WEST POINT — The stories have blended into each other throughout the years.
That’s natural when you have worked for nearly 40 years in one city and have coached as many players — boys and girls and black and white — as Marion Bratton III.
But whether it has been softball (slow- and fast-pitch), football, basketball, or baseball, Bratton’s story winds back to one source: Coaches. They have been there to provide guidance, to offer rides home, to deliver lessons that didn’t sink in until later in life, to teach him how to drive a truck with a manual transmission, to teach him about the skills needed to excel in sports, and much, much more.
Bratton has filled similar roles as a mentor at Oak Hill Academy and Heritage Academy for the past 20-plus years. He has had success and has persevered through five surgeries, numerous nerves blocks and cortisone shots, and procedures in which fluid has been drained from various parts of his body. Through it all, Bratton has been a constant — a source of discipline that he acknowledges has mellowed with age, but one he hopes has helped set a standard for student-athletes for the rest of their lives.
“Baseball is something that is handed down,” Bratton said. “If you don’t hand it down right, it never will be right. You have to try to do it right. I am not saying I always did it right, but I have tried to do the best I could to explain the game and to get into their minds that you’re going to be a daddy one day, and you’re going to want your kid to be what I want you to be right now.”
The 2015 Oak Hill Academy baseball team followed Bratton’s instruction all the way to the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools Class AA title series. Silliman Institute (La.) swept Oak Hill Academy in the best-of-three series, but that didn’t diminish the significance of the journey because very few people thought the Raiders were going to get that far. That they did is a testament to the old-school teachings of Bratton and the work of assistant coaches Mitch Bohon and Brett Blaise, who played for Bratton and helped him impart the lessons they learned years earlier to a younger group.
For his accomplishments, Bratton is The Dispatch’s All-Area Baseball Coach of the Year.
“This was a fun year to go out on because nobody expected us to be there,” said Bratton, who will be 60 years old in September. “Our guys proved they could do it.”
Stepping down
Following the 16-9 season, Bratton quietly announced he was stepping down as Oak Hill Academy baseball coach so Bohon, who played for Bratton at Oak Hill Academy and went on to play baseball at East Mississippi Community College in Scooba and William Carey University in Hattiesburg, could take his place. Bratton went so far as to tell reporters he didn’t want to make a big deal about the change because it wasn’t about him.
But Bratton’s decision was a big deal because so many people had shaped him into a player who, as he said, “always played hard and always thought my size didn’t make no matter at all.”
Bratton used that same approach as a coach. Whether he was working in football, softball, or baseball, Bratton didn’t put up with any mess. While the intensity of the one-on-one talks by the outfield fence — or behind it — might have diminished through the years, Bratton adjusted his coaching style to suit his players.
“I have had to grow into the mellow part,” said Bratton, who will remain at Oak Hill Academy as its athletic director. “I always have been very competitive. Yeah, there probably was a time I overdid it (in terms of) maybe riding a kid. You’ve got to find yourself. I had done it recreationally — and we had some pretty tough ol’ boys when I first started out here.
“I tried to do most of my critiquing at practice so I didn’t make a butt out of myself at the ballgame.
As much as he acknowledges the changes he made, Bratton said his standards didn’t change.
“I had to take a different approach,” Bratton said. “Sometimes you have to ride a kid a little bit. A coach has to figure out what you have to do with that kid.”
Starting points
It’s difficult for Bratton to identify one coach who had the biggest influence on him. If he tries to narrow it down, his memories will begin with one man who taught him valuable lessons and will meld into another coach who reinforced the things he learned and ultimately set him on his path to become a coach, too.
Years later, the stories and names pour out of Bratton as he sits on a stool in the concession stand at Oak Hill Academy. The tales trace the evolution of West Point and its sports. They also relate the development of a man who has played an integral role in the maturation of countless boys and girls. Bratton hopes the impression his coaches left on him helped him set a standard that has kept their legacies alive.
“We had a lot of coaches that took a lot of time with a lot of kids when I was growing up,” said Bratton, the oldest of five kids. “If it wasn’t for all of the coaches and teachers in my life, I don’t know where I would be.”
Bratton credits coaches for filling the void in his life left by his alcoholic father, Marion II. He said quit drinking cold turkey when he was 40. Bratton also credits coaches for helping his mother, Martha, buy the family its first house — on 1053 Hibbler St. in West Point. Many of those same coaches and teachers just so happened to live on the street, which made getting into any kind of mischief nearly impossible.
The flip side, though, was he always had a ride home, even if it meant he was the last one to be dropped off.
From men like Spanky Bruce (his youth baseball coach), Jimmy Wood (his high school baseball coach who taught him how to drive a stick shift in a beat-up red and white Chevy truck), Travis Langford (his high school football coach), Walter “Bear” Newell (coached football and boys basketball at West Point High), Terry Brumley (coached in football), and Noel Wright (junior high basketball coach), Bratton learned the importance of detail and discipline and hard work and diligence.
One story relates all of those qualities. Bratton said he was playing youth baseball for Bruce and he forgot to tag up. His penalty was to run 50 laps around the field the next day at practice. Bratton and Bruce’s nephew, Mike, who also was on the team, arrived to the field early the next day, so Bratton started his running. He said he had completed 48 laps by the time Bruce arrived at the field from work.
Bratton thought coach Bruce would believe him if he did the 50 laps before practice and had a witness to vouch for him.
