Gary Cooper Finds Fame In The Name

Gary Cooper is his name, and he is known to his Clemson Tigers teammates as ''High Noon'' and ''The Pride of the Tigers.''

A year ago, he caught four passes for 56 yards in Clemson's 35-10 victory over Penn State in the Florida Citrus Bowl.



Now, he is back for more.

The Oklahoma Sooners are concerned about how to cover Cooper, who is a double threat as a pass receiver and a runner on a reverse play.

Cooper touched the ball 20 times this season for the 9-2 Tigers, gaining 538 yards, an average of 26 yards a play. He scored five touchdowns, three on pass receptions and two on reverses. He had a 41-yard run against North Carolina. He ran twice for TDs against Maryland.

After Cooper led the Tigers with 34 pass receptions for 618 yards in his sophomore season, teams began to devote double coveage to him. ''They used what is called a bracket defense,'' Cooper said. ''They would have one guy run on top of me, another underneath.''

Basically a running team, averaging 277 rushing yards a game, Clemson often used Cooper as a decoy to throw to other receivers or to tie up defenders who did not read the run.

Instead of matching his 34 catches, Cooper had only 13, which doesn't bother the Tigers or Cooper. ''What the team does is more important than piling up good looking statistics,'' Cooper said Monday while eating lunch at the Stouffer Orlando Resort.

''We moved the ball well this year -- mostly on the ground and we won 9 of 11 games,'' Cooper said. ''I feel I made my contributions, and I believe football people know that -- the teams we play, the pro scouts.''

Cooper said he hopes to play in the National Football League. ''The pros know I can catch the ball and that I can do something with it,'' he said. ''I'm not worried about being overlooked.''

His famous name -- Gary Cooper -- came from his dad, Gary Cooper, Sr. Cooper said he really doesn't know too much about the late actor, Gary Cooper. ''I saw the movie High Noon,'' he said, ''and that's what a lot of the guys on the team call me -- High Noon. I want to see Pride of the Yankees but haven't yet. I know Cooper played Lou Gehrig in that one. I guess I'm a little young for Gary Cooper movies.''

Cooper was born in Sewickley, Pa., and went to Ambridge High School, in a small town north of Pittsburgh. He said he played football as a ninth grader but not again until he was a senior.


''I liked basketball more and I played pretty well,'' he said. ''But when I began thinking about college, I was concerned where I could go. It seems you have to be 6-10 or bigger to be considered nowadays. I was 6-3. Our football coach at Ambridge, Frank Antonini, told me I had potential to be a college football player. I went along with him.''

Cooper said his best position in high school was free safety, and that he came to Clemson as a free safety. ''I came here that way but I only lasted one day. It was kind of rough that day. Clemson had some very big running backs that I did not enjoy meeting so soon. I just wasn't used to anything like them. By the end of the day I was a wide receiver, and happy about it.''

A sociology major, interested in criminal justice, Cooper is articulate and enjoys a conversation that goes beyond the series of ''yups,'' the late Gary Cooper was known for in his wild, wild western movies.

He said Monday that he looks forward not only to Monday's Citrus Bowl game with Oklahoma but to his senior season with the Tigers. ''Rodney Williams graduates and we'll be breaking in a new quarterback next spring,'' Cooper said. ''Could be we will throw more next year. I'd like that. But I'm satisfied just to do what they want me to do.''

Blount talk about tangy New Orleans

Author and NPR personality Roy Blount Jr. rambles through the Big Easy in his new book.
May 15, 2005|By Jay Boyar, Sentinel Travel Editor

Roy Blount Jr. is a man who loves to talk. And one of his favorite places to talk about -- and in -- is New Orleans.

"People there are loose and unpretentious and tend to enjoy talking," says Blount of the Big Easy, which he calculates he has visited 42 times in his 63 years. "I love to be around people who like to talk picturesquely, without getting too forced about it."



