His name was Alton Waltman. He coached at North Forrest High School in Eatonville, outside of Hattiesburg, Miss., for two decades. The mascot was an eagle, the colors were white and blue and the size of graduating classes rarely broke 100. Anyone who passed through the school during Coach's time has a memory of him on a Friday night in a blue polo shirt stretched by his belly, the letters "N" and "F" stacked over his heart, a white cap on his head and a grimace across his face. He had one losing season.

Years before he retired he became an institution. When a field house was built on the school's campus in 1999, it was named after him even though he was still coaching. To this day the word "legend" precedes his name in the local daily newspaper.

In Mississippi it is dangerous to talk of gridiron legends, where those ghosts are so many. It is where the names Payton, McNair, Rice and Manning were first stitched across jerseys backs, where Bull Sullivan, who Sports Illustrated called "the toughest coach who ever lived," sent the boys into the alligator pond, where photographs of Ole Miss coach Johnny Vaught sit on mantels beside portraits of families he was not officially part of. But there are also dozens of men like Coach, whose stories are told in places like Eatonville, with only a service station and small school to mark their spots on a map.

He came from Hurley, a Gulf Coast town near the Alabama line. The rabbit ears on Saturdays only picked up Crimson Tide games and he became a Bear Bryant fan. He had two brothers and two sisters.

Their father worked at Ingalls Shipyard, owned a dairy farm and read the Bible. He took his sons fishing in the slow waters of the nearby creeks and swamps, but mainly he worked them around the farm. To avoid those tougher hours, Coach began playing football at East Central High. He was a good lineman until he shredded a knee during a kickoff return in practice. He then set his eyes on coaching. After graduating high school he earned a teaching degree from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1967. Only one course focused on football's Xs and Os. His first contract paid him $4,800 to coach junior high sports and teach a science class and drivers ed. He worked the shipyard during summers.

Over the next few years he moved around to several schools -- young assistants often do -- but was always soaking up football: memorizing playbooks, diagramming other coaches' plays and emulating his idol, Bear Bryant, whose book, "Building a Championship Football Team," he found and studied. Eventually, he became head coach at Vancleave High, a school not far from his hometown. He won some games and sometimes faced Hancock North Central, a team coached by his friend Irvin Favre, father to Brett. Vancleave's success over seven seasons led North Forrest High to offer Coach a job in 1980. He wasn't interested in making the move, but a young assistant on his staff talked him into taking over the losing program.

The school had gone through five coaches in four years. School board members half-joked that the kids just couldn't win. Coach told his new assistants -- a retired Vietnam vet volunteer and the shop class teacher -- that they were not going to talk about winning or losing with the players. He didn't want that on their minds. He only wanted them thinking about surviving practices, which Coach scripted into hell. He strung three weeks of two-a-days together. He put the lineman through metal chutes and up against sleds he stood on. At the end of practices he made them run eight sprints, which he said meant two for each quarter, and when they finished he would scream, "Overtime!" and make them run two more.