Parents requested nearly 680 religious vaccine exemptions in the first weeks they were available in Mississippi, something health department officials said has slowed in recent weeks.
In April, a federal judge ruled that parents can opt out of vaccinating their children for school on account of religious beliefs. U.S. District Judge Halil Sul Ozerden of the Southern District of Mississippi issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit, filed last year by parents who said the vaccination requirement violated their First Amendment rights.
Under the newly created process, which went into effect July 17, parents must complete the form on the Mississippi Department of Health’s website and make an appointment with their county health department to submit it. At the appointment, parents are shown an educational video about vaccination and are informed that if an outbreak occurs, their child will not be able to attend school or day care until it is resolved. The form is then processed by the health department.
Health department officials said that parents can apply for a religious exemption at any point, but schools are required to have proof of vaccination or an exemption form on file within 90 days of the start of school.
Dr. Jana Shaw, a childhood vaccination researcher and professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University, said Mississippi’s process is more stringent than several other states.
Of those who applied for a religious exemption in the first two and a half weeks, over 80% requested exemption from all eight of the vaccines required for child care or school entry. Those vaccines protect against hepatitis B; polio; diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis; haemophilus influenzae type b; pneumonia and meningitis; measles, mumps and rubella; and chickenpox.
Prior to the court ruling, Mississippi led the nation in childhood vaccinations as one of six states without a religious exemption for vaccines. It’s unclear exactly what impact this new exemption will have, but researchers have generally found a decline in childhood vaccination rates when a religious or personal exemption is added.
Vaccine requirement opponents have been unsuccessfully lobbying the Legislature for a religious exemption provision for years. Mississippi hasn’t had a religious exemption for child vaccinations since 1979.
“This is the … one thing that I did not have to hang my head in shame about,” said State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney, referencing Mississippi’s poor health outcomes, in a July 20 interview with SuperTalk.
Shaw said these types of policies in other states have led to a decline in childhood vaccination rates, but the size of that decline varies. An annual report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows nearly 10% of kindergarteners received exemptions in Idaho in the 2021-22 school year, while only 1% did in Massachusetts.
When discussing that decline, Shaw said state-level statistics are limited in their usefulness because they can disguise pockets of unvaccinated children in specific communities that can “easily start and fuel outbreaks.”
Of those who requested exemptions in the first few weeks, five counties had over 30 forms submitted: Jackson, George, Pike, Lincoln, and Madison.
Shaw also said religious exemptions are rarely actually about religious beliefs, as none of the major religions object to vaccination.
“Religious exemptions are often used, or abused, by those who do not want to vaccinate their children and use it for their personal objection to vaccination,” she said.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch admitted in her filings for this lawsuit that the compulsory vaccination law, considered on its own, would violate parents’ rights, something the judge cited in his ruling.
“For a federal judge to overturn it (the compulsory vaccination law), he pretty much had to – the attorney general conceded the point, threw us under the bus, (and there) wasn’t much else that could be done,” Edney said in his SuperTalk interview.
Edney and the Health Department have continued to emphasize the importance of childhood vaccinations and encouraged parents to vaccinate their children, including hosting a series of walk-in vaccination clinics at county health departments.
“Vaccines are victims of their own success,” Shaw said. “Parents don’t see (these diseases) anymore, so they don’t fear them.”
A program aimed at increasing doctors in rural Mississippi communities isn’t effective enough, a new report from the state auditor’s office says.
As health care worker shortages continue, the program’s success could be crucial to improving the state’s persistent health care crisis.
The Mississippi Rural Physicians Scholarship Program, established in 2007 by the Legislature and administered by the University of Mississippi Medical Center, awards money to medical school students for tuition or student loans. In exchange, recipients must spend one year practicing in Mississippi for every year they accept the money. A similar program focused on incentivizing dentists to practice in rural Mississippi followed in 2013.
Ideally, the programs would help close the state’s health care gap — half of all Mississippians live in medically underserved counties, according to a 2021 assessment from the state Health Department. Eighty of Mississippi’s 82 counties are federally classified as Health Professional Shortage Areas in either primary or dental care.
