Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408080017
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SCOTT BLANCHARD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
``Which was not true,'' Ragazzo says seven years later, ``because I watched it go out.''
The other engine was vibrating. The pilot said the words ``emergency landing.''
``I knew I was gone,'' said Ragazzo, a Virginia sports legend who retired in July after a 40-year career in coaching, scouting and athletic administration. ``I could see my childhood, I could see everything. It was the funniest feeling I ever had. I felt like I was just floating in the air. It was scary as hell.''
His fellow passenger offered a macabre thought about the seemingly inevitable crash.
``I said, `This makes me madder than hell,''' said Ragazzo, then a New England Patriots scout. ``I said, `Do you realize, with this darn plane we're in, the size of the plane, a total of four people - we won't even make the front page. We'll be a little blip on the back page.' So the two of us are sitting there laughing.''
That Ragazzo would put an earthy, mad-comic twist on a grave situation would surprise few who know him. When the plane landed safely, it preserved a sharp-witted storyteller who not incidentally influenced thousands of young lives as a college coach - including two stints at VMI, one as head coach - and, for the past seven years, Virginia Tech's director of student life.
Ragazzo, 67, and his wife, Betty, are retiring to a golf-course home in Southport, N.C., but Ragazzo hasn't sent out announcement cards. He hates emotional goodbyes, maybe because he knows himself. He got teary when one of his former VMI players, Radford University admissions director Vern Beitzel, finished a recent round of golf by saying: ``I want to shake your hand and thank you.''
``[I thought] I may not see this guy again,'' Beitzel said. ``It sort of made me realize how important that part of my life was.''
Ragazzo stood up for cadets and for VMI when the military was under public fire during the Vietnam War. His gruff voice and crew-cut might make him seem military strict, but he has a compassionate side, too. He once accompanied a freshman player to a relative's funeral, then drove him back to VMI. Instead of sending Jim Monos back to the barracks, Ragazzo had him come to his house for dinner.
``He knew that it was a tough day,'' said Monos, who later coached under Ragazzo and now is head coach at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. ``He really had some compassion for people. I'm not sure everyone knew that.''
Ragazzo set season and career touchdown receptions records at William and Mary, but his football career began with another secret: 114 E. 2nd Ave., Williamson, W.Va. The Mingo Fruit and Produce Co. resided there and so (fictionally) did Ragazzo. Aflex, Ky., wasn't big on football, so the son of Italian immigrants who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of opportunity crossed the Tug Fork River in search of hash marks.
Schools didn't check addresses much then, and Williamson won the 1944 state championship with a team that featured seven Kentucky residents in the starting lineup.
A coal miner's son who once was knocked in the head by a falling rock in a mine as Vito Sr. watched, Ragazzo attended William and Mary as a 17-year-old before the U.S. Army took him to Germany from '45-47. He hated college but hated the lingering smells of Nazi concentration camps worse, and he got a release when he re-enrolled as an appreciative undergraduate at W&M in '47.
Last year, when a Tech student complained to Ragazzo that she hated school, he told her to drop out and work for a year.
``She was writing me letters, saying, `Please, get me back in,''' Ragazzo said.
Ragazzo idolized his war-veteran classmates, many of whom made up William and Mary's teams that went 26-15-2 from '47-50. The game then bore little resemblance to '90s college football. Once, after Ragazzo peeked at his future bride in the stands as he trotted to the sideline, head coach Rube McCray shoved Ragazzo against a locker room wall and ripped him for '40s style showboating.
That's more than Ragazzo did after Monos once signed a recruit without watching film of the player.
``Once I got the film, I had made a mistake,'' Monos said. ``He just said, `Don't worry about it. That's the way it works out. Don't do it again.' I deserved to be reamed for what I did. But I knew I wouldn't do that again.''
Ragazzo's Division II national coach of the year plaque, for his 12-1 Shippensburg team, sits on the upright piano in Ragazzo's Blacksburg apartment, the only obvious nod to a football career that included a 6-4 1967 season at VMI - for which he was voted Virginia's coach of the year - and time in the Canadian Football League. The money there was less than he made mining coal, but the danger was less and working conditions better.
``Every year, there was a strike,'' Ragazzo said. ``I can still see people in line getting food [from the union]. My parents would not let us go and get free food. We had to grow our own food. We raised chickens and ate chicken three times a day. You'd sit out at night, guarding the chickens so people wouldn't steal 'em.''
Having survived that, it's little wonder Ragazzo can laugh on a disabled plane or dispense down-home advice to a college athlete. Beginning this summer, the one-time Aflex grade-school teacher can lecture his five grandchildren about life with tales that often edge out around a wad of chewing tobacco.
Ragazzo says he never thought about actually retiring until his daughter and son kept urging him to move closer to their Chapel Hill, N.C., homes.
``I said, 'OK, we'll try it,''' Ragazzo said.
A month later, an old coaching buddy called, offering him a job as head coach of a European-league football team in Hamburg, Germany.
``I said, `Coach, I just resigned here, and we're building a house,''' Ragazzo said. ```I've left Betty every year. I think this might be the straw that broke the camel's back. Let my try this retirement thing. If it doesn't work, I'll reconsider.'''
Betty shot him a look: Don't bet on it.
by CNB