Former 'Bama linebacker has made a difference with his life, helping abused boys and girls


By Tom Cushman
Retired columnist in San Diego, California

December 22, 2002

During the spring of 1971, Alabama's legendary Bear Bryant was listening to one of his athletes outline plans for a ranch that would house abused children when a secretary entered the office, and said:

"Coach Bryant, I have Vice President Agnew, Bob Hope and Roone Arledge of ABC Sports all on hold. What should I tell them?"

In his resonate growl, Bryant replied, "Tell them I'll be right with them."

The secretary left. Bryant then turned to his visitor and, with a sly smile, said:

"Now tell me more about that ranch you want to build."



    
Anyone who spent time with the late Alabama coach will recognize the above as vintage Bear. He was an American original. And, so was the young man seated across from him that day.

The name John Croyle doesn't resonate nationally in our sports culture, but it might have. During his three years as starting linebacker at Alabama (1971-73), the Crimson Tide was 32-4 and won a national championship. As a senior, Croyle was All-America and projected as a high selection in the NFL draft.

Instead, Croyle's dream was of another kind. While in college his summers were spent as counselor at a boys camp, where he befriended a youth off the streets of New Orleans. Through conversation he learned the youngster's mother was a prostitute who forced him to act as her banker and timekeeper. Deeply moved by the experience, Croyle began outlining plans for a ranch that would provide a home for children mired in desperate circumstances.

When the 1973 NFL draft took place, Croyle already had located a 120-acre plot near Gadsden, Ala., and was trying to meet a 48-hour deadline for delivering the $50,000 purchase price. Emptying his bank account would provide $5,000. An oral surgeon and Croyle fan from Birmingham pledged $15,000. When Alabama teammate John Hannah was drafted by the New England Patriots and quietly donated his $30,000 signing bonus, John Croyle had his land.

Twenty-eight years of mending broken lives have followed.

During the winter of 1974, five abused boys came to live with Croyle in the ranch's lone building. As news of the project spread, financial help began arriving. Over the final years of his life, Bear Bryant contributed $70,000 and arm-twisted for much more. Bryant's successor at Tuscaloosa, Ray Perkins, provided the entire $67,000 needed to build one of the homes that began dotting the landscape.

Occupancy never was a problem. One youngster was found by railroad workers in a box car, where he had been living for weeks. Another who had been ordered to leave by the 18-year-old pregnant sister with whom he was living was found wandering along a highway by a state trooper, who took him to John.

Another had been dipped in hot grease by his mother. Another was found living in a barn, using cardboard boxes as a blanket.

Another was dropped at Croyle's doorstep by parents, who then sped away in their Mercedes.

While the ranch was in its formative years, Croyle married, and he and wife, Tee, began a family exclusive of the extended one. Daughter Reagan recently was wed. John likes to tell about the night son Brodie, then 5, offered his clothes to a forlorn youngster who had just arrived and didn't have any.

What John didn't tell me during a recent conversation is that Brodie now is a freshman at Alabama and next year is expected to be the Crimson Tide's starting quarterback and might eventually have the NFL career that his father bypassed.



    
During the spring of 1990, I visited Big Oak. Croyle's tour that day included a 40-mile drive to Springville, where land for a girl's ranch had been obtained.

His commitment for that had been cemented by a 12-year-old named Shelley, who had been beaten and raped by her father while the mother held her down. Attempting to obtain custody, Croyle was rejected by a judge who thought it improper for Shelley to be lodged on a boy's ranch even though she'd be living with the Croyles.

"If you send her back to the parents, she'll be dead in six months," Croyle warned. Three months later, she was.

In April of 1990, the first house on the girl's ranch funded in total by then-Auburn coach Pat Dye, had just been made available. An early arrival was Ranell Friis, a 13-year-old from McComb, Miss. Reared with indifference and cruelty by an alcoholic father and drug-addicted mother, Ranell acknowledges she was thinking suicide before an agency contacted Big Oak.

"If it hadn't been for the ranch, I have no idea where I'd be today," Ranell, now 26, was saying from her home in Kentucky. "At first, it was hard to adjust being surrounded by the kind of unconditional love I'd never experienced before. All I'd known was abuse."

Now married to Rick Tillett, a McComb neighbor who had been supportive over the years, Ranell is mother to two young children and thinking of taking on more. She and her husband have discussed returning to Big Oak as house parents (each ranch home has two married adults overseeing eight young occupants).

Moving to Big Oak three years after sister Ranell, Stacy Friis is a recent graduate of Alabama-Birmingham University and an FBI intern.

Stories of turned-around lives are abundant. Since the day John Croyle turned his back on a potentially affluent life as a professional athlete, more than 1,500 young people have called Big Oak home. There now are 10 houses on the boy's ranch, seven for the girls.

The success of Croyle's project has made it an inspiration, and then model, for several in other states including one now being planned for the Santa Maria area. And, Croyle plans additional expansion for Big Oak, with a target population of 200 for the two ranches.

"The toughest thing is not having a bed for someone whose life or death might depend on it," he was saying recently. "We get as many as 10 calls a day about youngsters, many in horrible situations.

"Once we get them here, my job is as seed-planter and chain-cutter. They're butterflies chained to their past and hoping desperately to get free. We try to cut the chains and plant the seeds for future success."

Because of John Croyle's selfless approach to life, hundreds have flown away from a hopeless, often brutal, existence into a world that now offers them a chance.

Retired columnist Tom Cushman writes occasionally in the Union-Tribune. He can be reached at tcushmant@aol.com

How to help

To find out more about John Croyle's Big Oak Ranch, go to the Web at www.bigoak.org, or call (205) 467-6226.