State Auditor Shad White speaking at the Neshoba County Fair, Thursday, July 28, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
But according to State Auditor Shad White, the programs aren’t producing doctors and dentists fast enough. A former participant of the program, however, says it was never intended to solve the shortage entirely – the problem is too big and complex.
Data in the report show that the percent of need met for primary and dental care in Mississippi’s neediest communities has decreased over the past decade, despite more money being infused into the programs.
Fletcher Freeman, a spokesperson for the State Auditor’s office, said the programs, as they stand, are too small to be effective.
But participants like Dr. Jonathan Buchanan who moved home to Carthage in 2017 to practice family medicine said the programs are making significant changes in the communities they serve, despite the fact they are not solving the entire problem.
“I was the first physician to come back to this area in 26 years — that’s a generation’s worth of time,” he said. “Our program is currently somewhere in the 70 range of people graduated from the program and practicing, and if you asked each of those physicians, they’d say they’re making a tremendous impact on the quality of health care that rural Mississippians are receiving.”
The report takes issue with several things in particular: the programs’ definition of “rural” is too broad, and the commissions running the programs should maintain better oversight of them.
“We just don’t have the definition of ‘rural’ down,” Freeman said. “We’re using definitions when it’s convenient to potentially place doctors in Flowood.”
Though no participants have been placed in Flowood, the rules for the program allow for the Jackson suburb to be considered “rural” because of its small population. Currently, 10% of scholarship recipients practice in areas that the federal government doesn’t consider “rural.”
The report recommends adopting the federal definition of “rural” to ensure participants are placed where they’re most needed.
However, when the Legislature created the programs, they established commissions to oversee them. Those commissions decide how the programs work, including the definitions under which they operate.
Natalie Gaughf, assistance vice chancellor of academic affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center Credit: Courtesy of UMMC
Dr. Natalie Gaughf, the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs, said “it has been determined that the federal designation of ‘rural’ is not adequate” to meet the state’s needs, and what’s currently used is based on an “understanding of Mississippi’s current and historic health care landscape.”
Mississippi towns that have a population of less than 15,000 and are located more than 20 miles from a “medically served” metropolitan area are eligible for graduates to be placed for work, she said, and every practice location request is reviewed individually.
Students who aren’t from rural areas are also eligible to receive a scholarship, though Gauphf said that all of the program’s recipients have “substantial ties” to rural communities.
Additionally, the report found that a quarter of rural physician scholarship recipients and 14% of dental scholarship participants have breached their contracts.
That can mean students did not complete their commitment requirements, or they chose a non-primary care field of medicine or chose to practice in a non-rural part of Mississippi or out of the state entirely.
Breaching the contract should result in the scholarship being converted into a loan with interest. However, the report found that the scholarship programs’ offices do not accurately monitor this data. Gauphf did not expand on the challenges associated with tracking these numbers.
According to Gaughf, 49 medical school graduates have breached their contract from the time the program was created to the fall of last year.
Freeman couldn’t say what provoked the first-time review of the programs, aside from gauging their general effectiveness and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are being put to good use.
Since the program’s inception, more than $33.5 million in state dollars have gone toward it.
“This report was meant to highlight basically efficiencies and inefficiencies in the program to maximize every dollar they receive,” he said.
Freeman said if the offices use the report to address the programs’ deficiencies, perhaps they’ll receive more money and be able to make more of an impact. According to Gauphf, changes based on the report have already been made, including at least one new form used to track individuals who breach their contracts.
The Legislature has recently expanded both programs, putting $2.17 million into the rural physician scholarship program and $420,000 into the dentists’ program in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, according to the report.
“It’s a good program that’s effective at producing doctors,” Freeman said. “Just not at the rate we need them.”
Still, it’ll be hard for the program to keep up with the rate physicians and dentists are choosing to leave the state or retire, which Gauphf said is “faster than the programs can produce graduates.”
Buchanan, the scholarship program alumnus practicing in Carthage, sees the state’s health care worker crisis as multifactorial and not something that can be solved through a single program.
