I had reached my full height of six feet four, and my weight matched that so I wasn’t just big or just tall and I looked like a man instead of a boy inside the body of a football player. But football alone wasn’t going to get me to college, and it certainly wasn’t going to help me graduate. My body finally may have slowed down growing, but my mind still was racing at a hundred miles an hour, hungry for whatever subject I was studying. That was where Miss Sue came in. I can’t talk enough about the time and work Miss Sue put into helping me. She is retired now, but she deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. She was such a hugely important part of my success both in high school and in college because she was the one who really gave me the confidence to know that I could learn, which is the first step in beating the odds. Sue Mitchell was an Ole Miss grad and a high school English teacher who had been teaching in the Memphis schools since long before I was even born, so she knew what she was doing and she knew how different people study.
