Bubba’s father fell into coaching in 1942 when the football and basketball coach at the all-Black Dunbar High School in Lufkin, Texas, was sent off to World War II. Coach Willie Ray Smith Sr. didn’t know a tackle from a halfback, but he needed a job. Most of the adult men in the area had been called to military service at the time. Coach Smith was shot in the leg trying to break up a heated argument between two brothers in Denton, Texas, back in 1934, so he couldn’t pass the physical requirements for military service.