“We just don’t have enough physicians, period,” he said. “But I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.”
Shortly after President Barack Obama ushered the Affordable Care Act through Congress, the U.S. states expanding Medicaid were for the most part Democratic-dominated states in the northeast and west coast with a sprinkling of left-leaning midwestern states.
There was, however, a notable exception: ruby red Arkansas.
To this day, most of the 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid are located in the South, so Arkansas and a few other notable exceptions continue to stand out.
Still, in 2013, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe viewed expanding Medicaid as “a no-brainer” to provide health care coverage to primarily the working poor.
“But it was Obamacare and nearly every Republican opposes Obamacare philosophically, especially those in Southern states,” Beebe, who is now retired from politics and living in his hometown of Searcy in north central Arkansas, recently told Mississippi Today in an interview.
When Beebe proposed being one of the first states to expand Medicaid in 2013, he was a second-term Democratic governor with a Republican-majority Legislature. And to make matters even more difficult, the Arkansas Constitution requires a three-fourths vote of each legislative chamber to pass an appropriations bill, meaning a high threshold was needed to pass Medicaid expansion.
Still, Beebe set his sights on doing something historic in 2013 by expanding Medicaid.
“It is a no-brainer whether you are Democratic or Republican if you care about your people,” the veteran Arkansas politician said.
In the South, only Kentucky and Louisiana have followed Arkansas’ lead in expanding Medicaid. North Carolina has recently expanded Medicaid, though it has not yet been enacted.
In Mississippi, Brandon Presley, who is trying to become the first Democrat elected governor since 1999, said if elected he will work to expand Medicaid despite having a Republican Legislature.
If elected, Presley might study how Beebe succeeded in expanding Medicaid despite some difficult obstacles.
In 2013, Beebe said he was able to prevail by first approaching moderate Republican businessmen and making the argument that Medicaid expansion was good for the state’s economy and its people — "people I called the working poor, who worked but could not afford health care and their employers did not provide it," he said.
Beebe can still rattle off all the arguments he used in 2013 to convince lawmakers to expand Medicaid. Many of those arguments have been used – unsuccessfully – in Mississippi.
But there has been no one advocating for expanding Medicaid in Mississippi with the bully pulpit that Beebe had in Arkansas as governor. Current Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves and Phil Bryant, his predecessor, were vocal in their opposition to Medicaid expansion.
Besides having the bully pulpit, Beebe had a vast knowledge of the workings of state government. He previously served as attorney general and for 20 years in the state Senate, including 10 of the 12 years that future President Bill Clinton served as governor. For many of those years, he was the leader of the Senate.
"I knew how to work the Legislature because I had been worked by the best," Beebe said matter of factly. "But I think the arguments carried the day."
Still, Beebe said, getting the expansion bill through the legislative process was difficult and took several votes. In the 100-member House the proposal, needing 75 votes, garnered 72 or 73 multiple times.
“I believe it finally passed with 77,” Beebe recalled. “It was the same in the Senate where there were 35 members.”
It passed in 2013 and went into effect in 2014.
A key to passage was the unique form of Medicaid expansion proposed by Beebe. Recognizing the difficulty in getting the proposal needing a three-quarters vote, through the Arkansas Legislature, Beebe proposed Medicaid expansion be offered through private health insurance companies instead of by a government entity.
Instead of money going to the government entity to pay the health care costs of those covered through expansion, the money would go to the private insurance companies that provided the health care coverage. Some Republicans could support the proposal under the pretense it was not expanding a government program.
The state of Arkansas would need a waiver from the federal government to approve such a unique plan.
“The Obama administration needed a win in a Southern state so they approved it,” Beebe said. Plus, it helped that Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary was Kathleen Sebelius, whom Beebe knew from her time as governor of Kansas.
Beebe said the plan helped to attract more insurance companies to Arkansas, resulting in insurance premiums not skyrocketing in costs at a time when they were rising dramatically in the rest of the South. He reasoned that health care providers were not having to pass on costs to people who had insurance to pay for the people who received treatment, but had no means to pay for it.
