CLEMSON, S.C. — The first thing Clemson fans should know about 72-year-old Danny Ford these days is that he’s doing well.
Life on the 174-acre farm in Central, S.C., where the first coach to lead Clemson to a national title raises cattle and participates in South Carolina’s legal hemp program, keeps him busy. And healthy. He’s happy.
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“I’m just like a regular farmer,” Ford said by phone. “It keeps you a little bit younger than just sitting around and getting old, you know?”
The second thing to know is that although Ford still gets to his fair share of fall tailgates at Death Valley, he does miss Clemson people.
“That means the people that supported the football teams and didn’t even go to Clemson,” he said. “Anybody that was associated with Clemson back then.”
He’s referring, of course, to the late 1970s and 1980s, when Ford, at age 30, took over Clemson’s football program from Charley Pell ahead of the 1978 Gator Bowl. Pell resigned after the regular season to take the Florida job, making Ford the youngest head coach in Division I football. Three years later, Ford delivered Clemson the 1981 championship when the Tigers beat Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. He’s still the youngest FBS coach to win a title.
“A lot of the younger folks may not know that,” he said.
Today, Ford doesn’t miss coaching — “absolutely not,” he said.
He doesn’t like technology, does not send text messages unless he has to and types with one finger when he does. He doesn’t email, has no social media and has zero interest in learning any of it. When something goes wrong with his computer, he either calls someone for help or shuts it down entirely. He believes that if he had to recruit in 2020, he’d have arthritis in his fingers from all the typing coaches do now.
But seven years ago? Eight years ago? Ten years ago when he was 62 and had been out of the game for more than a decade?
That’s a different story for the 2017 College Football Hall of Fame inductee.
“I don’t (want to) say it would be ego, because I never felt like I had a big ego. But liking to do it and wanting to do it and wanting to be around young people, wanting to prove that you could still do it — yeah. You always have that, you know? Until you get a certain age,” he said.
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“Then you know time’s passed you by. … I’d have a hard time going out there and doing what I used to do.”
Former Clemson coach Danny Ford, shown in 2017, will tailgate before games, but don’t expect him to stick around. (Joshua S. Kelly / USA Today)Perry Tuttle, the Clemson wide receiver who graced the cover of Sports Illustrated after the 1981 title, still remembers the first time he met Ford.
Tuttle was a freshman in 1978, when Ford was still an assistant under Pell and coaching the offensive line. The two of them, Ford, who is from Alabama, and Tuttle, from North Carolina, came from different backgrounds. Tuttle wasn’t quite sure what to think.
“But the players that he coached, the Bostic (brothers), Steve Kinney, (Chris) Dolce, they loved him,” Tuttle said. “And because I loved those players — I really loved the Bostics — I just had to come to grips with Coach Ford had just a different way about him.”
It wasn’t long before the two were close.
As Tuttle headed into his sophomore year and the university was about to give the young coach the permanent head coaching job following the Gator Bowl, he said the players were first asked to vote.
Tuttle roomed with Jeff Davis, a linebacker then and Clemson’s current director of player relations and external affairs under Dabo Swinney. They talked over how they would vote, bouncing ideas back and forth. When it was time, Tuttle said they walked to the lobby of Mauldin Hall — the dormitory in which they lived — and voted in support of Ford.
“Everybody voted for Coach Ford,” Tuttle said.
Soon, it was official.
Shortly after, Ford called a meeting in his office. There were just three participants: himself, Tuttle and Davis. He knew how important the duo would be to his future success.
“I remember Coach Ford called us both in and he gave us the future of what he had hoped for,” Tuttle said. “I remember him saying, ‘We’re going to win it all with you guys.’ I’m just sitting behind his desk and he gave this vision as we sat in his office.
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“It was just the three of us. And I believed him.”
In 1979, Clemson went 8-4, a far cry from the 11-1 season it had under Pell the year prior.
That included losing to rival South Carolina and to Baylor in the Peach Bowl to close out the year.
But Tuttle remembered the conversation from Ford’s office months earlier. In the process, he was also noticing throughout 1979 just how much of an impact Ford was having on his personal life.
“I fell in love with Coach Ford. You’re talking to someone whose dad was always in and out of prison and Coach Ford and his staff really became the voice in which there was such an empty space in my life,” Tuttle said. “I don’t know whether you’ve ever thought about moments in your life where things kind of change and there’s a transition. That was one of those moments for me, and I recognized it at the time.
“I can just remember thinking, ‘I think this is going to be good for me.’ Coach Ford became a good man to me.”
When the Tigers went 6-5 in 1980, which included four losses in the last six games, Ford’s vision was in question. But again, Tuttle remembered the office meeting. And in 1981, when the Tigers were playing for it all, quarterback Homer Jordan vividly remembers Ford’s pregame message in the locker room.
