Once a Coach, Always a Coach: The Life Journey of Thomas Errol Wasdin

COACH

Chapter 1

IS THIS THE END?

The world looks a lot different when you think you’re going to die. – Tom Wasdin

Some call it Suicide Pain. Others call it the Suicide Disease. Either way, the common denominator is suicide.

Tom Wasdin knew this academically, even intellectually ... but now his thoughts shifted to reality. His reality.

In his research into the disorder, the medical name of which is Trigeminal Neuralgia, or TN, Wasdin once read that it was the 16th century’s leading cause of suicide. Of course, nobody knows for sure, since there is no way of documenting such things. Even today, nobody knows how many people suffer – and suffer is a mild word – from Trigeminal Neuralgia, much less how many people it drives to suicide.

Wasdin never thought he’d be one of them, but there he was one sunny spring day in 1998, just a couple of months after his 62nd birthday, driving from his Merritt Island high-rise condominium to his pastor’s office in Suntree, where he found himself sitting next to Dr. Gary Spencer.

What does the Bible say about suicide? Wasdin asked.

Dr. Spencer’s eyes flickered with surprise and then narrowed with obvious concern. He looked at Wasdin, looked at him in a way he’d never done before. This was more than a pastor-parishioner relationship. The two men played golf together, enjoyed social gatherings together. As he focused on Wasdin, Dr. Spencer saw something he’d not seen before.

He was very somber. The tone in his voice, the look in his eyes, everything about him was serious. It wasn’t Tom. Not the Tom that I knew. This was a man who was always upbeat, positive, jovial. I’d never seen him down. And now he’s asking me about suicide.

As he measured Wasdin, Dr. Spencer gave him the only answer he knew.

The Bible doesn’t address suicide, he said as he searched his friend’s face for further clues; a face pulled taut by the disorder that had taken control of Wasdin’s life, and now threatened to take that life. The Bible does say in the Ten Commandments that ‘thou shall not kill.’ It also says God values every person and cares for us, and he doesn’t want anybody to suffer. But it doesn’t address suicide.

Wasdin thought for a moment, absorbing the words.

This pain, he finally said, before pausing again. I’m telling you, this pain ... there are times if I had a gun I’d shoot myself. Sometimes it goes away for a couple of hours, sometimes a couple of minutes. Gary, I don’t know if I can continue with this thing.

As Wasdin spoke, his mouth barely moved. In the 23 years he suffered from the Trigeminal Neuralgia, he’d gotten used to talking this way, and people had gotten used to seeing him this way. Everyone, that is, except his wife Susie, who hadn’t seen him smile that wonderful smile in years, and it pained her. She noticed. But to others, it had become imperceptible, so skilled had Wasdin become with minimizing any kind of facial movement, because of the way it would trigger the beast that is Trigeminal Neuralgia and the unbearable pain it inflicts. Sufferers say it’s like feeling a charley horse coming on and trying to catch the gathering cramp, stretching your leg before it grabs hold. But there is no stopping TN. And when it does grab hold, it grabs hold, not of one’s leg, but the side of the face, the searing pain most times surging throughout the entire head.

Dr. Spencer knew Wasdin was dealing with a disorder, but he didn’t know the extent of it, or even its name. But now he had a parishioner, a friend, inquiring about suicide, and so he soon learned more about Trigeminal Neuralgia.

TN is a neuropathic disorder that affects the six branches of nerves – three on each side of the face – that pair with the cranial nerve and travel across the face. It causes an equal opportunity pain, reaching into the ears, eyes, lips, nose, scalp, forehead, cheeks, teeth and/or the jaw. Sufferers describe the pain in different ways – like being stabbed about the face and head with a fiery ice pick, like being submerged in boiling water, like a sustained electrical shock running from the face into the brain. Medical professionals say it’s one of the most painful conditions known to humans.