But when Mike said to Bruce, ‘Coach, Bratton has done 48. He is on 49 now.’ He said coach Bruce said, ‘I ain’t seen him run the first one.’ ”
Thus, the lesson was learned and Bratton said he never failed to tag up again. That was a valuable lesson because Bratton had great speed — his nickname was “White Lightning” — and he matured into a player who was trusted to steal bases without being given a sign.
“All of these coaches took the time to be there for us,” Bratton said. “Those guys instilled some things in me. I loved every one of them. Was I always their fair-haired child? No. If I messed up on the ball field, I got my butt chewed. I played for some tough old men, but I felt like if they didn’t get on my butt I wasn’t doing something right. If they didn’t talk to me, I felt bad. I didn’t mind them getting on me. I knew they knew I was out there if they got on my butt. If they didn’t say anything to me, I probably wasn’t getting the job done and I had to do something different.”
Time to coach
Bratton graduated from West Point High School in 1974 and went to play baseball at EMCC. After two years in Scooba, Bratton said he had a chance to continue his baseball career at Livingston State, which is known today as the University of West Alabama, but he felt it was time to get on with his life.
Ideally, Bratton would have jumped into work as a coach as a professional, but he said the job market was flooded with education majors. It also didn’t help that teachers didn’t make a lot of money, especially compared to other careers Bratton discovered, so he found a job at Babcock & Wilcox, a company that provides design, engineering, manufacturing, construction, and facilities management services to nuclear, renewable, fossil power, industrial, and government customers worldwide, in West Point.
While Bratton worked in a variety of roles (inventory specialist, supervisor over shipping and receiving crews) at the company, he also found time to get his start as a coach. Turns out the baseball team that Bratton’s brother, Mark, played on needed a coach, so he took over the 13- to 14-year-old youth league squad — the Indians, which were sponsored by B&W.
Thus began a journey in which Bratton coached nearly every girl and boy in West Point from the 1970s into the 1990s. Along the way, he worked with men like Greg Kaiser and Luther “Junior” Ray to help start the softball program in West Point. He also helped start the softball program at Oak Hill Academy.
While working full time and coaching in the park leagues, Bratton also continued to play semi-pro baseball and slow-pitch softball up until he was in his 40s.
With so much time spent on the field, it’s not surprising Bratton met his wife, Emily, at a sporting event. Bratton said he played football with Emily’s brothers and always liked her, but, for some reason, never got around to asking her out. One night, working as a coach, he said his friends said they were going to go to a club in Columbus following the game and asked him to come. Without a date and not wanting to go alone, Bratton asked Emily.
Thirty-eight years later, Bratton said his wife, who is an executive assistant at 4-County, has “kept him out of trouble” and has learned a lot about softball and baseball.
“It kind of got to where she kind of liked going to the ball fields,” Bratton said. “Now she knows what she is talking about. It has gotten to the point where she can out-coach me now, and she will tell me that. She has become a fan of the game. It has become a family affair.”
The Brattons have had two children — Allison Carter and Tyler Bratton, who played baseball at Mississippi State and is an assistant softball coach at MSU.
True to form, Bratton coached both of his kids in the West Point youth leagues. He continued to work at B&W until it came time to “roll the dice” and make a change due to the choices the company was making. One involved a decision to close the plant in West Point or the one in Paris, Texas. The plant in West Point survived, but Bratton received the blessing from his wife to pursue a job as a teacher and as a coach at Oak Hill Academy. Bratton went back to school to complete his degree and wound up becoming a fixture at the school for nearly the next 20 years. Aside from four years at Heritage Academy, Bratton has stayed busy with football, softball, and baseball for nearly all of that time.
“I have learned because of the coaches and my father in law and my wife that you can do just about anything you want to,” Bratton said.
Passing it on
Bratton smiles when he talks about his grand daughter, Catherine Tyler, who is 10, and how she is developing a taste for baseball and softball.
Bratton also smiles when he recalls how hard his daughter worked as a player and how his son excelled on and off the field for the Bulldogs.
But Bratton doesn’t need to smile when he tells one of his best stories. This one involves the time he received a visit from a former Oak Hill Academy player who he recalls being a little “high strung.” In giving the back-story, Bratton relates an incident the player had with one of his teammates. The incident forced the players to be separated in the dugout and ultimately proved to be too divisive for the team to overcome.
In fact, Bratton recalls telling the player that if he was head coach, there was no way he still would be on the team.
Years later, the same player with the “high-strung ways” sat in his home on a Sunday afternoon and told him he had finally figured out what Bratton was trying to tell him when he was a player.
“Those are moments that mean something to you,” Bratton said.
Moments like that are particularly special for a man who admits the relationship he had with his father “could have been a lot more.”
Through the years, though, Bratton came to realize his father was a lot tougher than he thought he was. He said his father continued to work after being diagnosed with liver cancer. He said his father never complained about his situation and never showed pain, even though he lived the last six months of his life with a tube coming out of his side.
While Marion Bratton II stayed sober in the last part of his life, his absence in his son’s life created a void that more than one man filled. Bratton III admits he has been “lucky” because so many people have helped him in so many ways. And while the pain from all of the injuries and surgeries played a role in his decision to leave coaching, Bratton is proud of the run he has had and hopes he was able to pass on some of the lessons he learned in the past 30-plus years.
“If I hadn’t gone through (his upbringing) and these other guys had not been there for me, where would I have been?” Bratton said.
All of the players who had Bratton as a coach could say the same thing.
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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