He said that provided a powerful argument for expanding Medicaid. Another strong argument, Beebe said, is that if Arkansas did not expand Medicaid the citizens of the state would still be paying for the expansion in states like California and New York.
Expansion helped Arkansas hospitals and actually resulted in less costs for the state.
A lot has changed in Arkansas since Beebe was elected to his second term as the only governor in Arkansas history to win every county. Now, former Donald Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders is governor, but Beebe said he is not hearing anything about repealing Medicaid expansion, though it continues to be tweaked.
“They changed the name,” he said.
Beebe said it would be difficult to remove coverage for 300,000 Arkansans.
“Plus, the budget could not afford it,” Beebe said.
Two-term Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards calls expanding Medicaid as he took office in 2016 “the easiest big decision I have ever made” — and one that has had clear and convincing positive results for Louisianans.
“To me it was an obvious no-brainer, and maybe it’s easier for me to say that than others because I believe in making government work,” Edwards said in a recent interview with Mississippi Today. “I don’t believe in just saying, ‘Well, we just don’t want to expand government.’ Quite frankly, I don’t expect St. Peter to ask that question one day: Did you expand government? But I do expect him to ask what I did for the least fortunate among us.”
Louisiana, like other states nationwide, was at the time facing a health care crisis. It led the nation in rates of uninsured people — 22%-23%, mostly the “working poor.”
“We had many hospitals, especially rural hospitals, that were in danger of closing when I became governor,” Edwards said. “But because we have expanded Medicaid, we have not lost a single one.
“I’m not going to try to tell you that it fixed all of our problems and that all of a sudden we have the best health outcomes in the country,” Edwards continued. “What I can tell you is it addressed our most pressing problems, and it has created an environment where we can more easily produce better health outcomes because you just have more people with the ability to go to a doctor.”
Edwards said that when he became governor of Louisiana in 2016, the politics of Medicaid expansion "were probably about the same" as they are now in neighboring Mississippi, and so was the dire health care situation. He would unequivocally recommend Mississippi leaders take advantage of the federal program designed to help poor states with health care.
Edwards notes the politics on expansion have changed in Louisiana.
"In Louisiana we have a gubernatorial campaign underway, and I don't believe there is a single major candidate of either party who says anything other than they will leave the Medicaid expansion in place."
Mississippi Today interviewed the term-limited Gov. Edwards on Medicaid expansion as the end of his term nears, on a policy he says "ranks at the very top" of his accomplishments. The interview is below, edited for brevity.
Mississippi Today: Could you give a brief/broad overview of the situation when you took office, and of the impact Medicaid expansion has had in Louisiana since 2016.
Gov. John Bel Edwards: First, I'll talk about the impact it's had on our overall state budget. Secondly, individuals and families — many for the first time — have health insurance. And thirdly, we saw positive impact on the financial bottom line of hospitals across our state.
When I became governor, we had the largest general fund budget deficit in our state's history. It exceeded $2 billion for the first full fiscal year that started July 1, 2016, and that was a little more than 20% of all our state general fund. And that deficit occurred after several years of leading the nation in cuts to higher education, and cuts to basic health care delivery systems in our state.
And the cuts were just horrible with respect to Medicaid ... You have optional programs, but the optional programs were like hospice, end-stage renal disease care — things that most people would never consider optional, like things that would impact a person's ability to stay in a nursing home.
The people who were caught uninsured were working poor people. The poorest of the poor qualified for Medicaid. Those who worked and made enough money had private insurance or employer sponsored insurance. Working poor people were left out of that equation, and our uninsured rate among working aged adults was the highest in the country, around 22%-23%.
If someone is uninsured and they have access to any health care, it's likely to be an emergency room, which is the most costly way to receive health care. It's also the least effective way to manage disease ... That care either went totally uncompensated by the health care provider, meaning they had to pay for its themselves, or it might have been compensated in part by the (federal-state Disproportionate Share Hospitals) program.
