University of Southern Mississippi Athletics
Blogging the Plate with Kevin Coker
2/7/2006 12:00:00 AM | Baseball
Feb. 7, 2006
During the 2006 Southern Miss Baseball season, redshirt-senior catcher Kevin Coker will sit down with Southern Miss Media Relations Graduate Assistant Joe Trahan to give Golden Eagle fans his perspective on baseball and life as the season progresses.
February 8, 2006: Third blog entry with thoughts on the 2006 Southern Miss media day, the annual "shaving of the freshmen's heads" at the team's Super Bowl party, his haircut of choice: the shaved head, his take on Super Bowl XL and a little about baseball too.
Media day was fun. I've never been called in to do an interview during media day before, so that was cool. I got to go in there and talk, and talking is what I do best. I enjoyed it, and I got some laughs out of the media. I was being interviewed at the same time as Brian Dozier, and I was impressed at how good of a speaker he is as a freshman. You would think that as a freshman, he'd be chattering his teeth. But he did a good job in there.
We had our Super Bowl party the other night and it was a lot of fun. We got to shave the freshmen's' heads, which is a tradition that goes way back to the (former Southern Miss pitcher from 2000-2002) Shea Douglas days. It was before the Clint Stoy's (former Southern Miss outfielder from 2001-2002), the Charlie Rogers' (former Southern Miss pitcher from 1999-2002) and all those other guys that were here when I was a freshman. Shaving heads is like freshman initiation, and is as deep of hazing as we can go. We don't haze anybody, make anybody drink or do anything stupid. We just make the freshmen shave their heads, and it's a fun thing to do. You have guys like Brian Dozier, who is like the Abercrombie and Fitch boy: a good looking guy who wears his hair brushed to the side each day. But we have his hair now, and he doesn't have it anymore! Everybody goes through it. The process isn't forced, but you don't want to say "no", because if you did, then you would be acting like a jerk. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, but everybody does it because it's in good fun. Nobody has ever put up such a fight to where we had to tie them down. Everybody is voluntary with it.
I do mine every week. You get out of that shower, and your head is dry. I've had a shaved head every year for the past 10 years or so. I've always had one at some point in a year. My mom originally didn't like me to shave my head because she thought that I had pretty hair. I don't even remember what my hair looks like anymore. I have a buddy named Craig Newton, who plays baseball with the Cardinals organization and played college ball at Delta State, who I caught with in high school. We used to shave our heads together in high school, and it gave us a rougher look. Now, I'm not really a rough person, but this is how I do it, I like it and it's grown on me. My fiancé does not like my shaved head, and I will have hair on October 7 for our wedding day. I will definitely have hair, even if we have to get some of that horse shampoo if it will make it grow faster! She likes me to have hair. I also like to grow facial hair every now and then, like during the holidays, but she can't stand that either. So, I'm going to have to be a clean-cut, business type guy. But that's what my job's going to be anyway, and it's going to go with the territory. So though she doesn't like it, she isn't here right now. She doesn't mind while I'm playing baseball, but she knows that baseball is going to come to an end soon.
Watching the Super Bowl the other night at our party, I didn't care too much for either team. Everybody was pulling for Seattle, so naturally, I pulled for Pittsburgh. Everybody thought that Seattle was going to win, but Marc Maddox and I told everyone that there was no way that that was going to happen and that Pittsburgh was a guarantee to win. And we were right. Of course, I wouldn't be telling you that if it had gone the other way! It was a fun game. It had a slow start, but it finally began to get better as the game went on. At one point I looked up, and there was five minutes left in the second quarter, and I felt like we had just got there. That game went by fast the other night. There weren't a whole lot of points, and it mostly featured the defenses. I loved watching Troy Polamalu run all over the field. That guy is a freak! It was another Super Bowl, but it didn't have anything in comparison to two years ago when Tom Brady and the Patriots beat the Panthers, or four years ago when they did the same thing to the Rams. Those kind of games, regardless of who you're pulling for, are good games and leave you saying that that was one of the best Super Bowl's ever. Overall, it was a great game and I was pulling for Bill Cowher and was glad that he won.
I didn't watch the halftime show, but I did like the commercials. My favorite commercial was the one with the streaking sheep. It was so funny! But I didn't get it until five seconds after it was over! So I sat out there and laughed out loud by myself for a minute. We were talking about the best halftime show, and it's official: it wasn't Justin and Janet, and her "accident"; we thought that the best halftime show was when Aerosmith performed at Super Bowl XXXV when the Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants played. We though that it was the best halftime show ever. It was cool to see Nelly come out and rap to some rock music in that show as well. I didn't care for this halftime show, as I'm not a Rolling Stones kind of guy.
While we're talking about music, I'm going to keep Bon Jovi's "Blaze of Glory" as my entrance song this season. It's a song that's off the Young Guns II soundtrack. My old high school coach and I used to sit around sometimes and watch movies after I graduated, and we loved that movie with Billy The Kid coming out shooting everything. I don't know when I started to pick up on that song, but I got it my freshman year. Then I came out the Creed's "Higher" my second year, and I hit around .210. So since Creed didn't have any "hits" in it, I went back to Bon Jovi, and started to hit again. It's like they say, 'If it ain't broke, I ain't fixing it.' I am superstitious, and that is something that I'm superstitious about.
I think that your song is your personality. I think the best intro on the team is Trey Cuevas'. He comes out to Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight", and when the drums start to hit in that song, I get fired up. As a story about songs, last year we were playing South Florida and I was coming to bat, hitting in front of Marc Maddox. And by the way, hitting in front of Marc Maddox is the easiest thing in the world. It's easier than 2 + 2, because you get fastballs and all sorts of good things to hit because he's hitting behind you. So as I walked up, they played Marc's song: The Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane," and I ended up hitting a home run because of it! After I hit that home run, he looked at me and said, "You like that music, didn't you?" It was funny to hit a home run when they accidentally played his song instead of mine. Picking a song each year is a debate that everyone goes through. Marc's not going to tell you what he's coming out to until game day. He's going to be a surprise, and likes to narrow it down. Cliff is kind of the same way. For me, I've told everyone since day one that I'm coming out to the same thing this year.
