WACO -- The football odyssey that has landed Jim Grobe in the most awkward coaching seat in America at Baylor, begins in junior college in the rural Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. His coach there was one demanding S.O.B. Grobe, an undersized linebacker in need of a role model, loved him.

A typical morning practice scheduled for 7 o'clock meant players needed to be ready to go by 6:58 a.m. or there was no go. Water breaks? No sir. Practices were wars of attrition designed for survival of the fittest.

So it was across America as the 1960s blended into the 1970s.

"Some people thought I was a butcher," the coach, Hank Norton, says now. "But we were a junior college, and you know what that means. Kids needed to betaught right from wrong."

Norton, who is 88 and enshrined in a bouquet of halls of fame for his work at what is now four-year Ferrum College, took a particular liking to Grobe, a "yes sir, no sir" son of a policeman already schooled in right from wrong when he stepped on campus.

Baylor head coach Jim Grobe was an undersized linebacker at Virginia in the 1970s. (Photo courtesy of Wake Forest University)

Grobe was maybe 5-10 on his tiptoes and on the wrong side of 180 pounds with more grit than potential. He had been hand-delivered to the coach by a mutual friend, a doctor, from the trio's hometown of Huntington, W.Va.

It was the diagnosis of the doctor, a Grobe family friend who served as a physician to the Marshall