Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 23, 1993 TAG: 9312220055
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RALPH BERRIER JR. STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
With both practices over and the room empty, father and son - head coach and assistant - were surprised to hear the room's only door open. They were more surprised to see Jessica Underwood - Dean's wife, Barry's mother - enter.
Dean's head churned with bad thoughts.
"Somebody's had a car wreck. Somebody's died."
Jessica brought bad news, but not what Dean expected to hear.
"The doctor called," she said. "We're going to the hospital right now. You've had a heart attack."
He was flabbergasted. Sure, he hadn't felt good in recent months and he was particularly sluggish over the weekend. He even suffered some chest pains while playing basketball at Virginia Tech with his buddies on Saturday, which prompted him to go to the doctor for some tests.
The heart attack wasn't the worst of it. More tests at Roanoke Memorial Hospital revealed he had blockages ranging from 50 percent to 95 percent in five arteries. Another surgeon checked the test results and said six arteries were blocked.
When doctors finally opened Dean Underwood's chest in December 1991 they performed seven bypasses. They took an artery out of his left leg and placed it in his chest. He was told then that never before had a septupal bypass been performed at RMH.
"They said it was a record," Underwood said.
\ Barry Underwood dragged himself to his parents' house in Blacksburg following a particularly grueling wrestling practice recently. He was rubbing his shoulders and the back of his neck. Jessica wondered if he had been run over by a dump track. He had.
Dean Underwood used his son to demonstrate a hold today.
"I'm going to be sore tomorrow," Barry told his mother.
Two years after doctors yanked his heart out of his chest, Dean Underwood is still coaching Christiansburg's wrestling team.
He took disability retirement from teaching auto mechanics following his surgery and now spends his days working for a financial services company. He didn't give up coaching. In fact, he was back on the bench just two months after his surgery.
His style has not changed since he first took the field as Christiansburg's football coach in 1974. In 17 years of coaching wrestling, Underwood has won eight New River District titles, including six in a row from 1985-90.
He is still a tree-trunk of a man not to be trifled with. He is a sight to behold at matches: bellowing, spit flying, limbs flailing.
"I've had parents ask me why I get so crazy during a match," he said. "I tell 'em, `Those 13 kids out there are mine. Only one them's yours. They're all mine.' "
That's probably a scary thought for a young man, judging by what the coach does to his real son during practice. A few years ago, it was even worse for Dean and Barry. Some school redistricting sent Barry to Blacksburg High School, where he wound up having to compete against his father's team.
"He used to tell me, `I wish you the best of luck, but I'm going to tell my kid everything I can to beat you,' " Barry Underwood recalled. "I'd say, `You tell him anything you want. I'm not going to lose.' "
Barry beat a Christiansburg wrestler in the NRD tournament on his way to winning the 167-pound championship in 1988.
The Underwoods are competitive even off the mat. That's why the joysticks on the family Nintendo game keep getting broken. That's why Barry can't stand to play Monopoly with his 21-year-old sister, Jennifer. She almost always wins.
"We had an Atari one time," Barry said. "It lasted a couple of weeks."
\ Ironically, that kind of intensity is probably good for Dean Underwood.
He feels better now than he's felt in years. He walks and runs at Virginia Tech as part of his rehabilitation, but there's no doubt that getting back into coaching has helped.
"It's a great stress release for him," said Barry. "Where else can you scream at the top of your lungs and get rid of stress?"
Just in coaching.
Dean Underwood played football and ran track at Christiansburg in the early 1960s. He played both offensive guard and middle linebacker at 150 pounds.
After attending the Auto and Diesel College in Nashville, he worked on the powder lines at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant before getting into teaching and coaching. He coached football at Christiansburg from 1974-84, then volunteered his help on the football staff at Blacksburg in 1987, Barry's last year.
Dean Underwood's oldest boy, Rusty, had gone to Christiansburg and played football and wrestled for his dad. Dean had taken over Christiansburg's wrestling program in 1976, even though he had never wrestled in school.
"He didn't know a half-nelson from Ricky Nelson when he started," said Buddy Shull, a Christiansburg assistant principal who was a couple grades behind Underwood in school and who later coached against him on the mats when he was at Radford.
"He's learned it all as he's gone along."
\ Dean Underwood has learned everything the hard way. That's the only way a sharecropper's boy knows.
The youngest of 10 children, Underwood grew up on a farm on Yellow Sulphur Road. The family was poor, but hard-working. Underwood put up hay, slopped hogs, drove horse plows. Some days, he missed school to work in the cornfields.
"He's the strongest man I've ever known," said Barry Underwood. "And he never lifted a weight in his life."
Growing up, Dean Underwood's family had little to show for its labors. He and his siblings got a couple pairs of pants, a couple of shirts and a pair of shoes each year. In the summer, the shoes were kicked off and the kids went around barefoot.
He never complained, although he was sometimes ashamed to bring his lunch to school, for he didn't have white bread like the other kids. He ate his sandwiches on his mother's homemade biscuits.
Underwood's family was close, loving and relatively unhealthy. His mother was left partially paralyzed by a stroke when he was 8. The fall of his senior year in high school, his father died of heart attack. Three of his brothers and two of his sisters have had bypass surgery. One brother died of a heart attack.
Underwood paid his way through school in Nashville by working as a welder at night. Those days were exhausting. When he finished school, he returned home with burns on his arms from where he had fallen asleep while welding.
"He has always worked," said Jessica Underwood. "He has always had to work."
After all he's been through, little things like a heart attack and a septupal bypass can't slow him down.
"I don't like to preach, but I tell the kids that there's nothing they've been through that I haven't been through," Underwood said. "That's why I want to work with kids. That's why I want to help them.
"Looking back, things were tough, but I wouldn't trade [those experiences] for anything else. When you really work for something, you appreciate it."
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