As the two men talked in Dr. Spencer’s office, a painting of a smiling Jesus beamed down at them. The pastor preferred the painting over ones depicting the Messiah being crucified. He felt the vibrancy it conveyed better matched his own personality, and his outlook on life. Perhaps it’s also why the pastor and Wasdin had become friends. He liked Tom for the same reasons he liked that painting, and had enormous respect for him. Rather than ever really noticing the pain Wasdin suffered from, Dr. Spencer instead saw a vibrant man in full vitality, even though he was approaching his mid-60s. This was a man who embraced life, who took it on, he said. Dr. Spencer saw a strapping, broad-shouldered fellow, handsome, with sandy brown hair and an athlete’s gait and presence. And then there was Susie, his beautiful wife and partner in life.

Tom Wasdin had it all, and more. Or so it seemed.

Wasdin, Dr. Spencer also knew, was a community leader, a successful businessman, a developer worth multimillions of dollars, and a generous philanthropist; someone widely admired and respected. In his younger years, he’d been a winning basketball coach. He was the man who once recruited and coached future Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Artis Gilmore to Jacksonville University. And then, as an assistant coach, he helped the 1970 Dolphins advance all the way to the NCAA Championship Game against the mighty, John Wooden-coached UCLA Bruins. It was the ultimate David vs. Goliath story, and it captivated the nation. It also epitomized Wasdin’s own life, a serial overachiever, someone who routinely slew Goliaths by outworking, out-planning and out-hustling them. This was a man born into the Great Depression, whose mother died when he was an infant, who rose from the hardscrabble farm lands of rural North Central Florida to someone who had pictures hanging in his home of him and Susie standing next to world leaders.

It was quite a journey. Wasdin had accomplished so much, with seemingly so much more to achieve – or overachieve, depending on the point of view. He was, after all, always the underdog, always the guy coaching at the smaller school, working for the smaller business, the guy constantly going against the Goliaths – and winning.

But this Goliath, this Trigeminal Neuralgia, was a giant he couldn’t bring down. Sometimes it brought him down. Literally. There was one time, Susie said, when he was so delirious from the medication he was on, just trying to control the pain, that he fell and fell hard. He hit his head on the coffee table. It was bad. I lived in constant fear that Tom was going to fall, hit his head again, and die from that.

Nothing seemed to work. As he sat in Dr. Spencer’s office, Wasdin told the pastor of the surgeries and procedures he’d had over two decades. Five of the six branches of nerves running across his face had been numbed, effectively killed, in order to kill the pain. The process also left him unable to feel most of his face. When he ate, food would unknowingly dribble out of his mouth. He practically had to learn how to talk again, and this was a man who was a dynamic public speaker. But now Wasdin was down to one good nerve, one nerve that gave him a semblance of feeling in his face. It gave him the faint ability to chew, to talk, to have a sliver of a normal existence.

And now the Trigeminal Neuralgia had hijacked that nerve, too, and the pain was unbearable. Susie used to find comfort when she saw her husband sleeping, because she felt it was a sanctuary, temporarily bringing Tom relief. What she didn’t know is how the pain would awaken him, again and again, in the darkest hours of the night. It would jar him upright, that jolt of electrical pain traveling from his face into the recesses of his brain. He didn’t complain, but he didn’t think he could go on like this. The cure – and nothing was certain – was to deaden the sixth and final nerve. If it worked, it meant the pain would no longer be there. But it also meant Wasdin would be unable to chew food, talk clearly or have any more feeling in his face. It would be like dealing with the aftereffects of a dentist’s Novocain, only all over the face, and 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every single day of his life. In short, it wouldn’t be a life.

As we talked, I began to realize that it had to be an incredible amount of pain, Dr. Spencer said. He shared with me how just moving his jaw, just smiling, could trigger it. I could see it in his eyes; that he was getting to a place where he wasn’t going to be able to live the way he wanted to live.

Prior to that meeting, Dr. Spencer, like many people close to Tom, had no idea of the relentless suffering Wasdin was dealing with. He’d only seen a man whom others envied and wanted to trade places with – the exciting history as a basketball coach, the successful business ventures, the millions in wealth, the physical stature and good looks, the smart and attractive wife who was 14 years his junior; a community leader and successful businessperson in her own right.