But the DiSH program costs the state about 40 cents on the dollar. Medicaid expansion has never cost more than 10 cents on the dollar, and in Louisiana, the 10 cents is actually borne by the health care providers themselves because the hospitals realized their bottom lines would benefit so much that they assessed themselves.
This has produced an awful lot of compensation for these hospitals. Their bottom line is so much better — and this is all hospitals, our community hospitals, our very large hospitals like Ochsner, like Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady, like Children's Hospitals of New Orleans. But also, and I suspect most importantly, rural hospitals, because they were the ones struggling the most just to keep their doors open and routinely cutting programs and reducing staff to stay afloat.
We were able to address all of that through the Medicaid expansion, and it helped our state budget tremendously. My predecessor said he refused to expand Medicaid because we couldn't afford it. The truth is we couldn't afford not to do it. It actually helped our bottom line and allowed us to shore up the financing of our hospitals.
But it also helped these working poor people because many of them for the first time in their lives had an insurance card in their pockets ... As the medical community here has told me many times, it saved a lot of lives here in Louisiana ... I believe that Medicaid expansion is a pro-life position.
MT: Did Louisiana see an increase in gross domestic product from Medicaid expansion?
Edwards: We had GDP gains. I can't say it's because of Medicaid expansion or that it's responsible for X percentage of that, but I can tell you we have had the highest personal income ever. We have had the lowest unemployment rates ever and we have had the most people working ever. We have had tremendous growth in our GDP, and I just intuitively know it helped.
... By getting away from all that uncompensated care and the matching payments we had to put up, and because hospitals assessed themselves to cover the 10% costs, we were then able to use the budget savings and the money we had to address other pressing concerns that we inherited after a long period of disinvestment in our state. It allowed us to invest in other critical priorities.
MT: How has expansion affected Louisiana’s workforce?
Edwards: So, you have a relationship with a primary care physician. You have routine appointments and diagnostic evaluations, breast cancer screenings, prostate cancer screenings ... Your disease gets diagnosed earlier. Your treatment starts sooner, and it comes with a prescription benefit, so you have a way to be healthier. You're a more productive worker. You're less likely to be laid off. You're more likely to be able to support your family. That business has a healthier employee who shows up to work more often and is more productive — and the business didn't have to pay for it.
I’ve had employers tell me they had good employees, but they weren’t necessarily healthy. They had a disease. They didn’t have health insurance, so they had to miss work to go and wait around an emergency room. They would have to call in sick more often. These employers benefit from having a healthier, more productive workforce that doesn’t come at their expense.
When you expand Medicaid for the working poor, you also work with the health care providers so that they don’t just have appointments 9-5 Monday through Friday, but you work with them so they have appointments after hours during the week, have places they can go on the weekends so that they don’t have to miss work in order to access basic care.
Now we have the advent of telehealth, which can be covered through the Medicaid program and allow them to see doctors and even specialists without having to travel. That is particularly onerous for poor people in rural areas that lack the resources and also are furthest away from the nearest physicians that they need to see.
MT: Has expansion had an impact on mental health and-or substance abuse?
Edwards: It comes with behavioral health benefits for mental health, and it also comes with benefits for those people who have addiction disorders, and those benefits both in patient and outpatient. That's clearly something we still don’t have enough of, but we have a lot more services available now than we ever did before.
MT: What is your take on Mississippi's battle over expanding Medicaid and its ongoing hospital/health care crisis? What advice would you give to Mississippi – particularly its politicians and leaders – on Medicaid expansion?
Edwards: I don’t think the whole time I have been governor I have addressed comments critical to another state or the leadership of another state. I will say the situation there, the one that I read about and the one that I know a little bit about firsthand — my wife is from Wayne County, Mississippi, and all of her family is still up there — it looks an awful lot like the situation we had here. The politics were probably about the same here.
... Here in Louisiana, we decided that decision was made by the federal government when they passed the Affordable Care Act — otherwise known as Obamacare — a feature of which was Medicaid expansion. So that decision was made by the Obama administration and the Congress at that time. It hasn’t been repealed, so it remains available to states, although not mandatory as it was originally intended. I believe that we should try to make government work for those who need it the most. The working poor people certainly need health care.
