Free Charley Pell! Former Gators coach wasn’t a cheater; he was pay-for-play pioneer | Commentary

Free Charley Pell.

Clear his name.

Give him his reputation and Southeastern Conference title back.

He went to his grave 23 years ago still known as one of college football’s most notorious cheaters, but now we know he wasn’t cheating at all; he was simply ahead of his time.

“Charley came along about 40 years too soon,” his longtime wife Ward told me the other day from her home in Alabama. “Back when we were at Florida, they accused us of buying players. We never bought players. We took care of players.”

And now here we are decades later and the NCAA is finally doing what ol’ Charley did nearly a half-century ago: Looking out for the best interest of the players. Except Charley was fired for it when he was a rising 43-year-old coach of the University of Florida who was hired to turn the perennially underachieving Gators into winners.

Pell’s ouster came in 1984 after the NCAA investigated UF and found it guilty of 59 violations. The Gators were hammered with what were then the stiffest sanctions (short of the death penalty) in NCAA history. Three years of probation, bowl bans and massive scholarship reductions.

And for what?

Most of the violations included football players scalping their free game tickets to boosters. One booster was even banned from the program for giving a player $50 for washing his car and delivering some beef to the player’s home. The NCAA also accused Pell of having a booster “slush fund” of $4,000 to pay for miscellaneous recruiting expenses.

In today’s world, Charley’s so-called booster “slush fund” is now known as a Name, Image and Likeness collective, totally permitted by NCAA rules and filled with millions of dollars to pay players. Those UF boosters in 1984 paying recruits a couple hundred dollars for football tickets pales in comparison to UF boosters of today offering a QB recruit Jaden Rashada a $13.8 million NIL deal.

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Not only are current players allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from boosters, but soon the schools themselves will be forking over tens of millions of dollars annually to pay their athletes.

As the late Bill Carr, the athletic director at UF when Pell was fired, told the Sentinel two years ago: “What happened with Charley Pell while I was there was illegal.  Now it’s legal. That’s what NIL stands for — Now It’s Legal.”

Reggie Bush recently got his Heisman Trophy back after he was stripped of it in 2010 in the wake of significant NCAA sanctions for USC, which included Bush receiving improper benefits during his Trojans career. According to Heisman officials, the decision to reinstate Bush’s trophy was based on “fundamental changes in college athletics” in which rules that have allowed “student athlete compensation” to become “an accepted practice and appears here to stay.”

If Bush can get his Heisman back because NCAA rules have changed then how about reinstating the Gators’ school-first SEC championship that Pell’s team won in 1984 but was later stripped by the league after UF was put on probation.

And while we’re at it, let’s also return UF’s 1990 SEC title under coach Steve Spurrier, which was won on the field but is not in the record books because the Gators were ineligible to play in a bowl game that season because of a midseason ruling handed down by the NCAA. According to SEC rules at the time, if a team was banned from a bowl game, it was ineligible to compete for a conference championship.

Spurrier and his UF coaches and players were not a part of the NCAA’s decision, which stemmed from former coach Galen Hall allegedly arranging a $360 child support payment for former player Jarvis Williams four years earlier. Spurrier still counts the 1990 team among the “seven” SEC titles he won as UF’s coach.

“Charley wasn’t a cheater,” Ward says. “He knew the type of background many of these players came from. I remember once when he rallied the boosters together to raise money to defray the medical costs of a player’s father who needed open heart surgery. Is that such a sin? Charley felt like every athlete should get some sort of stipend to meet their basic needs. We had players who came from nothing. Some of them would show up with one pair of underwear and one pair of jeans. They didn’t have enough money to buy deodorant or toothpaste. It was ridiculous.”

Even Doug Johnson, the lead NCAA investigator on the UF case involving Charley, had an epiphany years later when he wrote a letter on the coach’s behalf when Charley tried to get back on the sideline.

