Barry Switzer, ‘The King’ of Norman, is still unapologetically himself

• Dave Wilson, ESPN Staff WriterOct 9, 2024, 06:55 AM ET

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  Dave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.

NORMAN, Okla. — Across the street from Oklahoma’s campus, and a mile from the football stadium that bore witness to his legendary career, Barry Switzer sits in his home office at an ornate desk with his name on the front underneath an OU logo. Around him, commemorative footballs line the shelves, mementos of a time when he became known as “The King,” winning three national championships and 12 Big Eight titles.

There’s a replica Lombardi Trophy celebrating the Dallas Cowboys’ 1995 championship in Super Bowl XXX, when Switzer became one of three men — alongside Jimmy Johnson and Pete Carroll — to win championships in college and the NFL. With the Sooners, he won 66% of his games against ranked teams and battled Tom Osborne’s Cornhuskers and Darrell Royal’s Longhorns — as well as the NCAA — during his career. He doesn’t go down without a fight.

That’s why, on a Friday afternoon before his Sooners play their first SEC game against Tennessee, Barry Switzer isn’t thinking about the Vols as much as he’s contemplating his own future.

“Last days of life, it says here,” Switzer says as he picks up a pamphlet from his desk and reads it aloud, before laughing and adding one of his most common refrains. “F— me.”

The booklet is a decision-making guide for whether to replace your implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), a device that sends an electric shock to the heart when it detects a dangerous rhythm to correct it. The guide offers two ways to look at the decision.

The idea of dying quickly sounds painless. I’ve always said I hope to die in my sleep. Going through surgery and being shocked is not something I want.

Or, there’s the alternative:

I’m not ready to die. I have so much to live for. Even if it means being shocked, I’m willing to do anything that can help me live longer.

Barry Switzer has been in the spotlight for so long, and he still talks so fast that it would be easy to forget that he turned 87 on Oct. 5. Not that he shies away from it.

“I’m 87 years old,” he’ll say. “You better get your ass over here.”

Barry Switzer, at his desk in his home office, still is constantly in motion. His phone rings all day long. Brent Humphreys for ESPN

This decision outlined in that pamphlet was not a question that the coach could comprehend. Who would just go quietly into the night? That’s not Switzer’s style. He had never even considered avoiding getting shocked — he had already had the ICD procedure done two weeks earlier. It walloped him for a week or so, the combinations of anesthesia and his age and surgery. But a couple of weeks later, he rounded back into rare form. His most pressing concern now is that some good ol’ boy will backhand him underneath his left collarbone where the device was implanted, so when he’s at events, sometimes he’ll raise his arm to guard his chest.

His legendary photographic memory is still sharp, though his recall may be a little slower, which frustrates him. But that even more legendary mouth is still firing on all cylinders.

“I’ve never known anyone who would say, ‘I’ve lived a good life and I’m ready to go home and kick the bucket? I’m not doing that s—. Who would say, ‘F—, I’ll die now?'” Switzer says, laughing. “It’s better to have the f—ing thing than not have the f—ing thing. I’m not going to slow down. I’m going a hundred miles an hour.”

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He’s making and taking calls constantly, often merging them together to make sure connections happen. His iPhone “Blues” piano ringtone must ring in his dreams. He’ll stop and take photos with anyone who asks, naturally making sure his Super Bowl ring is prominently placed, usually on a shoulder facing the camera. He’s ensuring his players have tickets, friends have sideline passes, visitors have sleeping arrangements and dinner reservations, all while he’s fixing the gas grill at the Airbnb he owns behind his house (the Switzer Pigskin Palace, hosted by Barry, the listing reads) and making sure the Tennessee fans who are soon to be checking in can cook out on a nice fall football weekend.

And, not least of all, he’s making up for lost time with Ashley Snider, the 36-year-old daughter that he met for the first time five years ago. She grew up 10 miles away from Norman for three decades with no idea that the most popular man in Oklahoma was her father. But once they discovered each other, the embrace was instantaneous.

“She’s as much mine as the rest of my kids, as much me as all the rest of ’em got in them,” Switzer says. “She just got started a little late. I told her we ain’t got much time, I ain’t got much time left. We spend as much time together as we can.”