Yes, this was a man others envied; a man who even in his middle-age years people still called Coach; a man Dr. Spencer thought he knew. But he really didn’t. Few did.

Nobody, not even Susie, knew he was there that day to talk suicide. Oh, she’d heard her husband mention once or twice how thankful he was that they didn’t keep guns in the house. And she, more than anyone, knew the excruciating pain he lived with. TN hadn’t taken away Tom’s soul, but for years it had taken away his smile. But she still believed in his overriding optimism and his fighting spirit. She believed in her David. After all, she’d witnessed him so many times overcoming so many Goliaths. Little did she know, though, that Tom was already contemplating a trip to Oregon, where he’d heard something about how they allowed assisted suicide.

Dr. Spencer had seen enough in his years as a pastor to know that what you see and what is really going on can often be two different things.

I took Tom seriously that day, he said.

They talked more.

I knew firsthand that the residue suicide leaves is extremely painful, he said. I made Tom promise that if it ever got close, that he would give me a call. He said he would.

When he left that day, thinking about his life, about the things most important to him – his wife, his family, his health, his standing with God – Tom Wasdin wasn’t thinking about the tens of millions of dollars he’d made, the great games he’d coached, the boardroom battles he’d won.

I couldn’t help but think, he said, that the world looks a lot different when you think you’re going to die.

Chapter 2

GROWING UP WALDO

We were poor, very poor, but we didn’t know it. We always had food on the table and clean clothes to wear. – Tom Wasdin

The world Tom Wasdin was born into didn’t hold much promise. By the mid-1930s, the Great Depression had ravaged America’s terrain, steadily drying up hope. The prospects were even more barren if you were born several miles outside a rural North Central Florida town called Waldo. This is where Thomas Errol Wasdin entered the world on July 30, 1935, barely three months before his mother exited it.

Eddie and Faye Wasdin were farmers; a young couple of little means who were on their way to having a large family. Dorothy arrived first in 1933, delivered on the family farm by a midwife. When Dorothy was barely more than a year old, Faye Wasdin became pregnant with Tom, and he, too, was delivered on the family farm by a midwife. But before the family could grow further, Faye Wasdin fell victim to blood poisoning from an infection that had worked its way into, of all things, a pimple on her face. As her condition worsened and her fever reached dangerously high levels, she was rushed 60 miles northeast to a Jacksonville hospital, where she died, only 20, leaving behind a heartbroken husband and two children too young to have had any memory of her.

It was overwhelming for Eddie Wasdin, just 27. In addition to the everyday work of the farm, he also had to care for two children still in diapers, one a newborn. But what folks of that era lacked in material wealth was often richly made up by family. Just a few hundred yards across a field, walking distance away, were Uncle Wilbert and Auntie Estelle Gunter, Eddie’s sister. The couple badly wanted children, but couldn’t conceive. After Faye’s death, Eddie’s father, who was the original Thomas Wasdin in the family, encouraged his son to take his two small children and move into the Gunter’s tiny home, a rectangular structure lifted off the ground by blocks, barely 600-square feet with a fireplace and a wood stove in the kitchen. It had no running water, no electricity, no heat in its two bedrooms and no indoor plumbing. What it did have, though, was love, and lots of it.

The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months and eventually Eddie moved back into his farmhouse while little Dorothy and Tom stayed with Uncle and Auntie. It just seemed better that way – for everyone.

Tom Wasdin’s mother, Faye Wasdin, who died of blood poisoning when she was 20. Tom was only three months old at the time. Shortly afterward, he and his sister Dorothy moved in with their Uncle Wilbert and Auntie Estelle Gunter, who raised them.

Tom Wasdin’s paternal grandparents, Essie and Thomas Wasdin.

Dorothy and Tom loved their life with Uncle and Auntie, especially because they sensed they were deeply loved. We were poor, very poor, Tom said, but we didn’t know it. We always had food on the table and clean clothes to wear.

