Virgil Starks

Starks stands with Chris Evans during Evans's Senior Day last Saturday.

I didn't know Virgil Starks. Not personally. Our paths crossed precisely once, when I was working in the Auburn English Center as part of my duties as a first-year Master's student/Graduate Teaching Assistant. Once a week the English Center staff got together for "practicum," in which we'd have some sort of presentation and/or discussion to help us with our English Center responsibilities. Because we saw a lot of athletes in the EC, one week Virgil Starks came by to speak to us for about 30 minutes or so on various issues related to athletes and academics.

I'll be perfectly honest: I don't recall a lot of the specifics of Mr. Starks' talk. The biggest point he wanted to impress upon us, if I remember correctly, was that he and the athletic department wanted to know ASAP when an athlete was getting into academic trouble, before it was too late for him and the rest of the academic support staff to help them. But if I don't remember the details of what Virgil Starks spoke about that day, I remember the style in which he spoke as vividly as anything. He spoke with energy. With forcefulness. With care. With an intensity that made it clear that when people--Tubby included--said that Starks cared and cared deeply about his athletes making the grade, it wasn't just a blast of "We want our athletes to graduate, honest we do" hot air. Oh, he cared.

Afterwards, I told my fellow GTAs that a guy like that could never have been named Joe Smith or Bob Jones. He was always going to have to be called something with zing, something with pep. That guy always had to have been Virgil Starks.

Remembering this morning what it was like to listen to him, it reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite books. I won't get into all the geeky details, but in this story a young woman goes though a period of insane, frantic activity--long walks at midnight, piano practice in the wee hours, an entire house cleaned in a day, etc.--only to be whisked away to another world prematurely because a magic spell has caused her to live her life much faster than anyone else.

I've known a few people like Virgil Starks, human supernovas who burst at the seams with energy, only to pass on long before any of us expect them to. This is how I think of them: not as people who didn't get as much life as they deserved, but as those who simply lived a full life in a lot less time than it takes the rest of us.

Godspeed, Mr. Starks. You'll be missed.