It happens to all of us, even
the legends.
As we grow older, as some of our siblings and boyhood friends and high school teammates and college buddies begin to pass away,
we start contemplating our own mortality.
Maybe you’ll get ready to make a phone call and suddenly realize that Billy passed away three weeks ago.
Or maybe you’ll be on the golf course and remember that this is the hole where Sammy somehow chipped in for an eagle at the Bob Dooley Invitational charity golf tournament six months before he had the fatal heart attack.
Or maybe you’ll come across an old photograph, and get a pang in your gut and a tear in your eye because you’re the only one in the picture who’s still living.
“A lot of my buddies are starting to go,” Florida Gators legend Steve Spurrier, 78, says. “It makes you start thinking your day’s coming, too, so you better get as much living in as you can while you can.”
Get as much living in as you can while you can.
Sort of reminds you of the classic country song by Tim McGraw, “Live like you were dying.”
“And I loved deeper. And I spoke sweeter. And I gave forgiveness I’d been denying.
“Someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying.”
This is a lesson for everybody — old or young — and one that has hit home for Spurrier more and more during the last few weeks in the wake of two of his best friends and former Gator teammates passing away.
First it was Bill Carr, the former UF All-American who was Spurrier’s center when he became the first player in state history to win the Heisman Trophy in 1966. Carr, who would go on to become UF’s athletic director,
passed away Feb. 3 at 78 and Spurrier spoke with him just before he died.
“When I visited him, he was somewhat upbeat,” Spurrier recalled. “He always called me Orr. That’s my middle name. And I always called him Willie C. William Curtis Carr was his name. It seems like we all had a nickname back then. But he said, ‘If it’s my time to go to heaven, I’m ready. I am prepared.’ He almost could see it in the future, seemed like.”
And then a few days ago, Allen Trammell, the former Orlando insurance executive and perhaps Spurrier’s closest friend, passed away at 81 after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Trammell, a former UF football player and assistant coach and a star on the Gator baseball team, left behind three adult children (Allen, Michael and Shannon) and wife Charlotte
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