Still, it was a hard life. After doing his homework next to the bright glow of a kerosene lamp, Tom slept in the home’s closed-in front porch, where in the wintertime frigid winds whistled through cracks in the wood. The only remedy was more blankets, piled on until Tom was mummified; not wanting to emerge when the cocks began crowing before daylight. In the summertime, it was the opposite, with the heat so suffocating Tom could feel streams of sweat rolling across his ribs that poked against his flesh. Inside the house, Uncle and Auntie had a small bedroom, as did Dorothy. In the back was an open porch. Once a week during colder months, on Saturday night so as to be fresh for church the next morning, water was heated and poured into a galvanized tub that was brought into the kitchen, where one by one each family member bathed. Outside, a barrel held about 10 gallons of water with a hose protruding from it – a farmer’s version of a shower for when the weather was warmer. Burlap bags provided a measure of privacy. Farther away was the outhouse.

The Gunter farm was primarily a chicken farm, but we also had fresh vegetables, lots of good food, Tom said. Because it was a chicken farm, we ate a lot of fried chicken, chicken gizzards, chicken liver, and we always had eggs. If it was a special occasion, we’d have pot roast. It was very Southern. We drank a lot of sweet tea and lemonade. Since we also had cows, we always had fresh milk and homemade butter. A typical breakfast was eggs, bacon, biscuits, honey and grits. Auntie made the very best biscuits.

What the Gunters also provided the young Wasdin children with were values. Uncle Wilbert was a deacon in the First Baptist Church of Waldo – a Christian’s Christian, Tom said. Life revolved around the church, and Uncle was a regular at the deacons’ meetings. Tuesday night was choir practice. Wednesday night was a prayer meeting. Thursday night was visitation night, particularly if someone was sick. And Sunday? Sunday was an all-day affair at church, starting with Sunday school, then the church service. Later in the day was the Baptist Training Union and evening service. Tom attended all the weekly activities, never missing one until his senior year in high school, when there was a rare football game on a Wednesday night, which conflicted with the usual Wednesday night prayer meeting. Since Uncle drove the team bus to all the games, he happened to miss that night, too.

Dorothy and a young Thomas Wasdin, right, shortly after their mother died and about the time they moved in with their Auntie Estelle and Uncle Wilbert.

The values I received growing up, Tom said, I don’t know if I could’ve gotten better values.

He realizes that now, just like he now realizes how many life lessons he learned during his youth. One lesson he learned early and often was the value of hard work, a trait that later served him well as a successful basketball coach and then as a multimillionaire developer. These weren’t always easy lessons, though. Once, as a young boy of about 12, while noticing the free time some of the other children had, especially on weekends, Tom began feeling sorry for himself, and he expressed it. For him, work was constant, beginning early in the morning before school.

Nobody loves me, he whined to his uncle, starting to cry. I can’t go fishing. I can’t go swimming. All I do is work.

Tom was cleaning one of the chicken houses that day, a Saturday, getting it ready for new chickens. His sobs grew stronger. Uncle looked at him for several seconds and then broke off a switch from a nearby bush.

I’ll give you something to cry about, he said with an even tone, before administering about a dozen whacks. When Uncle stopped, he let the boy cry a little more until the whimpers subsided. Then he pulled Tom close to him and said, Son, I don’t want to spank you. I love you. Someday, you’ll appreciate what I’m doing for you. When you have your own kids, you’ll understand. You’ll realize that you were one of the most loved children in the world.

Then he pulled the boy closer, hugging him.

I love you, he said again.

The boy nodded, wiped his eyes. Then the two went back to work.

Years later, Tom realized that the winds of the Great Depression, and all the hard work he and his family did to overcome it, were always blowing at his back throughout his life. The work ethic he learned as a youngster served him well.

