back. "The guy had body-slammed me," Phil says. "Nancy just started crying. She said, 'Phil, what happened to you?' Then she said, 'When are you going to grow up? If you're going to be like that, I don't want to be with you.' "I guess in my head I was still Phil Bennett the football player," he says. "I was still that guy who didn't back down from anyone. Still the son of Jim Bennett, the toughest man ever to come out of Marshall, Texas. Still an idiot, in other words." He never lied to her again, and he never got into another fight. As time went by he found himself changing in other ways. He watched his mouth and stopped telling people off. He quit dipping snuff, his only vice outside of an occasional beer. "Hey," Nancy had said once when she found him with a pinch of tobacco in his mouth, "you want to be weak? Do you want me to raise our children by myself? Is that what you want?" "Nancy helped him see things," says Bob Fello. "Sometimes just a word from her was all it took to put things in perspective. He'd say she added a dimension to his life that wasn't there until she came along." They'd been together for only about six months when Phil got fired from his first college coaching job. In 1981 Texas A&M went 7-5 and prevailed over Oklahoma State in the Independence Bowl, but Phil and the other assistants were let go after the season when coach Tom Wilson was replaced by Jackie Sherrill. One staff left, another came in. Most coaches live in a state of readiness for just such a bloodletting, and Phil took it in stride. "We're getting a taste of what the coaching life is like," he told Nancy. They migrated to Fort Worth and Texas Christian, then the year after that to Ames and Iowa State. A few years later it was West Lafayette, Ind., and Purdue. "We're on a journey," Nancy told him, "and we're on it together." "I think the hardest part for Nancy was all the moving," says Tory Dickey, wife of North Texas coach Darrell Dickey and one of Nancy's closest friends. "Not that she didn't accept it readily and look forward to the next place they were going, but Nancy made such great friends that it became hard for her to leave them behind." Sam, their firstborn, came along when Phil was at Purdue. Phil was so excited about the birth that he took a high school recruit, Lavitias Johnson of Chicago, to the hospital to meet Nancy and see the baby. Phil also invited Johnson's parents, and it made for quite a crowd in Nancy's room. The day before, she'd endured 19 hours of labor and lost a lot of blood, but Nancy somehow made herself presentable. She combed her hair and put on lipstick. Ghostly pale, she darkened her cheeks with rouge. She was sitting up in bed with a big smile on her face when Phil and the guests arrived. "Mrs. Bennett, you sure look good for just having had a baby," Johnson's mother said. When the room was clear, Phil said, "Nancy, you amaze me." Purdue didn't get Lavitias Johnson--he went to Michigan--but Nancy helped Phil recruit other players, and sometimes she grew to love them. When the Bennetts were at Iowa State in 1985, Nancy discovered the team's star running back, Joe Henderson, riding a motorcycle and angrily confronted him. "I just gave Joe Henderson a piece of my mind," she said to Phil later that day. "I told him, 'I'm going home and I'm going to tell your mother and I'm going to tell Coach Bennett. Joe Henderson, if Coach Bennett catches you on a motorcycle again, we're going to send you home.'" "And Nancy didn't call them motorcycles, she called them murder-cycles," Phil says. "She was concerned for Joe." At Texas A&M, where Phil returned as an assistant in '95, Nguyen and his fellow linebackers went to the Bennetts' house for dinner several times a year, and Nancy always served her favorite dish, fried skinless chicken breasts. Even after the Bennetts left A&M following the 1996 season, Nguyen called Nancy when he needed a lift. "I'd tell her about my problems, and we'd talk for 30 or 40 minutes, and I always ended up feeling better," says Nguyen. "You'd want to keep something inside, but when you'd talk to Mrs. Bennett, you couldn't help but let it out. I always hung up the phone feeling like a different person." As Sam and Maddie grew older, Phil became concerned over the instability of his profession, and he worried about how the stress of each move affected the kids. He was short-listed for head jobs at big schools, such as LSU after the 1994 season, when he was runner-up to Gerry DiNardo. Rather than despair at the impermanence, Nancy reminded Phil that theirs was an adventure and that in the long run, they and the children would be stronger because of it. At each new school that hired Phil, Nancy had cheerleader uniforms made for Maddie and bought jerseys to match those of the team for Sam. "Think of the places you get to go, the things you get to do," she told the kids. "Some people live in one place their whole lives." Of all the moves they made, the one from TCU to Oklahoma, last year, was probably the most difficult for Phil. Although he relished the opportunity to work for the storied Sooners program, coach John Blake was under fire, and Phil's tenure as the defensive backs coach was likely to be short. Phil rented an apartment in Norman while Nancy and the kids remained behind in Fort Worth. The commute took three hours each way, but Nancy and the children drove up after work each Friday and left on Sunday. "The kids slept on air mattresses," Phil says. "Nancy got me this little cardboard chest of drawers for my clothes, and she somehow made the apartment a home. She never complained. That's why the job at Kansas State was so important to us. We were going to be together again." This summer, shortly after being reunited in Manhattan, Phil and Nancy went on an Alaskan cruise with Snyder; his wife, Sharon; and the other Wildcats coaches and their wives. The school president and various alumni also made the trip. As they traveled through inlets and glacier bays to Ketchikan, Juneau, Seward and Anchorage, the Bennetts found a quiet spot on the deck of the ship where for long hours they lay under blankets holding hands and watching for whales in the dark water. Phil drank Coronas, Nancy diet sodas. They napped and talked about the future and filled it with plans. One night they attended a dress-up dinner, and she wore a black dress that she'd bought just for that occasion. "Do you know how beautiful you are?" Phil asked Nancy. "It was the best time of her life," says Phil's brother Jim. "When they came back from the cruise, they flew in to Dallas, and Nancy called us. It was about 6:30 in the morning, and she was outside our door on