This is life at 87 for Switzer, who indeed is still going 100 miles an hour 50 years after winning his first national championship at Oklahoma. In Norman, he’s still The King, and he lives for his subjects — from former players, to OU fans, to local business owners, to Ashley and the rest of his family. He still has one mission that keeps him going.

“If you’re mine, I’m going to take care of your ass,” Switzer says. “If you need help, I’m going to help your ass.”

Switzer became the Oklahoma head coach in 1973 and found success quickly — winning national titles in his second and third seasons on the job. Stephen Dunn/ALLSPORT

BARRY SWITZER’S LIFE was forged by tremendous loss. He came from the outskirts of Crossett, Arkansas, a paper mill town of about 2,000 people, where his dad Frank, a bootlegger who sold whiskey in a dry county, was unable to watch him play football his senior year of high school because he was in the state penitentiary.

In his autobiography, “Bootlegger’s Boy,” Switzer recalls how his mother, Mary, was a bright, voracious reader. But she lived an isolated life, knowing that many nights her husband was out with other women, and so she escaped into books, and then pills. In 1959, Barry Switzer was home from the University of Arkansas, where he played for the Razorbacks, for the summer before his senior year. In late August, Mary came to kiss him goodnight. She was drunk and her eyes were glassed over from barbiturates. After years of watching her struggle, he turned away, saying he’d rather not see her like this. She left the room. Thirty seconds later she shot herself dead on the porch. For 30 years, he blamed himself, until he discovered she had left a suicide note when he and his brother Donnie were researching a book about their family history.

She had already decided to end her life and was going to kiss Barry goodbye. She was 45.

In 1972, his dad, who was 66, was accidentally shot by a girlfriend who caught him with another woman and began threatening him with a gun. Frantically trying to get him to a hospital, his girlfriend lost control on a curve, hit a utility pole, and the car exploded, killing them both. Just 74 days later, Switzer, previously an assistant, was named the head coach of the Sooners when Chuck Fairbanks left to coach the New England Patriots.

“That’s one of my great regrets, that Daddy never got to know what we were able to accomplish when I was here,” Switzer said.

But Norman saw it all up close, with Switzer winning his first 15 home games, sending the Sooners into hysterics. He restored Oklahoma, which hadn’t won a national championship since 1956, to glory, going 32-1-1 in his first three seasons, with national titles in 1974 and 1975.

He became a legend by being unapologetically himself, from recruiting Black players at every position in the early 1970s when most major schools were still only reluctantly integrating their programs, to giving his outrageous sound bites, to wearing flamboyant fur coats and stirring up scandals, such as when Texas’ Darrell Royal, a frequent Switzer critic, accused Switzer of spying on his practices, which Switzer denied with a wink.

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Barry Switzer’s fur coat embarrasses Brian Bosworth

Former Oklahoma head coach Barry Switzer recalls the first time he met linebacker Brian Bosworth on the recruiting trail.

“My coaches didn’t spy. When they spied, they were Chuck’s coaches,” Switzer says, laughing. “Chuck left. I inherited them f—ers.”

This is the paradox of Switzer. He broke rules. He sometimes had all 10 toes over the line. But he’ll spin even the smallest infractions into colorful tales, leaning into the character that made him a pariah among rival coaches, like when Joe Paterno said he couldn’t retire and “leave college football to the Jackie Sherrills and Barry Switzers of the world.” He already had a reputation, so why not make the tale even taller?

Switzer boasted in his autobiography that he paid Joe Washington, his first star running back, $100 an hour to babysit his kids in 1972, the equivalent of $750 today. In Switzer’s suite during the Sooners’ game against Tennessee, Washington, still one of Switzer’s best friends, laughs and scoffs at the claim: “I made $1.10 an hour. $3.30 for the whole night.”

Switzer became the Sooners coach at just 35 after serving as offensive coordinator, where he helped turn OU’s Wishbone offense into an unstoppable machine. George Gojkovich/Getty Images

In an era when coaches had my-way-or-the-highway rules, Switzer was an outlier. Hard-asses like Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler were gods, military-style rules governing hairstyles and facial hair were commonplace at programs across the country.

