A surprise retirement party for a fixture at Land O'Lakes High has a prevailing message: You're a good man, Charlie McBride.
By STEVE LEE
Published June 5, 2003
LAND O'LAKES - Contrary to what outgoing Land O'Lakes High athletic director Charlie McBride heard, Thursday's so-called chamber of commerce banquet in the school commons area was just a ruse.
Honoring McBride, one of the school's original football coaches when it opened in 1974 and the athletic director from 1983-97 and 2000-03, was the real reason about 300 people showed up. But for all McBride knew, he was there to help his son's catering business dish out barbecue to chamber members.
"I could have told you this was your party, but I probably wouldn't have gotten any work out of you today," Mike McBride told his father, who helped prepare his own surprise dinner.
As the recipient of a This Is Your Life spinoff organized by the school's athletic booster club, McBride - seated on stage beside his wife of 35 years, Pat McBride - was visibly shaken.
"I'm overwhelmed," McBride said in a quivering voice. "I couldn't in my wildest dreams have imagined this night. I don't think of myself as someone who deserves something like this."
More than a dozen mystery guests stood at a microphone around a corner, recounting days gone by before coming up on stage to hug the 60-year-old McBride and his wife.
"You've been around here a long time," said emcee Mike Connor, a booster club member who announces Gator football games. "There's a few people who want to get back at you."
"I'm real glad y'all are letting him retire because I've been retired for five years, and I need a fishing buddy," said Mike Hunter, McBride's cousin.
When McBride's parents stepped up to the microphone, he immediately recognized their voices.
"Those are the people living in my back yard," he quipped.
Charles Edward McBride Jr. and Maidie McBride, married for 62 years, live in South Carolina but when visiting stay in a travel trailer in their son's yard.
Gulf athletic director Paul Girardi, who shares McBride's disdain for computers, said, "Charlie, you're the lucky one because you don't have to worry about the damn technology anymore."
Other amusing tales were recounted by former Pasco supervisor of athletics Jim Valentine and Land O'Lakes football coach John Benedetto.
Valentine coached with McBride at Gulf, a two-year coaching stop before McBride came to Land O'Lakes, and explained how McBride created the first riding lawn mower to cut the grass at Gulf's Des Little Stadium. Actually, it was McBride's motorcycle hitched to a lawn mower.
In the early days at Land O'Lakes, McBride - the Gators' first wrestling coach - periodically grappled with his coaching brethren. And one time, fed up with Benedetto's constant poking, McBride hoisted the football coach atop a soda machine in the teacher's lounge.
"He ran and I cornered him," McBride recollected. "When I had a hold of him, I went ahead and put him up on the drink machine just so we'd have something to talk about 20 years later."
"Charlie, to me, is mad-mountain mean and the Jolly Green Giant," Benedetto said. "He probably has the biggest heart in the world."
Perhaps the most touching moment came when former Land O'Lakes wrestling assistant Kevin Dowling stepped up to the microphone and told the crowd how McBride had made him a better man.
"Sometimes in life, you find what your true calling is," said Dowling, who intended to be an engineer but became a football and wrestling coach, first at Land O'Lakes and now in Lee County, Ga. "I owe it all to him."
After graduating from Tampa Robinson in 1961, McBride played football at the University of Tampa before becoming one of five white coaches at all-black Booker T. Washington High in Tampa. That, he said, ranks among his proudest accomplishments.
He taught at Sanders Elementary in Land O'Lakes and spent two years at Gulf before becoming part of Land O'Lakes High's initial coaching staff.
Although he no longer will be part of athletics at that school, McBride plans to sit in the end zone near the locker room with fellow Land O'Lakes coaches at Gator football games on Friday nights.
McBride also will continue his other profession. A deacon at First Baptist Church of Land O'Lakes, he plans to help build dormitories on a Christian mission next week in Ecuador.
"All I can say is, I'm glad he's leaving the school and not the church," former First Baptist Church deacon Dick Avrietti said.
Added Max Ramos, a former principal and English teacher at Land O'Lakes: "He's been a spiritual mentor to me and probably doesn't even know that."