And to be sure, there was a lot of work to do. Between Uncle and Daddy’s farms, there were chickens, eggs, cows, hogs, turpentine gathered from pine trees, beans, corn, squash, tomatoes, pecans, watermelons and other assorted produce. Chickens were cleaned and often sold to restaurants. Produce was hauled to Jacksonville in a truck, to be sold either at the Farmers’ Market or the A&P grocery store. On those days when the truck came to pick up chickens, Tom would rise at 3 a.m. and groggily feel his way into the coal-black chicken house. Once there, usually with the headlights of the family truck providing some needed light, he’d gather and crate chickens for morning delivery, dodging hanging feeders and stumbling over water trays. Then he’d feed the other chickens. It was a lot of work. After all, Uncle’s chicken coops could house 10,000 chickens a year. When Tom was done and the sun started to peek into sight, he’d get ready for school.

Uncle paid Tom about $2 to $4 a week for doing his chores. I always remembered how hard it was to earn it, so I was reluctant to spend it, he said. I also remembered little expressions like, ‘You don’t go broke making a profit.’ ‘A dollar saved is a dollar earned.’ ‘You always spend less than you make, and that will take care of your finances.’

It was all good, but it was those two main things – the value of hard work and the comfort of always having money in his pocket – that proved to be a pair of veins Tom mined throughout his life.

Waldo in the 1940’s provided other lessons, as small towns often do. And it was definitely a small town, about 12 miles northeast of Gainesville, where the University of Florida sat. Waldo’s population was approximately 800 people, with those who resided in town called townies, and those who lived in the outlining farm areas, as the Wasdins and Gunters did, known as country. When Tom was in junior high school the big news one day, both in town and in the country, was about how Mansel Ayers, who played on the high school football team, had been drinking and wrecked his car, missing a curve when he was returning to town from Ocala. Ayers almost killed himself and his girlfriend. The remains of his crumpled car were hauled to a local garage, where the townspeople stopped by to view it as if it were an open casket.

It was totaled, just wrecked completely, Tom said. It made a lasting impression on me about drinking and driving.

Yes, sometimes fate was fueled by alcohol. Sometimes it was prodded in other ways. And sometimes it just happened – inexplicably and unforeseen. Tom had an uncle named Gordon, his mother’s half-brother, who had a paper route as a boy. Gordon was a cautious youngster, but one foggy morning while delivering the Gainesville Daily Sun on his bicycle, riding along Highway 26, a hit-and-run driver struck and killed him. The police later found the man who had done it. It was, after all, hard for the man to hide in nearby Gainesville, especially with a car suddenly damaged, with clumps of hair on it. The tragedy, and the sadness that engulfed his family, made Tom more careful when he got his first bicycle, a Sears Western Flyer, one of only two bikes he owned during his childhood. Uncle bought it for him when he was about 7. His only other bike was a Schwinn that Tom bought with his own money later as a teenager, purchasing it at Beard Hardware on the square in Gainesville.

Though he had cried and complained about all the work he had to do early in his youth, Tom did like the money it put in his pocket. He also didn’t want to give Uncle and Auntie much trouble. He learned early that it wasn’t worth it, and that he hated to disappoint them. Even at a very young age Tom was a people pleaser, seeking approval, a trait that has stayed with him throughout his life. He also quickly learned that if he got in trouble at school, the news would arrive home before he did, even though there were neither phones nor electricity to carry the message.

As he got older, he appreciated that work was a part of everyone’s life. It wasn’t uncommon for the family to gather at Tom’s grandparents’ house, where they would have a family hog killing, or perhaps make cane syrup together. We called them work parties, Tom said. We’d get together with relatives, family, friends and we’d work together. Everybody donated their time and then got a part of what we did, whether it was some of the meat or the syrup. We considered those work parties to be social events.

It wasn’t always work, though. There was play time. When they were real little, Dorothy and Tom created a world of their own under the back corner of their house, beneath the dining room. In that little corner they built their own town, one where metal toy cars traveled across dusty roads before pulling up to houses made of dirt. For hours, the cute boy with the dishwater blond hair played with his older sister, absorbed in their make-believe world.

There was laughter, too, like the time one Sunday morning when Tom was dressed for church, antsy and full of a boy’s boundless energy, barely paying attention to his surroundings. Suddenly, he backed into the galvanized bathtub that was still in the kitchen, toppling into the cold water. When he got out, he was completely drenched, Dorothy said.