It started with a request.
“Turn that stuff up, turn that music up. Turn it up loud,” Jordan remembered Ford saying in an effort to keep his players loose.
Then, he kept it simple. His pregame speech was always the same.
“Play for your parents, your family and the ones who love you. Play for your teammates,” Jordan recalled. “Give it everything you’ve got of course. But go out and have fun.”
Ford did not want to discuss this week the NCAA recruiting violations from 1976 to 1982 that led to sanctions. In January of 1990, with Clemson under investigation for further violations, Ford resigned.
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According to reports at the time, in a letter to Clemson athletic director Bobby Robinson, Ford wrote he would agree to “cooperate and participate with Clemson in the responses to the NCAA investigation.” He denied “any wrongdoing on my part,” adding that “an impartial review of the facts will so prove.”
Clemson president Max Lennon accepted Ford’s resignation, as did Robinson, who alluded to a struggle between Ford and Clemson’s administration.
Robinson reportedly said there were “honest differences of opinion on certain basic aspects of the football program” between the two.
It was a sad day for Tuttle, who had gone on to be a first-round NFL Draft pick in 1982 by the Buffalo Bills. An angry one, too, if he’s being honest.
“There’s just so much that he wanted for his players and because of that, he went and fought for it,” Tuttle said. “I think he knew what he had in South Carolina was a stronghold of recruiting. … I think Coach Ford initially had that vision that if you build the facility and you build what players want and like, (recruits will come).
“Of course we didn’t have cell phones and we didn’t have technology back then, but we had the ability to go back to our neighborhoods, to our schools and high schools and tell coaches, ‘This is the place you want to be.’”
Tuttle said he learned that day no one — not even the beloved football coach — was bigger than the university.
In 1993, Ford took over at Arkansas, where he was the head coach until 1997 and learned the challenges of trying to elevate the program in the SEC. Arkansas fired him after he compiled a 26-30-1 record.
“It was just brutal every week,” he said. “I mean, we’d have Auburn, Tennessee, Mississippi, Mississippi State, LSU, Alabama. … It was just awful.”
He and wife Deborah headed to the farm, which is about eight miles from Clemson. He’s had it since 1982, when he was negotiating his contract with the administration and preferred land to more money.
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The Arkansas job was the last time he coached. Tuttle was surprised Ford, who was 50 at the time, never got back into it. He believes Ford’s strong football mind would have, at the least, made him a standout coordinator.
“He was really smart,” Tuttle said. “He was a damn good coach.”
Former Baylor coach Grant Teaff, executive director emeritus of the American Football Coaches of America, echoed that sentiment.
“I thought then, and I do now, extremely high of him. I found him to be a man of solid character, which is very, very important to me, and he lived it on and off the football field,” Teaff said. “Tough coach. Boy, he was a good one now.”
But the farm.
“He loved that farm,” Jordan said. “I guess that’s his first love.”
These days, Ford’s days on the farm start early.
He’s working by about 7:30 a.m. and is outside for most of the day. Just last week, he was still watering plants until around 7:30 p.m.
Raising cattle has its frustrating parts and the hemp program he runs with his son, Lee, has been challenging, too. The Ford family has learned a lot, though.
“This will be our third year in (the hemp program),” he said. “It’s been fun and it’s been a learning experience, but it ain’t what we thought it was going to be profit-wise. But we made some money.”
Tuttle says his former coach, especially in South Carolina, will never have to worry about being forgotten. When Tuttle turned 40 in 1999, Ford made a trip to Charlotte just to say happy birthday. It’s still the wide receiver’s most memorable moment with his coach, and he’s hopeful Ford will stay in touch with former players as they continue to get older. Ford saw William “Refrigerator” Perry, the former Clemson defensive lineman, who continues a battle with ongoing health issues, a little more than a year ago.
When Ford comes to Clemson now, it’s usually for home football games. He doesn’t want to step on Swinney’s toes by being around the program and says Swinney doesn’t need his help anyway. Clemson has won two more national titles and made five consecutive College Football Playoff appearances, with more expected. Ford jokes he wouldn’t care if he never saw another football practice again.
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On Saturdays at Death Valley, Ford tailgates but then heads back home to watch the action on television. He doesn’t like crowds and he doesn’t like traffic. But he does enjoy having a full belly from tailgaters eager to feed the coach who was inducted into Clemson’s Ring of Honor in 2013, the highest achievement a coach or athlete can receive.
“What an incredible man,” Tuttle said of Ford. “I can honestly say I love him.”
(Top photo of Danny Ford: Kathy Willens / Associated Press)
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