her cell phone. And she said, 'I didn't mean to wake you, I just wanted to tell you about our trip.' She said it wouldn't take but 15 minutes. Well, she was so excited that she talked for 2 1/2 hours. After she left I said to my wife, Peggy, 'They've finally found a home where they can settle and be for a while. Have you ever seen her happier?'" On the night of Aug. 10 Nguyen called Nancy from the Cowboys' training camp. It was around 10, and, no surprise to Nguyen, Nancy described in detail his heroic play in exhibition games against the Oakland Raiders and the Cleveland Browns. Nancy vowed to send photographs, taken over the Christmas holidays, of Nguyen with Sam and Maddie. Maddie had made him a paper star just like the one on his helmet. Nancy promised to include magnets so that Nguyen could affix the pictures and the star to his refrigerator door. "She was the nicest person I ever knew," Nguyen says. The storm lasted less than 15 minutes. It came and went before most of Manhattan was up for the day. When Phil arrived at the hospital, a security officer tried to keep him from the emergency room. Phil barreled past the man and searched the unit until he found Nancy lying on a table, a team of doctors and nurses frantically working to resuscitate her. They had cut her clothes off. She looked sunburned, and the flesh at her breasts issued thin ribbons of smoke. The lightning had entered her body at the base of her skull and exited below her knees. It had blown her jogging shoes off and knocked her six feet in the air. Her forehead was badly cut from the fall, and blood was draining from the wound. "Nancy, please," Phil said, collapsing to the floor. He watched as a doctor covered her face with an oxygen mask. Somebody said, "We've got to shock her." Phil saw paddles being placed against her chest. "You're dreaming," another voice said, and a moment passed before Phil recognized the voice as his own. "We have a pulse," someone said finally. He went days without sleeping for more than an hour or two. He ate little, and he cried with a violence that terrified all who witnessed it. "I can't imagine what it's going to be like to look up in the stadium and not see Nancy there," he said on the phone to Joanne Roberts, a friend from his days as an assistant at LSU. "What am I going to do without her? Will somebody please answer me that?" Mercy Health Center of Manhattan stands just across the street from the Kansas State football complex, and Phil abandoned his vigil by Nancy's side only to attend practice and to check on Sam and Maddie at home. Snyder and the rest of the coaching staff began and ended each day with visits to the hospital. More than once Phil looked up in a daze in the wee hours of the morning to find Snyder and other coaches waiting to comfort him. In all his years with Nancy, Phil had never prayed for money, never asked to be a head coach. All he'd ever asked of God was to protect Nancy and the kids. "Dad, I need my mother," Sam told him one day. "Why does God need her?" Phil looked hard at the boy and said, "I don't know, Sam." Later he prayed for answers, but none came. "God, why not me?"he said. "What is wrong with you? You could strike me dead forsome of the things I've done. But why Nancy? She never hurtanyone." When the hospital room emptied, Phil could hold her. He could kiss her. But when he looked in her eyes, he saw nothing. The lightning had reduced her to a vegetative state. Her hands flinched, but doctors said this was involuntary; her brain stem had been damaged severely. The darkest hours came when Phil agonized over whether to take Nancy off life support. "What is going on around here?" he raged at the nurses one day. "Would someone please tell me what is happening?" Members of Nancy's family asked him to consider placing her in a nursing home. But Phil knew Nancy, just as she had known him. He would do what was right. She had taught him this. On Aug. 24, 13 days into the vigil, he had the life support terminated. "There ought to be more Nancy Bennetts in this world," he said when it was finally over, four days later. The funeral was held at the same church in Alvarado where Phil and Nancy had been married 15 years before. Outside, before the service, Slocum pulled Phil aside and said, "You've been a tough son of a gun all your life. You have to be tough now." Slocum couldn't help but recall the wedding and how big a deal it had been. The Aggies football star marrying the prettiest girl in Alvarado. Many of the same people were at the funeral. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSUDad Posted December 20, 2022 Author Share Posted December 20, 2022 More: When Nguyen showed up, Phil put his arms around him, and the twosat together in silence. It was hard for either of them tospeak. "Dat," Phil said at last, The full writeup: https://vault.si.com/.amp/vault/1999/10/25/shes-not-there-over-almost-two-decades-as-an-assistant-coach-kansas-states-phil-bennett-would-scan-the-crowd-before-the-opening-kickoff-to-find-his-wife-nancy-now-because-of-a-freak-act-of-nature-he-never-will-again Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
houtiger Posted December 20, 2022 Share Posted December 20, 2022 Tough story, I never knew. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSUDad Posted December 20, 2022 Author Share Posted December 20, 2022 35 minutes ago, houtiger said: Tough story, I never knew. Yep. A tough read. Phil had a house minutes from Kyle Field. I took my granddaughter to a game there a couple years ago. Phil had us stop at his house way before game time. Had food and drinks setup. He’s on some acreage. Nice pool and bar setup, I think it was around 4 TV’s he had back there. You could watch 4 games at one time. We left there with a parking pass from Phil. We were right across the road from the stadium. It’s good he gets to enjoy the rest of his life. His son Sam is married with two girls, Sam was also up at N. Tx. Sam was with Herm Edwards at Zona St. Also on the staff was Kevin Mawae. Sam was with the Zona Cardinals in the NFL, for a stint. Then spent a couple years on the staff at Hawaii. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Herb Posted December 21, 2022 Share Posted December 21, 2022 7 hours ago, LSUDad said: Don’t know if you remember, his first wife was struck by lightning and died. Phil was working at KSt. with Bill Snyder. On August 11, 1999, Bennett's 41-year-old wife, Nancy, was killed by lightning while she was jogging near their home in Manhattan, Kansas. I didn't know that...tragic. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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