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The time was November 1983, and I'd never heard of Spike Dykes. Amarillo High was scheduled to play Midland Lee in a Class 5A bi-district football game, and this fella Dykes was the head coach of Lee.
Only two years in the business, I tepidly called him that week for a few quotes to advance the game. With that kind of name, I envisioned a drill sergeant of a coach with a collar around his bull neck who ate sportswriters for breakfast.

"I tell you what, Amarillo High is stouter than 30 acres of onions. Larry Dippel can coach the spots off a leopard."

"Beilue? I used to know some people by that name in Winters near where I used to coach. Are you any kin?"

After I hung up, I kept thinking, 'who is this guy?' He's Spike Dykes, that's who he is. There's only one. God smashed the mold after Spike was born in 1938.

There will never be another one like him. There won't be another who started coaching at the smallest of Texas high schools, moved up and and down the ladder in a nomadic lifestyle, and finally landed the head job at a major college in the city he was born where he would coach the next 13 years and leave as Texas Tech's all-time winningest coach.

Well, actually it's possible, but not likely, to follow that career arc. But no one will do it like Spike, not with his self-deprecating homespun humor, his squeeze-your-neck style, his aw-shucks personality.
There were occasionally times when fans got exasperated at Spike, and every once in a great while, a media member might run afoul of him. But to paraphrase him, if you didn't like Spike, you didn't like chocolate ice cream.

If Tech played especially well, he would say, "We weren't Monsters of the Midway or anything like that, but we weren't bad." An intelligent player was "smarter than a tree full of owls." In a one-sided loss, "they beat us like a rented mule."

If he said this once, he said it 10 times, but when asked how big a particular game might be, say a game with Texas, he said, "Yeah, it's big, but I tell you what, Coahoma and White Deer was a big game in 1965 too." Dykes, once head coach at Coahoma, putting things in perspective.

Spike had the driest of wit, and that came out in my favorite deadpan story of Spike. It was 1988, his second full year as Tech head coach. The preseason Southwest Conference media tour was in Lubbock that August, and Spike was commenting on his starting lineups to the assembled horde.

"And at middle linebacker we got Dal Watson. Dal's from Odessa Permian, and was involved in two losing football games in his life until he got to LubbockThen, uh, we got him broke in pretty quick." Never cracked a smile.

He was genuine. It was no act for the public. William Taylor did not fit him. Spike fit the man like a well-worn glove.

They say if you want to know the measure of a man, see how he treats those who he doesn't need anything from. That was Spike. In the 1990s, he returned my calls without fail every Tuesday during football season.

I couldn't drive down for the weekly press conference each Monday, but he'd cover the same ground with me every Tuesday. Why? He doesn't need some peon from Amarillo. Why do it? He's busy. What did he have to gain?

I basically asked him that one time, and he just blew it off as no big deal. "It's just about being a good person," he said.

But Spike was more than Will Rogers with a coaching whistle. He was a good coach not a great one, but good. He came along at a time when Tech was a revolving door with four coaches in nine years.

He gave the Red Raiders stability, staying 13 years. He took a program to six bowl games that went to two bowl games the previous nine. His 1989 team finished 9-3 and No. 19 in the country. He won 82 games, and was named conference coach of the year three times.

He operated on a shoestring budget, tip money at Texas and Texas A&M. But somehow, with about half the talent, Spike's teams beat the Longhorns and Aggies six times each. For that, he should have a statue on campus.

His downfall, though, was losing to the teams he shouldn't, the North Texases of the world. That rollercoaster season of 1999 proved to be his last.

You could see it coming. I was genuinely torn, but I wrote a column during a Tech off-week that October that it was a shame Spike had to go out this way, that he deserved to ride off in the sunset, but the Grim Reaper was at the door and this was it.

The next game, typical Spike, Tech upset No. 5 A&M, 21-19. Spike wasn't happy with what I wrote, and I don't blame him. He told me so in no uncertain terms in a jubilant lockerroom afterward. A falling out, I guess you could say.

The last game of the season and the last of Spike's career was a home game against Oklahoma. It was announced right before the game that Spike was "retiring." No real shock.

But, again, typical Spike, using an unknown quarterback named Kliff Kingsbury, Tech stunned the heavily favored Sooners, 38-28. I've never seen Spike so happy.

I stayed until about the last writer was gone on purpose. I took off my sports editor's cap, and put on my human being one.

"Hey, as an alum," I said, extending my hand, "thanks for coaching my alma mater."
"Awww," he said, shaking it warmly. "Hey, you were good to us.
"
That's the way I want to remember Spike Dykes, who died Monday at age 79 from a heart attack. Good coach to the last second, and an even better man.

Jon Mark Beilue is an AGN Media columnist. He can be reached at jon.beilue@amarillo.com or 806-345-3318. Twitter: @jonmarkbeilue

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