Note to readers: I am always indebted to people who give me particularly good story ideas (And if you’ve got one for me, please e-mail me at Scott@ScottFowlerSports.com). This one came from one of the smartest, best people I know – my sister-in-law Kristin. She had seen Kojak do his thing while her husband Chip had done some teaching and coaching at Lincolnton. “Might make a good story for you,” she said offhandedly one day. Thanks to Kojak and the fine people of Lincolnton High, it certainly did. Copyright 2000 The Charlotte Observer All Rights Reserved Charlotte Observer (North Carolina) November 8, 2000 HEART OF THE TEAM By SCOTT FOWLER, Staff Writer LINCOLNTON, N.C. -- They are his boys, Kojak will tell you, and he loves them. That doesn't stop him from putting his hands on his hips, sticking a whistle in his mouth and ordering them to run up and down "Ol' Smoky" - the hill behind the Lincolnton football field. "Gonna run ya 'til your tongues fall off!" Kojak will say. "Gonna run ya on top of o-o-o-ol' Smoky!" They nod sweatily at Kojak in his "Coach" cap. They obey his whistle. It sounds like a typical player-coach relationship. It isn't. Kojak is a 44-year-old man who can't read or write and has difficulty carrying on a conversation. As a child, when a special school for kids with learning disabilities didn't work out, he gave up school and stayed home with his mother. Lincolnton (population 6,847) has embraced him for years. Kojak leads Christmas parades, directs the high school band, hangs out with the local firefighters and stars every autumn under the Friday-night lights as an unofficial assistant coach and cheerleader for the Lincolnton Wolves. For more than two decades, Kojak has been a fixture at Lincolnton High, a school 30 miles northwest of Charlotte where football dominates fall Friday nights. This Friday, when the Wolves play a first-round 2A playoff game at West Wilkes, Kojak will lead the team out onto the field in a full sprint. Then he will begin his rounds. His pockets are always stuffed with various items - toy rings, oatmeal cakes and dozens of lined sheets of notebook paper that contain what he calls his "plays." Kojak will sidle up to a player on the sideline and hold out a play. "Gonna put you in," he says. "Run this one!" The play may be a note a student wrote to him that afternoon, or a drawing of a football helmet. The player will thank Kojak and high-five him. "I've been here 20 years, mainly as an assistant," says Scott Cloninger, now Lincolnton's head football coach and a 1975 graduate of the high school. "I've seen him interact with the players hundreds of times. And I've never seen a single one of those kids be mean to him." "Kojak gives us some perspective on our high school years," one of the team’s offensive linemen says. "He shows us that not all people are the same. Some are special." Kojak is special, all right. And his story is more than the story of a popular high school football team latching onto a middle-aged man with quiet dignity and a generous soul. The team has to share Kojak with the town. Lincolnton wouldn't be the same without either one of them. Including Kojak Kojak's real name is Kenny Hamright, but a police officer once nicknamed him after the TV police detective because Kojak shared Telly Savalas' fondness for lollipops. Kojak has lived in Lincolnton all his life. Born with a number of mental and physical problems, Kojak didn't start walking until age 5. Now, you can't stop him. Perhaps that's why his 6-foot-1 frame carries only 150 pounds. Kojak walks everywhere, unless the sidewalks are too icy and his mother keeps him home. Then his bright eyes turn dull, and he peers through the window, watching the sidewalk for the first signs of thaw. Kojak lives in a duplex near the school, with his mother, sister and brother. Every weekday morning he puts on three to five shirts, sticks his plays in the back right pocket of his pants and walks to the high school. He can't tell time, so he plans his day around sunrise and sunset. He starts most days by helping direct school traffic, or else meeting teachers at their cars and carrying their supplies into school for them. Kojak feels best when he's busy. The school doesn't pay him, but he helps clean up after lunch every day and is the undisputed king of loading the band's equipment truck. His popularity cuts across race lines - Lincolnton High (enrollment 860) is 68 percent white, 15 percent African American and 15 percent Hispanic, and almost everyone seems to know and like him. Before football practice, Kojak usually walks downtown for awhile. Lincolnton has a true small-town downtown, dominated by the county courthouse and the dozens of family businesses on Main Street. The apple festival every fall draws thousands. Kojak stops by City Lunch most days - another local institution, where a meat-and-three-veggies plate costs $3. The Greer family has owned it for 43 years. "Kenny has been coming in here since I was a little girl," says Angela Greer, who manages City Lunch. "He eats here for free, but he wants to help, too - he'll