I believe that you should make available to your state federal programs that not only do that, but provide a benefit to your budget so that you can then have the flexibility to address other pressing concerns as well. We were able to do that here. Obviously the situation as it exists in Mississippi to the extent that I am familiar with it — I'm rather familiar — looks an awful lot like what we had here in Louisiana.
I would certainly recommend Medicaid expansion to the Legislature there, to the governor there, to the people who are running for governor there. I would recommend it to Gov. Reeves, to Brandon Presley and to everyone else.
MT: How is expansion viewed across the aisle now in Louisiana? What level of opposition remains there? Any chance Louisiana voters would go along with undoing expansion?
Edwards: Obviously people might expect me to give a full throated defense of Medicaid expansion. I was a champion of it while Gov. Jindal was in office and refused to do it. I ran for office saying I was going to do it, and I have since done it. I would just invite anybody to come over here and talk to the hospital association, talk to hospital medical directors and CEOs.
Go to the most rural isolated, poorest parts of our state ask them about Medicaid expansion, and then go talk to employers in those areas and see what a difference its made for them.
The opposition has just melted away here. It's virtually nonexistent. I think that’s borne out by the campaign that’s underway where not a single candidate says they would undo the Medicaid expansion, and it would be a perilous position for them to take in the campaign if they said that.
Abdul Mohsin Mohamed, 17, was last seen at around 8 p.m. Sunday leaving King Smokers on Mississippi Drive headed to the Burger King up the road. He never made it to the restaurant and hasn’t been heard from since.
He was last seen wearing a black hoodie, black shorts and shoes. He’s described as 5-foot-10, with a slender build with a mustache and black curly hair.
Anyone with information should contact the Waynesboro Police Department at (601) 735-2323 and ask for Cmdr. Lt. Don Hopkins.
The provost of Delta State University suddenly stepped down Monday afternoon, according to an internal email obtained by Mississippi Today.
Andy Novobilski, who came to the regional college in the Mississippi Delta in 2021, will move into a faculty position as a tenured professor of computer information systems in the spring, wrote the new president, Daniel Ennis, in an email to faculty and staff.
Novobilski will also stay on as a special assistant to the president for the remainder of the school year.
Andy Novobilski, stepped down Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, as Delta State University provost. Credit: Courtesy of Delta State University
Ennis emphasized in the email that Novobilski’s transition was due to “family reasons” and is “not an indictment of anyone, nor a reaction to any particular set of circumstances, rather, the result of my own assessment of Delta State University’s direction and my expectations for the President’s Cabinet.”
“Dr. Novobilski ably led Academic Affairs through the pandemic and worked with skill and diligence under three presidents with very different styles and priorities,” Ennis wrote. “He is welcome to serve as a valued member of Delta State University’s professoriate.”
Reached for comment Tuesday morning, Novobilski said he wasn’t ready to share more information about his transition out of the provost role.
“At this point I really have nothing to say, but I tell you what, I do have some really important and really cool family things going on right now,” Novobilski said.
“It’s seriously impacting my time for good reason,” he added.
The move, which was not announced outside of the university, comes as Delta State has started the fall semester in the wake of public uproar over the hiring of an interim band director who made transphobic comments on a now-deleted podcast.
It also may not be the last personnel move Ennis will make this year, he intimated in the email. He has been tasked with improving Delta State’s budget and enrollment, both of which still seem to be struggling.
Last week, faculty were briefed on a cabin “retreat” that Ennis held to focus on the “direction/future of DSU,” according to a faculty senate report to the music department that was obtained by Mississippi Today. The main focus was on recruitment and retention.
The budget for the last school year resulted in yet another shortfall — more than $1.5 million.
This was due to a number of issues, per the faculty senate report: An initial budget forecast that was too high, improperly encumbered funds, and a misconceived sidewalk replacement project the university thought the Mississippi Department of Transportation was covering. It turned out Delta State was responsible for putting 20% toward the project.
But there was some good news: Enrollment, including dual enrollment, was up about 5%.
