When Tragedy Strikes

When the home telephone of a college football coach rings late at night, it's often the kind of news he'd rather not hear. Usually, it means a player has been arrested, violated a rule or done something to anger someone. Such thoughts ran through the head of Mississippi State Coach Jackie Sherrill when he picked up the telephone at his home on the evening of August 5. The news was, indeed, bad. But this time, it was so bad it made an arrest or a rule violation seem small and insignificant. It was a player calling to tell Sherrill that senior running back Keffer McGee had drowned in a swimming pool. "When Greg Favors called me and said 'Keffer's in the hospital and he might not make it', my first thought was that Greg might be kidding. There's no way that his happened," Sherrill said. "Then I realized he wasn't kidding." When Sherrill immediately called the hospital, and ran up against a