But Switzer was a players’ coach. He laughs with “Little Joe,” as he still calls Washington, asking Washington if he remembers borrowing his ’72 Cadillac so he could visit his girlfriend in the Dallas area. Washington says Switzer allowed players to be themselves on and off the field.

“I painted my shoes silver,” Washington says. “He treated us all as individuals. Most people don’t take that time to do something like that. If you worked hard, you could be yourself. He enjoyed that.”

In the 1970s, Thomas Lott, the Sooners’ first Black quarterback, wore a bandana under his helmet and on the sideline. Brian Bosworth’s haircut inspired a generation of teenagers to get lines shaved in the side of their heads. He wore a T-shirt on the sideline during a game in which he was suspended that mocked the NCAA, calling the organization the “National Communists Against Athletes.”

Switzer didn’t like that one, but he also was no fan of the NCAA. A large portion of “Bootlegger’s Boy” is an angry screed against what he saw as an organization that lacked common sense or empathy. So he says, still today, that some of those were rules worth breaking, because while he might have been ethically wrong, he was doing things that were morally right. He recruited a lot of players from poor families and believed it unfair that rules prevented buying plane tickets for trips home, prevented buying players food or paying for long-distance calls home, prevented providing basic necessities. And he makes no apologies.

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“I knew what the problem was and I knew how to solve the problem. NIL is ‘now it’s legal,'” Switzer says [he’s even filed to trademark that term]. “Fifty years ago it wasn’t legal. I’ve always had that attitude: If you’re a good kid and you try to be as good as you can be, as long as you do the right things, I’ll take care of you.”

That’s why Switzer built a bunkhouse in his Norman home, where his former players are welcome to stay anytime.

“But you’ll have to fight Keith Jackson for a bed,” Switzer says of his former two-time All-America tight end. “He thinks it’s his damn house.”

Switzer recalls sitting with Jackson on the floor of his home in Little Rock, Arkansas, watching television with the high school star, while promising his mother, Gladys, that if she let Jackson come to Oklahoma, Switzer would treat him as one of his own children for the rest of his life.

Last month, 40 years later, Jackson walked into Switzer’s house and the old coach immediately greeted his old player — “HEY, BIG BOY!” — and then got after him about his weight. The Sooners are family.

“You better be nice to me, Coach,” Jackson says. “I’m going to speak at your funeral, and I haven’t decided what I’m going to say yet.”

Maybe Switzer’s deep connections with everyone around him stem from the dysfunctional home of his youth. Or, maybe, Switzer ponders, he was inspired to become a better version of his dad, the rogue bootlegger who made a lot of money skirting the law, but used it to help others who were looked down on by society like he was.

“Back when I grew up, I promise you a Black man had no justice or credit,” Switzer says. “They couldn’t go to the bank and borrow $500. S—, they’re working at the paper mill for a dollar an hour and 40 hours a week, making $40. They couldn’t buy a car on credit unless Daddy walked in with ’em and told the car dealer, ‘Sell this man a car.’

“I got it from my dad. I had the same attitude. I knew that a lot of kids needed help.”

In 1995, Switzer’s son Doug played quarterback for Arkansas-Pine Bluff, a historically Black college about 80 miles from Crossett, while Barry was the head coach of the Cowboys. Doug was the only white scholarship player on the team, and his dad would be one of the few white faces in the crowd during games. Barry was stunned when every week, total strangers — from principals to prison wardens — would stop him and tell him how his dad had paid for their college tuition or bought them a car, as long as they kept their grades up. Frank Switzer helped their asses.

Ashley Snider grew up just miles away from Norman, Oklahoma, finding out in 2019 that Barry Switzer was her father. Now, they’re making up for lost time, including in Switzer’s suite during the Tennessee game. Dave Wilson/ESPN

BARRY SWITZER SAYS he takes care of his own. And Ashley Snider is his now.

In 2008, Snider was visiting family in Alabama and her grandmother ripped the Band-Aid off a deep family secret, blurting out, “You’re adopted. Now hold it together.”

