This is an opinion piece

Foley’s Lester Smith and Bud Pigott could have coached a worm in the belly of a bass to unhook itself and give the fish a bloody lip on the way out of its mouth.

Other coaches were flabbergasted how Smith, the Lions’ head coach, and Pigott, the longtime defensive oracle, won so many games with average talent and wished they could have deciphered their code.

“One coach told me, ‘If I’d have come close to what y’all have done, I’d have a monument to me in this town,’” Smith said.

RELATED: Read more on Lester Smith, Bud Pigott

Smith and Pigott now have one in their town, as the field at Ivan Jones Stadium is being named for them Friday. That’s the least the community can do for two men of such gigantic stature, integrity and coaching acumen. The multiplication of their virtues among their players will go on for generations.

Former fullback Lynn Gregson, who now lives in Arkansas, said he was asked a few years ago by a leader in his church to write something to express his gratitude at Thanksgiving.

“I started with Lester Smith,” said Gregson, who, seized by emotion, stopped halfway through reading it aloud and began to weep.

Gregson remembered fumbling an onside kick that could have cost Foley a win and Smith’s reaction afterward.

“Coach Smith never said, ‘Gregson, you moron, how could you do that?’” Gregson recalled. “After the game, he put his arm around me for a second and patted me on the shoulder with a look of, ‘It’s OK.’ I don’t think he even said anything, which made it even more powerful. Every person is motivated differently and coach Smith knew the right trigger to pull on each player.”

The trigger never included cursing from Smith or Pigott, both of whom are devout Christians.

“They wanted to win but they were more concerned about developing us and making us better human beings,” former quarterback Anthony Kaiser said. “To be in their presence, even today, it’s like I am still a student and they’re the coach. You want to behave yourself around them even now.”

Under Smith and Pigott, the specter and reputation of Foley’s program enrobed the Lions in glory but got draped over other teams like a jacket of wet briars.

“Your players just won’t quit,” late Satsuma coach Billy Coleman once told Pigott.

Smith and Pigott engendered loyalty and stoked a fierce desire to succeed among their players, who never wanted to disappoint their coaches.

Smith himself once played a game without shoulder pads because legendary East Mississippi Junior College coach Bull Sullivan asked him to. Smith said he never would have asked his players to do the same but, if he had, he probably would have had plenty of takers.

“I’d have gone without a helmet if he’d asked me to,” said former tight end and linebacker Rusty Pigott, the son of Bud Pigott.

That brand of loyalty rarely exists today among coaches, players and schools. Smith and Pigott were together 21 seasons in all over two eras. Subtract UMS-Wright’s Terry Curtis, who has been there 24 seasons and will soon be the state’s all-time winningest coach, Bayside Academy’s Phil Lazenby (16 years), Saraland’s Jeff Kelly (12 years) and Theodore’s Eric Collier (10 years) and all the other coaches in Mobile and Baldwin counties have been at their current schools an average of three years.

Smith and Pigott were a harmonious tandem — “I don’t ever recall them having any sort of cross word or an argument,” Rusty Pigott said — but their approaches could be vastly different. Smith was more effusive in his praise while Pigott was more measured.

“Coach Pigott had a presence,” Gregson said. “He was a big man. Coach Smith would say, ‘Great job!’ and coach Pigott would say, ‘That was pretty fair.’ If you got that out of him, that was good. You wanted to hear that from him.”

The players saw their coaches work endlessly and repaid them in kind.

“They put in the 12 or 14 hours a day to figure out how we’re going to get these scrawny boys to win,” Rusty Pigott said.

Their legendary film study got inside other teams’ playbooks so thoroughly — maybe down to how the other quarterback tied his shoelaces or the direction the other coach spit — Foley’s players were confident they would be in the right place at the right time and make the handful of crucial plays to win a game.

“We went in knowing we would win,” former offensive lineman Doug Lipscomb said. “We were generally one step ahead. We won a lot more games we should have lost than we lost games we should have won.”

Smith’s son Keith, who learned to operate a projector at age 4 and is now the head coach at Snook Christian, marveled at the way his father studied film.

“It was like watching a symphony,” he said. “He was always studying the game. He would carry a notepad around with him and write down ideas.”

But Lester Smith always thought showing his players how to do something was as good as telling them. He coaches his son’s Snook quarterbacks and still possesses an accurate arm.

“He’s 78 and he can still throw a tight spiral,” Keith Smith said. “He’s as good as he ever was teaching the quarterbacks.”

So good a rare interception of Smith at Foley’s practices was considered a badge of honor.

“Coach Smith would play quarterback against the first defense in 7-on-7 and he had a standing offer that whoever intercepted him would get a Coke,” Rusty Pigott said. “But no one ever did.”

“I’d tell him, ‘Why don’t you throw one up for grabs at least once?’” Bud Pigott said.

But Rusty Pigott finally made a one-handed, diving interception to earn the Coke.

“It was the proudest moment of my football life,” he said. “Nobody had done that. I was going to get that Coke and I didn’t have to pay for it. I wish I had kept the can.”

Off the field, Smith and Pigott often showed their players how much they cared about them.

Former defensive back Arties Roper said Smith shortened a practice to allow Roper and other players to attend a revival at Roper’s church.

“When we got to church that evening, the first people we see are coach Pigott and coach Smith,” Roper said. “This had nothing to do with football, it was them being role models and mentors and father figures.”

Kaiser said Smith helped him through trying times, including his mother’s mental illness and his sister’s suicide.

“If coach Smith knew something was wrong, he was at my house,” Kaiser said. “As you grew older, if he knew something was wrong, you’d get a two-page letter from him.”

And that is how Smith wants to be remembered, “as somebody who treated his players right and did it the right way, that we didn’t take any shortcuts,” he said. “Somebody who worked hard and lived right and was a good example. Somebody who realized football is a game, not life and death, it’s not a war. And someone who got the most out of the players.”

That’s why people love Lester Smith and Bud Pigott. It’s why their names are on a living, breathing field where good men were made.

Jimmy Wigfield is a correspondent for AL.com. He worked full-time at the Press-Register for 32 years, including 12 years as assistant sports editor. Email him at [email protected].