Hey, everyone! I hope this fall weather finds you well and all your football teams are winning. Speaking of football, I recently had the privilege of sitting down with former Middle Tennessee State University head football coach and athletic director Boots Donnelly and his daughter Bunny to discuss her new book, Boots Donnelly: How He’ll Be Remembered.
I was a student at MTSU during Coach Donnelly’s tenure and that 1985 season when the Blue Raiders were ranked No. 1 in the nation in NCAA Division I-AA football. It was such an exciting time to be in Murfreesboro!
Reading Bunny’s book gave me a new perspective on a man I thought I already knew a lot about. Much more than a book about football or coaching, this is a story about life, perseverance, family, and what shaped a man who helped shape our community. I highly recommend it.
Here, I have again recruited Meredith Thomas, who grew up in an athletic household herself, to help tell this story.
by Meredith Thomas:
Legends have a way of looming larger than life when we’re little. They’re the big, strong, superhuman superheroes we gaze at in awe, carefully placing them upon the golden pedestal where they may reside indefinitely or until our own realities come crashing down around us. We admire them before we’re old enough to understand what the word admiration means. We just know they’re special. There’s something that makes people stand a little taller around them.
Now imagine that the legend you’ve held in such high regard, the one whose life-size poster may hang on the wall above your childhood bed, is actually quite well known personally to you. A parent. Your dad, no less. For Bunny Donnelly, that larger-than-life figure is her father, Boots. To Middle Tennessee, he is a revered football coach, a former athletic director, and a familiar name woven into the fabric of this community and beyond. To Bunny, he’s also the man whose life began long before the victories and public recognition. He’s the father whose story she wanted to understand, preserve, and ultimately share with all of us.
And we are super moved that she did.
In Boots Donnelly, readers are taken beyond the familiar headlines and football memories to explore the man behind the legend. From humble beginnings and the hardships of his youth to a career that helped define an era of MTSU football, Bunny traces all the experiences that shaped her father’s remarkable life. Bringing together stories of family, friends, and football, she reveals the many roles and responsibilities Coach carried throughout his life while always returning time and again to the importance of family.
A whole human life is made up of fits and starts, trials and tragedies, love and fury, victories and heartaches. A person is so much more than a profession or a list of accolades. Sometimes the most important chapters of a person’s life are the ones the public never gets to see.
The challenges Boots endured in his youth offer us a glimpse into the experiences that helped shape the man, coach and father that he became. It is these moments that remind us that a person’s public accomplishments only tell part of a story. We don’t always get to know or truly understand our heroes, even when we live under the same roof with them.
Families don’t often uncover the most important details about their loved ones’ lives until after they’ve gone. The opportunities we have to ask another annoying question or clarify a memory disappears, leaving us to piece together the story from whatever remains.
Reading Bunny’s book struck a particularly personal chord with me, as I also have a father who was a well-known local athlete and coach, someone who has earned tremendous respect throughout his community. My dad also has stories people want to hear that have become part of his legacy and part of our community’s collective memory in many ways.
I have recently made a more deliberate effort to record my own dad telling those stories in his own voice. Sometimes I will inquire about a specific event of familiar tale we’ve all heard a dozen times but could never recite with the same zeal. Others, I just record parts of conversations in the hopes of getting the facts straight while still being blessed with the gift of having him here to set the record straight himself. It’s an exercise in listening but also one in understanding, as the more I inquire, the more I realize how much there is to learn about the man behind the stories.
What shaped him? What has he overcome? What did he quietly carry while the rest of us saw the coach, the athlete, the father, or the man everyone seemed to know?
I think that is what makes Bunny’s book such a gift. What started as a pseudo note-taking endeavor intended for the eyes of the inner family circle only, became a much larger undertaking: documenting a life in all its complexity, including the hardships that preceded a man’s success and the experiences that shaped his character. In doing so, she created something much more meaningful not only for herself and her family, but for everyone who has known and admired Coach Donnelly over the years.
We don’t often spend enough time celebrating our local legends for all that they’ve accomplished. Oh sure, we can fill stadiums, share photos, spread tall tales, and recount their greatest public or professional moments. But maybe the most important ways we can honor them is to take the time to sit down and ask questions and actually listen while they are still around to answer.
At the end of the day, what could be more important, valuable or life-affirming than the gift of understanding? To understand is to make room for empathy and see someone way beyond accolades and public persona, recognizing the experiences that have made them who they are. I believe these legacies deserve more than the stories we tell after they’re gone. We have the opportunity to hear those stories directly from them, and ask the questions we might have never thought to ask before. For me and Bill, preserving our family’s stories has always been more than an effort to simply get the details right. It has served as a way for us to hold on to something precious and rare while we still can. And the most important lesson of all is this: we shouldn’t wait until it’s way too late to begin.
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