This was Hugh Freeze in his prime.
It was three summers ago and he was sitting in his spacious office in Oxford, Mississippi. For over two hours, as thin shafts of sunlight filtered through the blinds onto the Ole Miss coach, he shared his life story in his sweet-as-honey drawl, detailing his unlikely rise in college football.
I was spellbound as he described how, only hours after his wedding in July of 1993, he and his wife snuck into Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee. There on the empty field, surrounded by the empty bleachers that seemingly stretched into the summer sky, Freeze, then a first-year high school assistant coach, made a promise to his bride: “I will be a head coach in the SEC one day,” he said softly.