They laughed then, and they still laugh now.

Another time, when Dorothy and Tom were staying at Daddy’s house, Tom awoke in the middle of the night needing to use the bathroom. Instead of having to navigate in the evening blackness to an outhouse, most families, like the Wasdins, kept a slop bucket handy. Tom relieved himself in the bucket, only to learn the next morning that it was the milk bucket.

Again, it was another event the family laughed at whenever they recalled it in the coming years.

Some events, however, were more fraught with drama. Clothes were not easy to come by during the Great Depression. Auntie was constantly darning socks and patching holes. She even made shirts for Tom and dresses for Dorothy out of the cotton bags that once contained chicken feed, which came in attractive floral and other print and textured designs. So it was a bit alarming when one winter night, while playing with something on the mantel above the fireplace, Dorothy’s coat caught fire. By the time it could be put out, it was ruined. You just did what you had to do and moved on, she said. Life happened.

It was a life slowly emerging with new technology. Nobody in Waldo had a TV. They weren’t even invented yet. But cameras were around. Tom was about three when he saw his first one. Timid for a family photo, he kept hiding behind Uncle. He was a shy boy in general, and while Uncle and Auntie were the best parents he could’ve had, he was painfully aware that he didn’t have the woman who’d given him life. Maybe that’s what drove him during his youth and later as an adult – to work harder, to do more, to make a name for himself, to want acceptance and to be liked. He doesn’t know. All he knows is the pain he occasionally felt, knowing he didn’t have what other children had.

I’d be sad sometimes because I didn’t have a mother, Tom said. I had Uncle and Daddy. I had an Aunt, and I knew she loved me. But I didn’t have my mother. I’d cry sometimes because I’d hear other kids talk about their mothers. ‘Mom this, mom that.’ It hurt.

By the time Tom was four, Daddy had gotten remarried to a woman that he and Dorothy called Miss Edna. They also got a stepsister, Greta Fay, and eventually four half-siblings – Erlene, Shirley, Jerry and Arvita. Tom and Dorothy visited Daddy regularly, and he was always good to them, but his home was never their home. It was always more like we were guests, Tom said.

When he was set to start school, Tom didn’t want to go. Waldo High School housed all the children in the area, grades 1 through 12. All totaled, there were about 120 kids. His first day, Tom was intimidated. Actually, he was frightened. Then he saw a face from church, his friend that he knew as Fred Jr., a skinny kid who stammered. His father, Fred Donaldson Sr., owned the local grocery store. Once I saw Fred Jr., a familiar face, I was okay, Tom said. I never minded going to school after that.

The two friends progressed through each grade together, eventually graduating to nearby Gainesville, where they became Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers at the University of Florida. But that was a long ways away. There was still a childhood to live and more hard times to endure. If it wasn’t bad enough growing up in the deep shadow of the Great Depression, there was the historical event that visited the United States when Tom was just 6. Tom and Uncle were driving back from Waldo one chilly winter day in the family truck, a Chevrolet Model A with the cabin removed and a flatbed rigged in the back. The truck had a windshield, but no doors. Country roads were dirt and narrow. When another car approached, it was customary to slow down and lean off the road with your two side tires, allowing the other vehicle to pass in the same manner. But nobody passed without first stopping to chat. That wouldn’t be neighborly. On this day, the talk from the passing car was excitable.

The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!

At Daddy’s house that night, Dorothy and Tom’s father hushed them when the news scratched across the family’s battery-powered radio. It was a Sunday night, a time when they usually visited their father and stepmother. Daddy was known to be a prankster, jovial. But he sternly quieted the family as his face tightened, leaning it into the voice emanating from the radio, the news now seeming more official as it crackled across the dining room.

The expression on Daddy’s face was suddenly serious, Dorothy said. There was just this heavy atmosphere. You could feel it. I’m sure what was running through Daddy’s mind is if he would have to go to war.