“As a coach of football, Charley has and had few peers,” Johnson wrote then. “He has paid more dearly for his mistakes than others have for similar mistakes. There are coaches coaching today who have done far worse than Charley, and have paid significantly less or not at all.”

The sad part is that all Charley ever wanted to do was coach football. He was a fiery, undersized 185-pound defensive lineman who worked himself into an All-SEC player while playing for Bear Bryant at Alabama in the early 1960s. His dream was to be just like his mentor, and he was willing to do anything in order to coach football — including getting married.

At 27 years old, when he was up for his first head-coaching job at Division I-AA Jacksonville State, the school president during the interview told Charley: “We’d love to hire you, but we don’t think it’s a good image to have a 27-year-old bachelor as our head coach.” Charley replied: “Don’t worry about that. I’m engaged to be married.”

After he left the interview with a job offer, he quickly got on the phone and called Ward, who he had only dated him a few times. She was just preparing to enter TWA’s flight attendant training program when Charley called said, “Hey, do you want to get married?”

Ward replied: “To whom?”

And the rest his history. With Ward by his side, Charley was a success at Jacksonville State and then Clemson and he was on the verge of building the Gators into a national power. He was a master organizer who worked relentlessly and endlessly and expected the same type of mindset and drive from his players and staff.

“I demand just one thing from my players, and that is attitude,” Charley once said. “I want them to think as positively as the 85-year-old man who married the 25-year-old woman and built a five-bedroom house near an elementary school.”

One of his assistant coaches, Lee McGriff, told the story once of being on a recruiting trip in Miami and being awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call.

“It was Coach Pell,” McGriff said. “I’ll always remember that deep, gravelly voice of his. “He said, ‘Coach McGriff, it’s 2 a.m. What are you doing for the Gators right now?’”

Pell is given much of the credit for organizing the vast network of Gator boosters and charming them and convincing them that they needed to start contributing millions if they wanted UF to be able to build the facilities to compete for national championships.

“First, Charley touched their hearts. Then he touched their wallets,” Carr once said. “Charley Pell had the most profound effect of anybody in UF history next to Steve Spurrier. Charley Pell made Steve Spurrier’s job a good one.”

But after he was fired by UF, Charley was blackballed from coaching. He tried several business ventures, but none gave him the satisfaction of coaching. He went through a long bout of depression and even tried to commit suicide in wooded area of Jacksonville in 1993.

Even his attempt to take his own life came with a well-organized game plan. Charley priced caskets, picked a burial spot in his hometown of Albertville, Ala., and even recorded written instructions about whom should be the pallbearers.

He then ran a hose from his car’s exhaust pipe through the passenger-side window. Luckily for him, he also took a handful of sleeping pills and drank a bunch of vodka. That combination made him throw up, and when his good friend Malcolm Jowers — the state trooper who guarded Charley at Florida games — discovered the suicide note, he rushed to the wooded area where he found Charley vomiting outside the car.

“When he couldn’t coach anymore, he felt so useless,” Ward said at the time.

Charley found God after the suicide attempt and eventually learned to live happily without football until he died of cancer in 2001 at 60. Ward says Charley never again talked about how much he missed coaching football, but it still angers her that he got banished from the game he loved so much.

“When you look at what’s going on today with the NCAA going in the complete opposite direction and players getting paid so much money,  it makes you realize that what happened to Charley was so unnecessary.”

If Reggie Bush can get his Heisman Trophy back isn’t it time to give Charley Pell his reputation back?

Turns out Charley wasn’t a cheater or an outlaw at all.

He was just a pay-for-play pioneer who was way ahead of his time.

When Charley was coaching UF four decades ago, Gator fans everywhere purchased bumper stickers that said, “Give ’Em Hell Pell!”

All these years later, it’s time for another bumper sticker that posthumously vindicates and exonerates one of the most influential coaches in UF history:

“Ring the Bell, Free Pell!”

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen