Luck or Something Like It by Kenny Rogers Read Free Book Online

The next thing I knew, I woke up on a bench in the dressing room, with a doctor telling me to lie still. To me that was a signal from on high that maybe football wasn’t my destiny. I called it quits. As I realized very quickly, there’s a big difference between being athletic, which I was, and being an athlete, which I wasn’t.
    I came up with a better Plan B: I would be a cheerleader. That way I got to be at every game, right next to Leah Ray, and never had to risk passing out on the field. I practiced hard but really paid more attention to Leah Ray than I did to the finer points of cheerleading. During our practice sessions, we worked up a cheer with a big ending, where I threw Leah Ray up in the air, then caught her. On the night we rolled this trick out for the football fans, my brother Lelan showed up to watch me cheer. I threw Leah Ray into the air as planned, turned to give a proud look at Lelan, and promptly dropped her on the ground. After that, she kept her distance from me, in every way.
     
    If you come from a family of eight kids, many of them older than you, then there are always people around to show the way. At sixteen, like all red-blooded American boys, I was itching to drive. My sister Geraldine’s husband, Eddie Houston, one of the best guys in the world and the rock of Geraldine’s life, agreed to teach me. Eddie had a stiff leg from childhood polio, but that never kept him from living his life. The first time we went out in traffic in his old Model T Ford, I turned too quickly, hopped a curb, and busted the right front tire, a disaster in those hard times. Eddie, with no money for a new tire, said, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix the thing.” Which is exactly what we did, with a tire-patching kit. To this day, when someone on the crew has an accident, I can hear Eddie’s voice saying “Don’t worry, we’ll fix the thing.”
    A few years down the road, I sent Eddie a couple of hundred bucks with a note attached. “Hey, Eddie, this is for that tire I busted when I was a kid.” He got a big kick out of that.
    As a complete aside—it’s a habit of mine—Eddie worked as an accountant for a box company called Gaylord Containers and said he had a gift for numbers. I was instantly impressed. One day, hanging with him at his office, he challenged me to give him some numbers to add in his head. I started reeling them off.
    “$6,241.”
    “Okay.” Eddie closed his eyes as if he were The Amazing Kreskin.
    “$4,911.”
    “Okay.”
    “$16,221.”
    “Okay.”
    And the last one,” I said, “is $18,000.”
    “Got it.” Short beat. “$62,535 is the total.”
    I was so amazed. It was so cool that he could just add a group of numbers in his head like that without even writing them down. Just to make sure, I re-added the numbers on his calculator while he was doing something else.
    He wasn’t even close.
    When I confronted him, he smiled and said, “I told you I had a gift. I never said it was a good gift.”
    That’s what I loved about him—an accountant with a sense of humor, and boy, are those hard to find. My first professional accountant/business manager, Michael Gesas, also had a droll sense of humor. As we became close friends, he and his wife, Helene, would come and visit me when I had my farm in Georgia, Beaver Dam Farms. He always had this dream of riding horses. Now there’s a great picture, an accountant cowboy from Beverly Hills on a horse. Far be it from me to deny him his dream. In the stable was a big black thoroughbred named Mikey. It was his choice to ride Mikey.
    It all started as planned. We mounted up like cowboys and hit the dusty trail. As we were riding, the path took us down by the creek. Michael had no sooner said, “I feel like John Wayne today,” when Mikey decided he had had enough. He headed to a sand bed alongside the creek and politely lay down on his side with Mike’s leg underneath him. We were all laughing so hard, we didn’t even realize he might have been