Eddie Wasdin didn’t. But life around Waldo began changing, as it also did around the country during the 1940’s. The war brought jobs for scores of local people, particularly at a nearby training station known as Camp Blanding, where there suddenly was work building barracks for thousands of soon-to-be soldiers-in-training. They hired carpenters at Camp Blanding and paid them $1 an hour, Tom said. Meanwhile, farm labor was about 20 cents an hour. Camp Blanding gradually expanded, consuming 170,000 acres while serving not only as a training center, but as an induction center, a separation center and a German prisoner of war compound. Some 800,000 soldiers received all or part of their training there.

Tom was just six when war was declared, the conflict in Europe shifting into the overdrive that came to be known as World War II. He was still too young to fully understand. He was just a boy starting school; starting his life. He countered the world’s seriousness by quickly developing a love for recess – my favorite subject, he would often joke later in life. As he grew, recess turned into what would become a lifelong passion for sports. By the time Tom reached his high school years, he liked to say, If I couldn’t shoot it, pass it, dribble it or date it, I wasn’t interested in it. Sports, school, church, chores. That was my life, he said, but mostly sports and church. Sports because I wanted to and church because I didn’t have a choice.

It was a stable life. The Gunters only moved once, when Tom was 12, going from the tiny 600-square-foot house to a home a little more than twice as large that had indoor plumbing and a stand-alone garage. The house sat on 40 acres of land. More importantly, it sat near the two-lane road that was Highway 301, which meant the family could now get electricity. The home also had three bedrooms, which meant Tom didn’t have to sleep on the front porch anymore. Around the same time, Tom’s father became the first man in Waldo to own a tractor. Prior to that, Eddie Wasdin worked his crops the old-fashioned way – behind a mule. Even with the modern convenience of a tractor, and other societal advancements, it was still an innocent and simple time, with families huddling around crackling radios at night, listening to programs like Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Shadow, Captain Midnight, The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet. Then one day, Tom saw the future of communications at an appliance store in Gainesville, something that would change the world – a snowy black-and-white television set, able to broadcast the one station from Jacksonville.

The house Tom Wasdin moved into when he was 12. It was the first time he lived in a house with indoor plumbing and electricity. It sat on 40 acres of land off Highway 301, just outside of Waldo, Florida.

Like millions of other boys around the country, television animated Tom’s curiosity, making him more aware of a bigger world, one that he wanted to explore. He loved Waldo, but he knew he’d one day want more than what the small rural town could provide. There were times when he couldn’t wait to grow up. In fact, in some ways he was growing up faster than most boys. When Tom reached the 8th grade, he was already showing precocious athletic abilities. At the request of a local fellow named Floyd Sonny Tillman, Tom joined a town baseball team, playing second base. Not only was he the youngest player on Sonny’s team, he was the youngest player in the league. He liked Sonny, and saw something in him. Sonny was best friends with my Uncle Ralph, so I knew him fairly well, Tom said. Sonny was a thinker, a guy who’d organize things, someone who always had ideas on how to do things.

Years later, their lives intersected in Brevard County on the East Coast of Central Florida, where Tom was Cocoa Beach High’s basketball coach and Sonny worked as a cook at Fat Boys’ Bar-B-Q restaurant in Cocoa. It was during that time in the late ’60s when Sonny assessed the operation at Fat Boys’ Bar-B-Q and thought to himself, I can do better than this. So he decided to give it a try, opening his first restaurant at the corner of 520 and US1 in Cocoa. But it was in Gainesville, fittingly located on Waldo Road, where he officially opened the first restaurant that he would call Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q. It later became a franchise, and it made Sonny a multimillionaire. Tom, too, would one day become a multimillionaire, with both men also becoming University of Florida boosters. Sonny never went to college, but UF would be Tom’s alma mater.

First, though, there was high school to attend, where sports took greater shape in molding a life that was only beginning.

Chapter 3

A BOY BECOMES A MAN

I knew there was more to life than there was in Waldo. – Tom Wasdin

From the time boys are old enough to talk, adults ask them what they want to be when they grow up. Little boys think they know, but of course they don’t really. Usually, it isn’t until they reach their high school years when clearer ideas form. And