It.

I am sitting in John Croyle’s office on Wednesday and I have puzzled him with a question.“If you don’t have ‘It’, can you develop ‘It’?” I ask.He deposits his elbow on his desk as the elongated hand that used to smack quarterbacks buffs his chin. He glances up as a finger lifts for the answer, then he stops himself as if hunting for deeper truth. He pensively begins again:“It” occurs when you find what you were put on this earth to do. If you’ve got ‘It’ you can’t hide it. If you don’t have ‘It’ you can’t fake it,” he says. “You can have credentials, tools, and skins on the wall, but that might not matter a bit. I have a friend who is a surgeon. He was up for three days straight doing heart and lung transplants. After the third night we went over to his house for dinner. At dinner, he was nodding off. Then his buzzer went off and he had to go put a heart in a child.”Croyle leans up as his blue eyes come out of the shadows and into the light. “It,” he says, grinning.The biggest oak at the ranch (literally—he’s six-foot-six) that rescues endangered children seems to think the sapling he raised has got “It”, too. His son Brodie recently joined him at the Ranch as Associate Executive Director, foregoing a five-year career in the NFL and a short stint with a lumber company. “Pretty early on, I knew that Brodie was different. When he was two years old, he wanted us to take off the training wheels on his bike. He had fallen on a hill, got up, and asked us to take them off. Another time, we had a boy at the Ranch who was 6 when Brodie was 5. He didn’t have much. So Brodie goes and gets his G.I. Joe pajamas, his presents, his stuff and drops it at the little boy’s feet. That ‘It’ factor, Brodie had it,” recalls Croyle.But Croyle’s first child was not the cannon-armed quarterback who became Alabama’s career passing leader (that is, until A.J. McCarron eclipsed him in 2013). His first child was a daughter, Reagan. “I truly believe God gave us Reagan first, ‘cause I didn’t know how to love. Every man who has had a daughter has his heart broken within the first three minutes of her life,” says Croyle. “Four years later, my dad jumped in the air when I told him we were going to have a son.”John reflects on how raising Brodie was different than Reagan, how parenting must be tweaked from child to child. “I was harder on him because there is a shortage of men in this world. Brodie used to say to me, ‘You love Reagan more,’ and I’d reply ‘No, I love her different.’”Croyle remembers a father-son meeting with his callow seventeen-year-old after a misstep. “It wasn’t a life or death thing, but I asked Brodie to give me his word that it wouldn’t happen again. He said, ‘Dad, I can’t give you my word.’ But eventually we worked through it. Some things he had to learn the hard way.”The Bible says that the sins of the father can follow through three generations. If you flip that, perhaps the wisdom of the father can thread through even more. An ancestral historian, therefore, could literally trace the Croyle lineage of wisdom through many generations of oak-like men. John cites Jim Floyd, his maternal grandfather, as the best man he ever knew. “He was a farmer. He raised 7 children in Boaz, Alabama. I never saw him angry, never saw him raise his voice.”And John’s father?“Good man. 5’11” midget,” he says jokingly.And himself?“I’m not perfect. There are mistakes I made forty years ago that I don’t make now. I’ve got a whole new set of mistakes. People talk all the time about how to win ballgames. You win ballgames by cutting down on mistakes. The same applies to being a dad. Good fathers also know how to cut down on mistakes. I think about Isaiah 43:25 a lot, which says, ‘I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.’ That’s powerful stuff, man! He does it for his own sake!” he says as he leans back in his chair.Brodie?Writer William Zinsser says that the best gift a parent can bestow on a child is to free them to succeed or fail on their own terms. Croyle doesn’t profess to have been perfect parent, either. “Some things we did well, some things we did poorly. I’ll give you an example. Brodie and I were on a hunting trip several years ago. It was just me and him in a hotel room. I was trying to make a point and Brodie stopped me. He said something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘You wonder why I always bring someone home with me? It’s because you’re always trying to teach me something, instead of just being my dad.’ Boy, did that hurt!”Croyle props his feet up on his desk and clasps his hands behind his greying head, reflectively. “There were times when I should have shut up,” he laughs. “Parents shouldn’t fall into that trap. Every meeting does not need to be a teaching point. I learned from that. So Brodie and I started meeting at Cracker Barrel in Tuscaloosa every Friday before the games. Sometimes we’d talk about life, sometimes I’d bring the newspaper and we’d say nothin’,” Croyle says as he sits up and thwacks his hand on his desk.“We’d leave and I would tell him ‘good luck tomorrow’ and that’d be it.”With two grown children, John is now embracing the role of grandfather. He has become Jim Floyd to them, yet he hopes that Reagan and Brodie will be the Godliest persons that their children know. “Brodie is a tremendous father. His eighteen-month-old will start crying for his daddy—his daddy now—in the middle of the night, and Brodie will get up and go in there and sleep with him. That’s a good daddy.”I cannot leave an interview with John Croyle without asking him about Bear Bryant. It would be near sacrilege.Here is what he said:“He was a people reader. Those are the first words I think about when I think about him. I remember we were playing LSU one year in Tuscaloosa. Bert Jones was their quarterback. I had hit him three times, just as he was throwing the ball. After a series, I ran back over to the sideline and coach looked at me and said, ‘When you gon’ get him?’ And that was all it took. I got him! Oftentimes, he didn’t have to say much. We’d make a good play and would be runnin’ off the field, and he’d just pat you on the fanny and say ‘good job.’ He had the gift of reading people. Some people say that he was the best at taking average players and making them great. I say that he was the best at finding already motivated people. Bryant made me think I was better than I was. There were people I played against who were definitely more talented than me, but I thought I was better than them.”The road leading into Big Oak Girls’ Ranch in Springville, Alabama is called Shelley Drive. Croyle named the street after an unforgettable girl who never got the chance to come to the home. Twenty-five years ago, Croyle stood in front of a family court judge and asked for custody of one Shelley, who had been brutally raped by her father as her mother held her down. “I’ll take Shelley,” Croyle implored the judge. “If you send Shelley back to her parents, she’ll be dead within six months.”But the judge was noncompliant, citing the fact that Croyle operated a boys’ ranch, not a girls’ ranch. “Then we’ll take Shelley into our home,” Croyle begged. But the judge swung the gavel with unbelievable callosity, sending Shelley back home to her parents. John’s six-month prediction turned out to be wrong: Shelley was beaten to death by her father within six weeks of leaving that courtroom.John and his wife Tee made a promise never to let another girl slip through the cracks like Shelley had done. The Girls’ Ranch was founded in 1988 and since has brought hundreds of girls under its shade. Every day at both the Boys’ and Girls’ Ranch, Croyle sees the aftermath of lives affected by abuse, neglect, physical and sexual assault, cigarette burns, abandonment, rape, and even torture. These children’s labyrinthine life stories are surreal and shocking.Croyle, indeed, is like a walking book of quotations and stories. Spend five minutes with him and you’ll walk out of the meeting a better man. For instance, when I ask him, “What’s the best thing about your day?” I expect him to say something like “The moment I kiss my wife goodnight’ or perhaps ‘The moment I get to relax after a hard day’s work.” But he says something very interesting. He says:“The best thing about my day is when I look into the eyes of a boy or girl and tell them nothin’ is going to hurt you today.’”My meeting with Croyle is much more than a smattering of anecdotes and one-liners from his speeches. I feel like every answer to my questions allows me to see down into the roots of his soul. Before our interview, I walked around the facility with Big Oak Marketing Director Rhonda Hindman. I said to her “It’s amazing what God will do if you just trust him” as my awestruck eyes moved about the ceilings, the walls.Croyle leaves me with a thought, a little nougat of “It” to chew on as I drive back home that afternoon.He says: “There is this picture that I saw one time. It was of Jesus, Peter, and John. On the left, Peter is looking this way, and on the right, John is looking another way. But there in the middle, Jesus has his palms out and his head is thrown back and he’s laughing. That’s the God I want to know.” 78To learn more about or to support Big Oak Ranch, please visit www.bigoak.org