go get ice for us in the back or help clean up. "He's a child at heart, and he loves for people to include him. I guess that's what the town mostly tries to do - include him." On many mornings, Kojak produces a dollar bill at the lunch counter and asks for four quarters worth of change. Then he puts the quarters one by one into the gumball machine that sells toy rings, and he puts those four rings in his pocket. Kojak will later give the rings to various ladies in town. He is prone to handing out two or three of them to bank tellers when he is depositing the firefighters' checks. Lincolnton's firefighters have kept up with Kojak for years, ever since he first was attracted by those sparkling trucks and began coming around the firehouse in the mid-1970s. The firefighters care for him closely. They arrange most of Kojak's medical and dental care. Many other townspeople have given him food or clothing over the years, and Lincoln Athletics keeps him in tennis shoes. The firefighters bought him a fancy bike once so he could get around faster, but that idea was abandoned after awhile. Kojak didn't care for stop signs. A small blue jar on the fire department's second floor serves as Kojak's bank. It currently holds $7, although Kojak never seems to completely run out of money in Lincolnton. The firefighters trust him implicitly. "He's watched my kids before at a fire," says Steve Valentine, a shift captain at the Lincolnton Fire Department and a friend of Kojak's for more than 20 years. "I had to get to a fire in a hurry and he was already there. I told him, 'Kojak, please watch them and don't let them get out of the truck.' And he didn't." A rocky beginning Kojak's mother, Lestina Poole, understands the degree of affection Lincolnton has for her child. "Everybody knows my son," she says matter-of-factly. His mother raised him while working full-time. When Kojak was close to 20, in the mid-1970s, he first started popping up at Lincolnton High - the next-door school he never had gotten to attend but had always been curious about. Don Peach, who had recently been hired as band director, was one of the first school officials to see him. Kojak had come to an evening band rehearsal and kept walking around the students, mumbling to himself and occasionally shouting, "Hidy-Ho!" to anyone in earshot. Peach did what many adults would have done. He called the police. And that's where this story would have ended in so many places in America. The skinny guy who acted sort of strange would have been barred from school property. Maybe he would have ended up in a big city somewhere, sleeping in a doorway and wandering raggedly through the streets. That's not what happened in Lincolnton. The police officers who answered the call knew Kojak. They told Peach that Kojak was harmless, and that it was up to the new band director whether he wanted Kojak to hang around band practice or not. "Let him stay," Peach said. For years, when the band came home late at night after a competition, Kojak would wait under a light pole with the students until every one of them got a ride home. Only then would Kojak walk home himself. A kinder place It is 25 years later now. Kojak and generations of high school kids in Lincolnton have long since adopted each other. Kojak worries about the football players and the band students, the teachers and coaches, when they don't show up at school. Doctors believe this is the most likely cause of his occasional stomach ulcers. There is a Stanford University developmental psychologist named William Damon who theorizes that morality can be hampered by the practice of "bounding" - limiting children to contact only with people like them. The opposite of bounding is "bridging" - exposing children to people of different backgrounds. Bridging, so Damon's theory goes, usually produces a child with better morals. The coaches and teachers at Lincolnton aren't developmental psychology experts. They have gone mostly by instinct. What their instincts have told them is that having Kojak around feels right, that he has made Lincolnton a slightly kinder place by his presence. He goes on every football road trip and once accompanied the band to Washington for a presidential inauguration. "He's a driving force for the kids to see that we are different and we need to appreciate our differences," Lincolnton principal Rhonda Hager says. "High school kids sometimes get a bad rap for only interacting with the popular kids. But these kids love Kojak." Nowhere is that love more apparent than on Friday nights at the Lincolnton High football stadium. He can't walk more than a couple of steps without someone wanting to talk to him or hug him. As an interview subject, Kojak is willing but uncomfortable. When asked a question by a stranger, he usually responds with a "You know." "What do you like most about Lincolnton?" "You know." "Why do you like helping out with the football team so much?" "You know." "How do people treat you here?" "You know." After a few days in Lincolnton listening to dozens of Kojak stories, you don't have to ask anymore. You know.