Snider, who worked as a paralegal for a law firm in Oklahoma City, returned home and immediately cornered the lawyer she worked for to ask him how to unravel this mystery. But it was a closed adoption, which meant she couldn’t access any records. Her parents couldn’t help because they didn’t know her biological mother’s name. It was never listed publicly, and an attorney handled the entire adoption process.

She tried to let go, unsure she’d ever know the real story. But in 2016, her father gave her what would end up being a life-changing Christmas gift, buying her and her husband, Trevor, Ancestry.com DNA kits.

“I immediately found a bunch of relatives, an uncle and first cousins,” Snider says. They were all Switzers from Crossett, Arkansas. She started sending messages to some of her relatives on Ancestry’s site, finding few answers. Then, nothing happened for three long years.

In 2019, Snider had her third child — she named her Crimson — and was up with her in the middle of the night when she got a message on Ancestry from a woman in Oregon. Snider wrote back and the woman sent her a phone number. She wondered if she was really going to call a stranger and tell them her life story. But she did, telling her all of what she had been able to piece together over the years: She was born March 5, 1988, and believed her parents to be from the Noble, Oklahoma, area. She knew she had an older sister and that her grandmother talked her mother out of an abortion and into adoption.

“I know who your mother is,” the woman responded, telling her the name [which Snider wishes to keep private]. “She has an older child. Her mother was a nurse, and everyone knows that she dated Barry Switzer in the 1980s.”

Her brain starts processing it. Snider wasn’t a big Oklahoma fan. But she knew the name and that he had coached at OU, but not sure when or in what capacity. What she knew for sure was Barry Switzer was the same man who owned Barry’s Chicken Ranch, a defunct chain of restaurants. She had eaten there as a kid.

The stranger tells her to check her phone. She puts it on speakerphone to open her text messages. There’s a photo.

“All of a sudden, I see my mother,” Snider says. “It’s shock. It’s disbelief. It’s excitement. It’s relief.” She had waited so long for this and wondered if she had ever seen her before or been in the same place.

“Nobody knows about you,” the woman says. Nobody, except her biological mother.

Switzer didn’t, which Snider said she believes. He and his first wife, Kay, with whom he had three children — Kathy, Doug and Greg — had divorced in 1981, and Switzer’s reputation was well known.

“I never claimed to be an all-American husband,” he wrote in his book. “I was too selfish and self-centered, and when I became successful, many temptations entered my path.” His dating habits raised eyebrows with the Oklahoma administration, which disapproved of him seeing younger women. “A lot of gossips thought it was disgraceful,” he says. “I really didn’t give a damn about that, because I didn’t feel it was any of their business.”

He and Snider’s mother had an on-again/off-again relationship. When Snider was born in 1988, he was 50 and she was 24. Ashley has a deep respect for how difficult the situation must have been for her.

“She kept this man’s secret her entire life,” Snider says. “She already had a kid, and she just knew it wasn’t going to be white picket fences. She knew that she couldn’t do it on her own.”

They finally talked, and her mother confirmed Switzer was the father, before calling him to connect him with Snider. It was a shock to him, obviously, but he was also distraught she’d gone through this too.

“She was young, and we had agreed that if she ever found anyone, she’d just move on, and I thought that’s what she’d done,” Switzer says. “And what she’d done was gotten pregnant with my child. She went on and had the baby and gave her up. And it all came back.”

Snider wanted to do a paternity test to confirm, because she’d heard stories of others finding their presumptive birth parents, forging a relationship, then finding out they weren’t their actual parents.

Switzer remembers getting the call. “They said, ‘Coach, you don’t have a lot of wiggle room here,” he says. “The odds are 48 million to 1. I said, ‘She’s mine?’ She said, ‘She’s yours!'”

Snider, meanwhile, got a notification, logged into the system and saw the results: Barry L. Switzer, 99.99%.

Ten minutes later, her phone rang.

“I’ll never forget what he said,” Snider says.” He said ‘Is this Ashley? This is Coach Switzer and I’m your daddy and I love you, and I want to get to know you and your family and your kids.’ I’ll never forget, he introduced himself as Coach Switzer.”

