Too bad all the members of the Marietta Rotary Club are too old to play college football. That's because if they were younger, most of them probably would have been ready to be recruited by new Georgia State University head Coach Bill Curry after his inspiring talk to the club on Wednesday.

Curry recounted how he got involved in football as a boy, and the lessons he gained from playing the sport and the lessons he tries to impart to the young men he now coaches.

Growing up in College Park, his goal was to pitch for the New York Yankees. But he went to a summer day camp at age 11 and was told he was going to play football, too.

"We were given pads and sent to the locker room, and the biggest problem I had was having to undress in front of the bigger boys," he said. "I was terrified."

The practices were hot, sweaty, bloody and full of screaming coaches.

"I hated every minute of it and thought it was a ridiculous sport and decided to quit," he said. "But I had a problem. My father said 'You didn't have to start playing football, but once you start playing, you've got to finish it. We don't quit things in this house.' So there I was, stuck."

Worse yet, he was assigned to play center.

"It was a fate worse than death," he said. "Short, fat, disinterested Bill Curry had to snap the ball to his best friend. It was the worst thing that could possibly have happened.

"But a few years later I was snapping the ball to (quarterback) Billy Lothridge at Georgia Tech. And a few years after that I learned to hike it to Joe Namath, and to Roger Staubach, then to Bart Starr, then to Johnny Unitas.

"The worst possible outcome to young Bill was the only possible way that I could have had a career that gave me so, so much. A career that forces me to this day to give back to the youth of America the great gift of the sport of football."

Curry's pro career took him to and NFL championship with the Green Bay Packers and a Super Bowl victory with the Baltimore Colts, and was followed by a head coaching career that began at Georgia Tech, then proceeded to Alabama and Kentucky and back to Georgia State, where he is the program's inaugural coach for a team that will begin play this fall.

"I think the citizens of the United States face an opportunity not unlike the building of a football team," he said. "But we are the only sport in which every player needs every teammate on every play just to survive."

And he emphasized that every player and every person is unique.

"You're unique, whoever you are," he said. "You have a gift that God gave you that you have the capacity to develop, to give to a cause greater than yourself, to develop in the context of having to listen and to relate to people who are different from you."

"The huddle has a place in America because each person brings a unique gift. If we could take 6.7 billion fingerprints, no two would be the same. There's no one like you. You are unique. God has given you something I don't have."

We need to develop our gifts such that we are willing to understand those who are different from us, he said.

"There was a time when you could live in a segregated society and it seemed like it kinda worked. No more," Curry said. "You can't be a racist and step in a football huddle anymore. You'll be exposed. Because when you step in that huddle, black America is there, white America is there. Conservative and liberal America is there. Muslims, Jews, atheists, agnostics, Christians, fundamentalists are all there. You don't step in the huddle and say 'I'm not playing with that guy because I don't like the way he thinks,' because the coach will say, 'Fine, we'll find somebody who will.'"

Curry spoke most highly of his old coach at Tech, the legendary Bobby Dodd.

"His initial speech to us was 'Men, if you're not a good football player it is not your fault. That's my fault, because I invited you here. I'm not going to run you off the way other schools do. I'm going to keep you here. It's going to be a disciplined environment. You'll have a good time. But if you cut class, you'll regret it the rest of your life."

Curry didn't think Dodd meant that, and decided he was better off sleeping late than going to an 8 a.m. chemistry class he hated.

"The next day I was ordered to report to Grant Field at 6 a.m. in my running gear," he said. "And I ran up and down those steps until I could not run another step. And I decided that chemistry at 8 a.m. was wonderful. The most important thing is that I never cut another class."

"I graduated from one of the toughest schools in world, because of a football coach who loved me too much to allow me to self-destruct. That's what can happen. It happens in scouting and at church and when the huddle comes together and people put aside their differences."

"Where else do you see people totally different in every walk of life laughing and hugging each other? Sometimes in church or at work, but if you see a good football team, it's always there. One-hundred percent of the time. The main reason the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl was that they were committed to each other."

Concluded Curry: "My college coach gave me a vision in life and I had no choice but to follow it. Young people today need us desperately. Scouting, church and football are more needed now than ever."

And thank God for coaches and men like Bill Curry.

Associate editor Bill Kinney's column runs on Tuesdays and Saturdays.