Russ and Amy Huesman celebrated Mother’s Day a few hours early this weekend. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football coach and his bride of 20 years decided to enjoy a dinner out without their four kids — “our date night,” Amy said happily — before their children handed over the cards and gifts this morning.
“I actually asked for peace and harmony within the entire family for one 24-hour period,” Amy said when asked what Jacob, Levi, Emily and Natalie might give her.
“They basically said they’d rather go shopping, because that’s just not happening.”
After reeling in her laughter she added, “I really don’t ask for much. Just tell me you love me and appreciate me and I’m good to go.”
Isn’t that really what almost every mother wants most of all? To feel loved and appreciated? Sure, the flowers are nice, but they eventually have to be thrown out and the vase washed. A candlelight dinner costs too much and further weakens the ozone. Jewelry? Who needs another sparkling stone, anyway? (OK, scratch that last one, says my wife. Every woman always needs another bauble.)
But on the ever-so-slightly sliding scale of motherly stress, almost no one deserves more love and appreciation than the wives of coaches and athletes.
“In many ways my mom was a single parent raising four kids,” said new Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley, whose famous father Vince was almost always away tending to University of Georgia football.
“That was an era when coaches were almost never home because recruiting rules were so different. So he brought home the pay and she did almost everything else. She finally got him back one year when he had to cancel a speaking engagement to a Bulldog Club at the last minute. Dad sent Mom instead and she spent a solid hour annihilating him. The next day the club president calls Dad and says, ‘You’ve been great, but we want your wife back next year.'”
Nearly 30 years later, Barbara Dooley still knows how to one-up her husband. When Derek made his Atlanta-area Big Orange Caravan stop last week, his mom showed up wearing Tennessee orange.
“So the expectations have risen,” Derek said. “Now everybody’s coming up asking, ‘So when is your daddy going to wear orange?’ They’re watching and waiting.”
It isn’t only coaches, however.
When Kyle Petty was growing up watching his father Richard become the winningest driver in NASCAR history, his mother Lynda “had to be the strong person, hold everything together. She’d even get the car serviced. Her job was to take care of everything at home while Dad went out and made the money.”
But Kyle Petty quickly noted one difference between that time and this time: “NASCAR never raced on Mother’s Day back then.”
The Huesmans met when Russ was an assistant coach at William & Mary and Amy was working at the Virginia school.
“We dated for a year,” Russ said, “went through an entire football season so she could see the hours and the ups and downs of the profession.”
Still, as the kids began to arrive and Amy decided to home-school them — “a double whammy,” Russ said — it occasionally got to be almost more than she could take, especially during recruiting.
“Oh, I’ve threatened to write letters to the NCAA to get rid of May recruiting more than once,” she said. “I just kind of mark off the times of the year I don’t expect him to be around much. But I don’t know that I’d say it’s like being a single mom. I have someone to pay the bills and I know he’s coming home at some point. I think single moms have it a lot harder.”
Nor does oldest child Jacob subscribe to his father’s notion that mom has to be the bad cop because whenever dad comes home, in Russ’s words, “All we want to do is hug ’em and love ’em.”
Said Jacob, who’ll be a much-recruited senior quarterback at Baylor School this autumn, “My mom’s a nice person. My dad’s a nice person, too. But when I know I’ve done something wrong, my dad can still scare me.”
None of this is to say Amy would necessarily trade her life for another.
Of Russ she says, “He’s always done a great job of being at home whenever he’s not at work. He’s there for the kids whenever possible. And from my perspective, being a great dad is 90 percent of being a great husband.”
Says Russ of Amy: “I’ve probably got the best wife in the world. She’s a pretty special person.”
If only every husband would show such love and appreciation for the mother of his children.