Novobilski’s transition will mean the university is now searching for an interim provost and a permanent replacement, which Ennis wrote he hopes to have in place by June 2024.
As provost, Novobilski was the university’s chief academic officer — essentially second-in-command. He had earned a reputation as a stickler for the hierarchy of academia, according to multiple faculty members.
Novobilski entered academia, which he has called an “accidental career” after working as a software engineer and starting his own software design consulting firm, NovoTech.
Bear Bryant gets a victory ride after the last game of his remarkable coaching career in December, 1982. (Photo courtesy University of Alabama)
Someone recently asked me: Who is the most unforgettable coach you have encountered in your long sports writing career?
The answer was and easy one, but requires some background. Indeed, it requires a story, which follows.
Rick Cleveland
This was back in September of 1971. I was an 18-year-old sports reporter, who could easily have passed for 13, for my hometown newspaper The Hattiesburg American. My beat was the Southern Miss football team, and they were about to play Bear Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide juggernaut. I was assigned to do a feature story on Bryant and was dispatched to Tuscaloosa for his weekly Tuesday press conference.
The Bear, as everyone called him then, had just unveiled a surprise Wishbone offense and stunned No. 3 Southern Cal at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, reversing a three-touchdown defeat the year before. Younger readers need to know that back in the the 1960s and 70s, Bryant was practically deity in the Deep South. The word “legendary” doesn’t begin to describe the hold he had on football fans in this part of the country. Some folks in Alabama claimed Bryant could walk on water. I was not so sure he couldn’t. I was in awe of him.
Five years into my sports writing career, I was finally making just enough money to purchase a new car — just not much of one. My 1971 Ford Pinto sounded like a sewing machine and maneuvered only slightly better. I left 30 minutes early to make the 180-mile trip with time to spare. Just across the state line, my left rear tire blew. This was during a September heat wave. I struggled and struggled to get the lug nuts off, and then had problems with the flimsy jack. So I sweated and I cussed and I got grease all over me. Then I sweated some more and cussed some more, knowing I was late and knowing I couldn’t make up time in my sewing machine.
Greasy, sweaty and quite embarrassed, I arrived at the Alabama athletic offices a few minutes after the press conference ended. Charley Thornton, Alabama’s splendid sports publicist, took one look at me and asked what happened. I told him, and added, “Mr. Thornton, if I don’t get an interview with Coach Bryant, they might fire me back home.”
Thornton said he’d see what he could do and he walked down the hallway. Then he came back and told me to follow him, and I did. We walked into this spacious office, filled with huge trophies and with a desk that seemed about as big as an end zone. Behind that mammoth desk, leaning back in his chair, eating a barbecue rib with his huge, socked feet propped up, was the man himself.
He might as well have been God.
Mr. Thornton said, “Coach said he has 10 minutes for you,” and then he left. It was Bear and me, all alone. He shoved a box of sweet-smelling ribs over and said in that deep, gravelly voice of his, “Charley tells me you’re Ace Cleveland’s boy. Is your mama as pretty as she always was? Here, son, have a rib…”
I would have choked on it. I was still hot and sweaty with a parched throat, and now I was nervous as all Hades. I said no thanks, but that I really appreciated him letting me interrupt his lunch.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “They’re mighty good. What can I do for you?”
I had prepared questions the night before, rehearsed them on my way over. In my haste, I had left all that in the sewing machine. I opened my mouth and . . . nothing came out. I froze. I choked.
Bryant waited several seconds, and then his lips curled into a smile. This is what he said: “Aw, shit, son, spit it out.”
It was as if he knew just what to say. My brain freeze ended instantly. I got a splendid interview that was more like a conversation and lasted much longer than 10 minutes. He of course told me he was really worried about Southern because they always played Alabama tough and he knew his boys might be cocky after winning at Southern Cal. He made USM, an average team at best, sound like the Green Bay Packers.
After a while, the great man asked, “Are you in a hurry to get back to Hattiesburg? Why don’t you come out to practice with me?” And then he drove us out to practice in his golf cart. And then he took me up on his tower with him. I noticed several veteran Alabama writers, who had covered the Tide for years, down below. I am pretty sure they were glaring up at me thinking, “Who the hell is that greasy little kid?”