Blount (pronounced "Blunt") is focused on New Orleans because he has just written a stylish, tangy, reminiscence-packed guidebook about it. Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans (Crown Journeys, $16) contains his free-associative reflections on a place he adores immoderately.

"I like to sit around a table with a few people and eat and drink and talk," he says of his favorite New Orleans activity. "If I could do that all the time, I wouldn't write."

But write he does -- a lot.

Blount contributes columns to Atlanta Magazine and Oxford American, and also writes humor books, including Crackers (about being a Southerner) and It Grows on You (about hair). He's written the memoir Be Sweet, the novel First Hubby and the biography Robert E. Lee.

Blount also has written a movie, Larger Than Life with Bill Murray, and has appeared briefly in a few of them. If you were casting him in a film these days, you might make him a plant foreman or a wagon master or the manager of a struggling ball club. His features are unassertively flinty -- more Chris Cooper than Gary Cooper -- and his sweep of gray hair imparts an air of earned authority.

On a picture-postcard afternoon, late in April, Blount is having lunch in Central Florida, rather than in New Orleans. That night, he'll tape a road-trip installment of the NPR news-quiz program, Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me, at the Portifino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando Resort.

As Blount works his way through a plate of grouper, under the umbrella of an outdoor table at the hotel's Trattoria del Porto, Carl Kasell, the show's silver-throated announcer, drops by on his way to an afternoon of serious roller-coastering. Other droppers-by include fellow-panelist Roxanne Roberts and her adolescent son.

"Have you ever been to the real Portifino?" asks Roberts, meaning the restaurant in Italy upon which our local version is modeled.

"Yeah," Blount replies, with gracious understatement. "It's a little more European."

ALL ABOUT OYSTERS

New Orleans strikes Blount as European too -- a cross between Europe and Dixie.

Blount grew up in Decatur, Ga., and currently spends much of his time in Mill River, Mass. He first visited the Louisiana city as a child, but only began to understand the place in the summer of 1963, when he worked at The Times-Picayune after college.

"People in New Orleans tend not to present themselves in formal ways to the world," he reflects. "People sort of melt a bit in the heat and the moistness."

Without provocation, Blount will run down a list of artists who, thanks to the city's moist magic, have experienced "formative moments:" William Faulkner, Louis Armstrong (a New Orleans native), Zora Neale Hurston, Little Richard, Ray Charles and, well, it's a very long list.


He can recommend a lot of things in the city, including The Bistro at the Hotel Maison de Ville ("where Tennessee Williams used to stay"); Audubon Zoo ("the gorilla and the orangutan"); Jackson Square (where he recently heard a man play "Malaguena" and "Summertime, Summertime" on water glasses); and the annual Jazz Fest celebration, as well as a spot called Jacques Imo's.

"Last time I was there, the owner was drunk and standing on tables and giving out free food," he recalls with a chuckle. "So there's that."

Surprisingly, the author has never been in New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

"From everything I hear, the actual Fat Tuesday day is too loud and violent," he cautions. "I would chase one naked drunk person -- I mean, if she wanted me to chase her -- but a whole bunch of naked drunk people is just too much."

In Feet on the Street, Blount calls New Orleans, "the best town for eating in America, if not in the world." And for him, oysters may be a bigger part of that than they are for most folks.

New Orleans Directions (Rough Guides, $10.99), a recently published no-nonsense guidebook, contains only the briefest mentions of the mollusk. ("Oysters Rockefeller [was] concocted at Antoine's around 1900," author Samantha Cook notes, "and named for the oil magnate.")

In contrast, the cover of Feet on the Street prominently features an image of an oyster, and the book's text is rich in references to them. Blount also includes his semi-famous song about oysters, which ends this way:

I prefer my oyster fried.

Then I'm sure my oyster's died.

The author even compares himself to an oyster: As a young man, he reveals, he had developed a hard shell that the moistness and informality of the Big Easy helped him shed.

"It's a metaphor," he explains. "Oysters work on all sorts of levels in the book."