Legendary South End coach who stepped up now steps back

“But once they were ready, their legacy grew. No other youth football programs in Little Rock could boast such a sustained record of success, 569 wins from 1972-2022. No other amateur field could boast Leslie O’Neal, Keith Jacksons, Sr. and Jr., Rickey Williams, Cedric Cobbs. No one else knew to teach Black boys that the secret to football, the violence of its collisions, was to know restraint. Or perhaps no one else knew to care for them in that way, such as chauffeuring and then sponsoring them to weekly movie matinees. Whole stadiums in Fayetteville and Norman and Tulsa would cheer their names but would not love them in that way. Only he’d known to shuttle them out of the redlined ghettos in which the city’s fathers, its Chamber of Commerce, had meant to corral them. “