Stay Forever Young. Billy Boy

Posted Mar 7, 2009 by Tom McEwen

Updated Mar 7, 2009 at 12:32 AM

Got this phone call back in the Sixties from Marcelino Huerta at The Tribune saying I should get over to the Univ. of Tampa. He had something to show me. Huerta wasn’t kidding around - Coach Chelo had a slender, freckled smiling kid there. He was, Chelo said, Billy Turner, a football quarterback, a shooting basketball guard, and a baseball whiz who could play any base, and well.

In the four years ahead, Turner would become the busiest athlete at UT, lettering all his years there in baseball, football and basketball. Now, all these years later, the gifted Billy Turner has laid down his coaching whistle. Turner won tons of games in all of the sports. Best I know, he was always a fair man, a proud man, a good husband to one wife and daddy to eight kids, and now, 20 grandkids - another reason for this move. The big school state title eluded him by as little as five points against Naples.

Billy Turner was high in that scroll of the very, very good ones, like Crockett Farnell, Holland Aplin, Frank Lorenzo, Buggo Griffin, Robert Weiner, Earl Garcia and Roland Acosta.

They all fed off of each other. There were few secrets. Asked what may have moved him most, Turner said “being awarded the Coach plaque from the National Football Foundation at a Tampa banquet.”

But how, Billy, did all this start that is now ending so triumphantly? Well, he said, “It began growing up in North Alabama where my dad worked in a rock quarry as we three brothers did. Idle time gave us a chance to select well-formed rocks and learn to hit the night lights with them. That is how I got my pitching and passing. Got to where we could hit them with the first throw.”

Passing accuracy in the quarry helped plenty.

The head Turner drove to Florida looking for a place for the family to relocate, said Billy.

“For some reason he passed up Winter Haven and Lakeland and chose Auburndale. We wondered for a while but then began to like it. And, we had the great athletic teams there. In time, big citrus plants moved there, as did Gen. James A. Van Fleet and trucking. I came to love it.

“My brothers went to Florida and I went to Tampa. Wonderful decision,” Turner concluded. It was there he set records in football, basketball and baseball. He quarterback backed the football team and was in every position for Spartan baseball.

“I wanted to crew, but it was frowned on,” he said. “If I was not busy, I was not happy.”

After a year of looking, he decided to go into coaching, and did.

“I coached around and around but when I went to Chamberlain 30 years ago I knew it was for me and it has been. I have had some health problems. My wife says it is age. Guess I so, I am 71. Got a pacemaker. Don’t get around like I used to.

“I knew it was time to quit. Can’t be a kid forever, but now I can try with these 20 grandkids around. They give me a head start, although I had one edge back when I came down here: I could hit those light bulbs with those rocks better than most.”

Call me, Billy Turner, if you break 80 again.

Meanwhile, be forever young.