It was the beginning of a whirlwind relationship. Switzer was fascinated by the names of Snider’s children. First was Atticus, after the character in “To Kill A Mockingbird,” a book Switzer loved, so they found a quick bond. Second was Memphis. And third, Crimson, the color of the Sooners. Switzer couldn’t believe it.

But there was a twist. Snider grew up a massive Alabama fan. Her daughter was named after the Crimson Tide. Switzer found it hilarious. “Her daddy that raised her was an Alabama fan,” Switzer says, laughing. “Can you believe that s—?”

Switzer pulled a few strings as a token of appreciation for the man who raised his daughter. He called Nick Saban’s secretary and asked her if she could get him to personalize a photo to David Godfrey.

“That was what I did for him for his first Christmas present,” he says. Snider said her dad proudly displays it on his bedside table.

Switzer bought her a car, which inadvertently outed her, when the dealership posted a photo on Facebook of them announcing that Barry Switzer had come in to buy a car for his daughter.

His statue in front of the Switzer Center had a plaque on the back of it with the names of all 10 of his grandchildren. He had it removed and redone to add the names of Snider’s three kids. Switzer started attending all of his new grandchildren’s sporting events. Switzer attended Grandparents’ Day at their schools recently.

“I’d walk into a gym and people would ask me, ‘What the hell are you doing here?'” Switzer says. “I’m here to see my grandchildren play!”

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This wasn’t the chicken restaurateur. This was The King. She worried that people, particularly Switzer’s three kids, would think she was trying to be an opportunist, but said her siblings have all been kind and welcoming. Still, she has kept their story under wraps for almost five years.

The mother who raised Snider, Judy Godfrey, was unable to have children, and would always tell Ashley she was a gift from God.

“She was my person, my best friend in the whole wide world,” Snider says. “She used to always tell me, ‘I can never talk to your mother on the phone, because she was giving me a gift that I couldn’t give.’ That’s how I was raised, that my life mattered.”

Judy Godfrey died in January 2019. Snider found Switzer in December 2019.

“She never got to hear any of this,” Snider says. “She never got to hear, ‘Mom, I found him.'”

Still, Snider was fortunate, she thought. These late in life meetings don’t always go well. But Switzer was taken with all of it.

Snider said she had no expectations, but just wanted to understand where she came from. Switzer’s embrace has allowed her to do that. He’s taken her to Crossett, where he got to meet family members she corresponded with years before on her quest to find her dad. Switzer has taken her to Dallas to meet Jerry Jones, his former Arkansas teammate and boss with the Cowboys.

Switzer said they share a quick, easy wit and that she’s as strong-willed as he is. She called him Barry once, and he said his kids call him Dad. She said, “Well you raised them.” Now she calls him the way he first introduced himself to her: Coach.

Switzer is always game for a photo or an autograph, and often holds court at lunch in Norman at the Midway Deli, his favorite place. Brent Humphreys for ESPN

BOB THOMPSON FIRST knew Switzer as a childhood hero of his parents. Then the coach became a customer and a friend who would change the course of his life.

Thompson grew up in Minnesota, the son of Oklahoma natives who moved north, where his dad became a minister. Thompson’s family got one television channel and the one college football game he always watched growing up was Oklahoma-Nebraska.

In 1985, he purchased the Midway Grocery & Market, a neighborhood grocery store and meat market founded in Norman in 1926. He was just 27 and didn’t realize how in over his head he was. He was able to scrap and claw to keep it going, surviving with a skeleton staff.

“Coach Switzer walks into the store one day and just embraces us,” Thompson says. “Just absolutely loved the store.”

One day, Switzer was visiting while it was virtually empty, sitting with Thompson. Switzer told him he had to ditch the groceries. The college students want the sandwiches the store sold, and that’s what he needed to focus on. Get more tables, get rid of the Vienna sausages and Spam. And he was always there to help. Switzer, he said, became a coach to him too.