Bear Bryant in his customary pre-game position: Leaning on a goal post. (Photo courtesy University of Alabama)
After a while, I told Coach Bryant I really did have to go home and get to work. He told me to hand him my notebook, and then he wrote down a man’s name and the tire store where he worked. “Tell Joe I sent you,” he said. And so I did. Joe put on a new tire and wouldn’t let me pay. “If Coach Bryant sent you, the tire’s on us,” the guy said.
Five days later, I returned to Tuscaloosa — in somebody else’s car — and watched Bryant’s boys dismantle Southern Miss 42 to 6. It could have been 70 to nothing had Bryant not been such a benevolent gentleman. I covered many more of Bryant’s games over the years, games against Ole Miss, State and Southern Miss and also in bowl games that won national championships. I was standing right next to Bryant at his press conference after the 1979 Sugar Bowl when No. 2 Bama defeated No. 1 Penn State 14-7 for the national championship. Bill Lumpkin, a longtime Birmingham sports writer, asked Bryant how close a Penn State running back came to scoring a game-tying fourth quarter touchdown. Answered Bryant, smiling and holding his index finger and his thumb about an inch apart, “Bill, he was about as close as the length of your ying-yang.”
I also covered Bear’s last game at the Liberty Bowl in December of 1982, silently pulling hard for the Crimson Tide to beat Illinois, which they did. And I covered his funeral a month later. Trust me, presidents and kings have been buried with less fanfare. I, as hundreds of others, cried.
Many believe Bear Bryant was the greatest coach ever. I agree. I know this for certain: Nearly 52 years later, he remains my all-time favorite.
Dr. LouAnn Woodward will continue to lead the University of Mississippi Medical Center, one of the state’s largest employers and its only academic health science center, for another four years.
Trustees on the Institutions of Higher Learning board, which governs all universities and colleges in Mississippi, unanimously approved the Chancellor of the University of Mississippi’s request to give Woodward another four-year contract in executive session at the board’s June meeting.
“Under Dr. LouAnn Woodward’s tremendous leadership, the University of Mississippi Medical Center plays a vital and growing role in serving the health care needs for all Mississippians,” said Chancellor Glenn Boyce in an emailed statement. “I’m deeply grateful for her guidance, commitment and talent, and how she continues to empower her home state and shape UMMC for an even brighter future.”
The new four-year contract began July 1 and will be in place until June 30, 2027,confirmed Jacob Batte, the director of news and media relations for the University of Mississippi.
Batte could not answer why Woodward requested another four-year contract renewal while her previous contract, which began in 2021, was still in place. Marc Rolph, UMMC’s executive director of communications and marketing, also declined to answer.
“I am grateful to Chancellor Glenn Boyce and the IHL Board for their leadership and support,” said Woodward in an emailed statement. “I’m excited about the future of the state’s only academic medical center, and I’m honored to lead it for another four years, advancing our tri-part mission of education, research and patient care.”
Woodward, whose official title is UMMC’s vice chancellor of health affairs and the dean of the school of medicine, became the first woman to lead the medical center and school when she was appointed in 2015.
She was trained as an emergency room physician at UMMC after graduating from Mississippi State University. Woodward is also a tenured professor in the academic center’s Department of Emergency Medicine, according to UMMC’s website.
Woodward has led the health system, which includes seven health science schools and the state’s only Level 1 trauma center, through the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in university leadership and a major dispute with the state’s largest private insurer, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi.
In the coming years, she’ll oversee the creation of a state-accredited burn center.
“The University of Mississippi Medical Center is an essential part of the health care landscape of our state, and the work done here makes a tangible difference for all Mississippians,” Woodward continued in the statement. “Each day, I am inspired by our dedicated and compassionate faculty, staff and students, who pour their hearts and souls into their work and learning, all with the purpose and vision of a healthier Mississippi.”
Batte would not say how much Woodward would be paid in the new contract, citing state law that prohibits the disclosure of certain public hospital records.
