I Don’t Mind Hitting Bottom, I Just Hate Dragging.
For Tony Ingle, a basketball coach with a NCAA Division II championship win under his belt, that’s more than just the title of his autobiography, it’s a lesson learned after a lifetime of overcoming difficulties most people could only imagine.
In a speech to the Hamilton Place Rotary Club on Wednesday, he shared some of that story.
Born with a facial deformity, he underwent five reconstructive surgeries before he was 15, receiving over 3,000 stitches.
“I thought the lucky ones in the children’s ward had curtains, I was always out in the open room. My face was constantly being disfigured. I know what it’s like to feel ugly, and to have people look at you and ask, ‘What’s wrong with your face?’”
The ridicule became so unbearable, he told his mother that he did not want to go back to school - that he would rather cut off his own head or wear a mask for the rest of his life.
But she told him that enough was enough and that he should “smile through the pain.”
In the following years, that was nearly unbearable at times as trial after trial stacked up.
There were domestic disputes stemming from his father’s drug and alcohol dependency, difficulty in school after months and months spent in the hospital, and poverty so constant that he couldn’t try out for basketball because his parents couldn’t afford decent shoes.
He said the only pair his mother could afford were slip-ons that were so thin that, “You could stand on a dime and tell which side was facing up.”
He was so eager to break free and play basketball that one of the most fortuitous events of his eighth grade years was finding a pair of mismatched shoes while cleaning out his school at the end of the year to play in.
One of those was two and a half sizes two big and the other came from a dumpster.
So he wore three socks on the foot with an over-sized shoe and started going to practice after school, but his father didn’t share his enthusiasm. In fact, the night after his coach told him that he was going to play varsity, he woke up to his parents having an argument about him.
His father had found him a job working in a carpet plant and told his son that he wasn’t going back to school. Telling his father that he had no intention of dropping out earned him a horrific beating that left visible bruising, apparent to everyone that saw him play the next game.
“It didn’t matter to me once I put on that jersey, cause I felt like somebody. I didn’t feel like I was poor. I didn’t feel like I was dumb. I didn’t feel like I was ugly.”
So he played, and he loved it. He played varsity all four years at North Whitfield High School and went on to play for two years at Dalton Junior College.
And at that point, his father had gotten sober, took a week off work, and borrowed $1,000 to come see him play. Ingle said it was the best time of his life.
He was injured in that game after a collision with another player that left all of the ligaments in his knee torn. He was heartbroken.
He said that later, seeing his parents and his girlfriend cry next to him, he vowed then and there that he would win a national championship or die. That was it.
And years later, he actually did get that championship. Working his way up from teaching local youth teams to three separate high school teams to college and even working as a scout for the Utah Jazz of the NBA.
Not that it was always smooth ride - after taking over as head coach for the team at Brigham Young University in 1996, the team posted an 0-19 record under Ingle.
But just six years later in 2002, he accepted a position at Kennesaw State University where he led the team to make their first-ever appearance at the NCAA Division II national tournament after a record season with 25 wins
.
They won that tournament the following year.
In 2013, Ingle was brought back to his alma mater, Dalton State, to revive the basketball program which had been absent for more than 35 years. He coaches there now while working as a motivational speaker, telling people what he believes it means to “Smile through the pain.”
Coach Tony Ingle