“That guy did everything he could to make me succeed,” Thompson says. “He’d sit up by the front door as people came in and could pick up on them not knowing what to do. He’d get up and show ’em how to order. He’d take out the trash. As we got busier and busier, I didn’t have enough people and he’d tell me, ‘You need to hire some more people. You need to put some more chairs in. The students are going to be here.’ It was just so amazing to me that he had sort of had a vision for my success. It’s one of those things that’s hard to take in.”

Switzer began asking reporters, photographers or TV crews to meet him at the Midway for interviews, and the publicity has been invaluable for Thompson.

The Midway is where Switzer’s legendary interpersonal skills are often on display, along with his incredible recall for names and faces. Thompson said he’ll never forget a few years ago when a man in a wheelchair came in. The seating arrangements are tight, so Thompson helped clear space for him and get settled at a table.

The military vet asked Thompson if that was Coach Switzer across the way. He said it was, and the man, an amputee, told him he’ll never forget that he was waiting to welcome him home at the airport when he returned home from Iraq a few years before. Across the room, Switzer was talking to some guests at his table, and Thompson eased by to nudge him, knowing he’d want to say hello. “He turned around and looked at him and called him by name across the room,” Thompson says. “It just stunned me, and stunned the man. I get chills thinking about that moment.”

Tennessee fan Phillip Furlong and his friends ran into Switzer at the Midway on game day, just hours before the Vols faced the Sooners. They took a photo together out front and couldn’t believe it happened on the very first stop of his very first visit to Norman. He said in his travels across the SEC, you don’t see someone of Switzer’s profile just mingling with the masses.

“It’s absolutely surreal,” Furlong says. “That’s a guy you see on TV for the Sooners and Cowboys, and all of a sudden he’s just hanging out in a deli with you.” The Midway Deli is now a Norman institution with a sandwich named for Switzer, called the Coach: Peppered turkey and pepper jack cheese with lettuce and mayonnaise on “wheatBarry” bread.

The place is packed daily, the walls lined with OU sports memorabilia and history, and the coach is almost always there holding court, making meeting Barry Switzer exactly what you would want it to be.

“He doesn’t need any of this for his ego,” Thompson says as customers flocked to Switzer’s table. “He just knows this is what we need him to be for us.”

All over Norman, you’ll find evidence of Switzer’s enduring popularity, with the plaque marking the “Table of Truth,” his reserved booth at Othello’s, and anything with his name on it is an “instant sellout” at Blush. Brent Humphreys for ESPN

SWITZER ISN’T HARD to find in Norman. If he’s not at the Midway, he’s often at breakfast at Juan del Fuego, and has been such a longtime dinner guest at Othello’s that he has his own reserved booth, with a plaque commemorating it as the “Table of Truth.” At every stop, he spreads a little Sooner Magic, striking up a conversation with others before they meet him. If he sees a child staring in awe, he smiles, waves and gestures for them to come over.

“Coach Switzer, he’ll find any huddle, any conversation, any seat at the bar,” Oklahoma coach Brent Venables says.

Around town, Switzer’s photo is a fixture on restaurant walls and Switzer merchandise dominates the market. Stores sell socks, buttons and greeting cards with BMFS on them, for Barry Mother F—ing Switzer. Blush, a store on Campus Corner, sells “Hang Half A Hundred” throw pillows, commemorating Switzer’s famous mission statement to score early and often.

Blush owner Megan Benson said anything with Switzer on it is “an immediate sellout,” though she said he refuses anything free or at a discount, wanting to support her store instead, including thinking the pillow was so hilarious that the Switzers bought 20 of them to send out as Christmas gifts. Barry came in one day to buy a shirt with a photo of him underneath crimson lettering that says, “Winners Win.”

“I need that sweatshirt with my face on it,” Switzer tells them. “I got pulled over on Highway 9 and the cop told me if I came in here and bought it for her, she wouldn’t give me a ticket.”

It’s an only in Norman situation. Most legendary coaches retire to the lake or the golf course or a gated community, out of sight. When you sign up to coach the Sooners, you must make peace that you’re in Barry’s town. But Switzer understands it too, and instead of being domineering, he’s the ultimate cheerleader or sounding board, and has let his six…