It was December 1977 and Mt. Juliet High principal Elzie Patton was in a bind.
The coach of the school’s brand-new wrestling team quit and the principal needed someone to fill the position ASAP. He turned to the chairman of the PE department who had been the Golden Bears line coach and special teams coach for five years.
“I knew absolutely nothing,” Jerry Kirby said Wednesday. “The only thing I knew about wrestling was when I went to the Tennessee State Fairgrounds and saw the Fabulous Fargo Brothers and Tojo Yamomoto wrestle.
“I came walking into school one morning and I signed in and (Patton) said, ‘Coach, I need to see you’. ‘Ah, Lord, what have I done now?’. He said, ‘I want you to be the head wrestling coach’. I said, ‘Mr. Patton, I don’t know anything about wrestling’. He said, ‘Yeah, but you look like a wrestling coach’. I said, ‘What if I don’t want it?’. He said, ‘You don’t have a choice. It’s yours. It’s going to pay you a $200 supplement’. ‘Boy, that’s great. That’s a lot of money’.”
It took him 26 years to get out of the job. He led numerous wrestlers to the state tournament. Zach Dailey went to the state finals in the late 1990s, winning the school’s first two championships. Kirby and his eventual successor, current coach Brad Mattingly, drove him to a national tournament in Pittsburgh where he also did well.
His success helped him to be honored for his lifetime service to the sport by the Tennessee Chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame during a ceremony last Saturday at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville.
There was a lot of learning on the job for a man who didn’t wrestle in high school. Kirby, an Antioch High graduate, played four years of football at Middle Tennessee State before coming to Mt. Juliet in 1973.
He also relied heavily on his wrestlers in the early years.
“Jeff Williams, his senior year, he pretty much coached the team,” Kirby said. “He was a state qualifier as a junior and he would get with me and say, ‘Coach, this is what we’re going to do in practice’, and he would show me moves. And then he’d say ‘I’m going to give you 20 minutes at the end of practice for conditioning’. I told him ‘That’s not enough. I need about 30’.”
He didn’t even have an assistant for 16 years.
“We bought our first wrestling mat from Lebanon High School for a hundred dollars,” Kirby said. “It was about a 30-by-30 mat and it was about as hard as this concrete floor I’m standing on now. But we did have a brand-new $3,000 dollar mat that was rolled up.”
But that brought about another problem.
“Mr. Patton said, ‘You’re going to have to find a place to practice’,” Kirby said. “I said ‘Where’s that going to be?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll leave that up to you’.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere in the old Mt. Juliet High School (now Mt. Juliet Middle) where we didn’t have wrestling practice. We had it in the gym at 6 o’clock in the morning one year and that was a mistake. Up in the balcony in the gym while basketball was trying to go on, and that didn’t work because basketball coaches didn’t like you being up there. We practiced on stage, in the cafeteria. And finally, general building trades did not get enough kids down in the addition added onto the building, so we were fortunate enough to get an actual place to wrestle. The only problem was we didn’t have any heat. None of the heaters worked. But they finally fixed them so we got some heat.”
There was plenty of heat at MBA last weekend as Kirby was inducted into the same hall former Lebanon High wrestler and coach Jeff Lester was inducted into in 2019.
“If anybody needed to cut weight they could have cut weight in there because the air conditioning wasn’t working very good,” Kirby said. “It was a great ceremony and it was a beautiful place. MBA’s a gorgeous place.
“My fingers are sore from responding to all the comments I’ve had on Facebook and Instagram and everything else. It’s just been overwhelming. I even went to get my tires rotated and a former student said ‘Mr. Kirby…congratulations’. I can’t stay away from them. It’s been overwhelming. I’m still in a state of shock. I never dreamed I would be in anybody’s hall of fame, especially a wrestling hall of fame where I knew absolutely zero about wrestling.”
Knowing nothing about the sport helped him get along with officials.
“Jack Faircloth was an official and he told me about five years into my coaching career, ‘Coach, you never come up to question a call or this and that’,” Kirby said. “I said, ‘Jack, I can’t question a call when I don’t know what’s going on’.”
Like many sports, wrestling is a tight-knit community of coaches, wrestlers and officials who may be rivals on the mat. But they’ll help one another as well. Kirby credited taking the Golden Bears to other schools around Nashville to practice.
“Basically, that’s where I learned a lot of stuff,” Kirby said. “All of them were very helpful. All the wrestlers would help my wrestlers to learn moves and different things. There’s probably not a wrestling book I didn’t buy or VCR (tape) I didn’t buy to watch and just try to pick up on stuff. Of course, I had my kids go to several camps. It was just a combination of everybody who helped me.
“I spent more time with wrestling going to seeding meetings, rules meetings, tournaments than I did with football. You would have a few coaches who would have some problems with each other. But for the most part, everyone was wonderful. It was just a great family. It was something I was proud to be a part of. Something I wouldn’t take anything in the world for the 26 years I was head coach.”
Kirby coached the Golden Bear lines and kickers for six head coaches through 2002 for 30 years. He turned the wrestling reins over to Mattingly in ’04, giving him 27 years in that sport. He retired from teaching in 2012 after 39 years in the gym, classroom or … dance studio. He couldn’t step down until he bailed another principal out of a personnel hole. Previous experience or qualifications not required. And he’d just had a knee replacement.
“My last two years, Mr. (Mel) Brown came and saw me and said, ‘Coach, I need a favor’. ‘What do you need?’ ‘I need you to teach dance’. ‘I said Mr. Brown, I can’t dance’. ‘Yeah..’ ”I know what’s going on. You’ve had some parents call you and complain because they’re not doing any dancing. They’re just walking over to PE classes’. ‘Right’. I had a bunch of the dance team people that were in my class and I told them if you can choreograph some dances, I’ll make sure everybody gets and A. And they did a wonderful job. They’d fight to see who was going to teach the dance.”
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