COFFEETOWN HS SPORTS

Only an act of God can make legendary Coffeetown radio voice Max ‘The Axe’ Bell hold his tongue.

The Copperheads’ athletic program pays its announcer to share his thoughts with fire, passion and vinegar after all.

His wages are hardly life-changing.

But the job itself recently changed Bell’s life forever.

“It ain’t much in the bank,” Bell told me in our exclusive interview a year-and-a-half after a catastrophic stadium collapse left him clinically dead for 15 hours, and in a coma for weeks.

“But it’s like hittin’ the jackpot in my heart, son.”

Bell’s heart stopped behind his Coffeetown football radio microphone

A pivotal Coffeetown football game at Warburg High School should have ended Bell’s life on a bone-tingling November evening.

The Warburg Broncos’ stadium and foundation failed inspection for the third straight year, county records show in documents obtained by the Copperhead Courier.

Still, Bell climbed the depression-era pine-timber stands and press box ladder for his usual radio duties on 790 The Pylon.

Thankfully, he was the only one brave enough to give it a shot that night.

“I’m just cut from different stuff. Now I’m not sayin’ it’s good stuff. I’m just glad no one else got hurt.”

It takes a lot to deter Bell from a challenge, as anyone who’s spent five minutes in his sphere of influence can attest.

That raw radio voice and uncanny wit didn’t grow through a life dedicated to sports broadcasting, after all.

Bell’s resume makes him an anomaly among his peers.

His nickname – ‘The Axe’ – comes from the years he spent as a volunteer Copper County firefighter

“Back in my early days, I told em don’t worry about hookin’ up the hose,” Bell said.

“If I couldn’t figure it out swingin’ my axe through whatever barriers and barricades was in my way, then it just wasn’t meant to be figured out. It’s called fire-fightin’, not fire-wettin’. And bubba, I was showin’ up to fight.”

Bell rarely goes out on calls anymore.

His fire-fighting strategy landed him on disciplinary leave more times than he can count.

“Yeah, it was probably a lot,” Bell explained.

“My axe hit a couple critical pipes and electrical a few times in smoky situations. I did take out a couple cats. But that’s just occupational hazard. The jury never could be convinced of that at those hearings though. Mighta been different if they’d randomly picked more dog people.

Another time I got my axe stuck in a widow’s refrigerator when we showed up to check on her pacemaker.

That time was kinda the last straw, because there wasn’t even an active fire on the premises.”

Fire-fightin’ or not, Bell credits his time in the smoke for the gravel in his vocal cords and the salt in his soul

“Listen son, I seen some things between those licks in the flames. Sometimes you can hear the devil laughin’ at you, like he’s just darin’ ya to fight him on his own turf,” Bell said.

“I’m not sure where I’m goin’ with that, but I think about it a lot. And a lot of times I bring those memories with me to call the games for these boys. Because the devil is out there on the football field, too. It’s whoever ain’t wearin’ Coffeetown copper and rust, that’s who.”

Even the referees?

“Especially the referees,” Bell says without a hint of a grin and a slimy brown trickle of chaw juice forming at the corner of his lip.

If the devil is on the football field, Bell had an angel with him that night at the Coffeetown-Warburg game

Winds whipped up to 30 miles-per-hour throughout the evening, WKBR-TV meteorological records show.

Bell stuck with the call as the precarious pine beams creaked and moaned beneath his radio waves.

“If ya go back and listen to it, you can actually hear it start to splinter,” Bell said.

“I wasn’t gonna back off that call though. No way. There’s too many people out there couldn’t make it to the game. Too many people love Coffeetown football, you know? How are they supposed to know what happened if I don’t tell em myself?”

I respectfully asked Bell if he’d heard of the internet.

He spit in his plastic water bottle.

“Just words on a screen you mean? Where’s the heart and soul in that? Football is a game that makes you feel stuff. If the team is winnin’, I feel good. I feel about as good as I ever felt havin’ a girlfriend and almost as good as I felt havin’ a dog.

And when it feels bad, well I hurt. I feel like the devil’s taken my axe, and he’s just pressin it right here (rubbing his hand on his heart). Pressin and pressin.

Sometimes it’s the chili pups from the concession stand, and sometimes it’s the game. Sometimes it’s both I reckon. But if it’s the game, then the listeners gotta feel that, too. Just the way this deal works.”

Miraculously, Bell says he didn’t feel any pain when the press box collapsed along with Warburg Stadium’s empty home stands

There was one final play that decided whether or not the defending State Champion Coffeetown Copperheads would make the playoffs.

Just as Bell made his call, the radio signal cut out.

Literal radio silence.

“It’s weird, but the last thing I remember is Reptile (Henderson) cuttin’ that pass loose. Then I swear I felt like some strong, other-worldly hands was holdin’ me up and everything went black, just like our season.”

The pass fell incomplete, and Coffeetown’s hard-fought but underwhelming season came to an end.

“It was fitting,” Coffeetown Head Coach Cliff Swansea later told me.

“That wasn’t even the most unfortunate thing to fall that night. That incompletion doesn’t compare to how incomplete it would have felt to go through the playoffs without Max ‘The Axe’ Bell.”

(Coffeetown boosters read Swansea’s quote in the Saturday morning Copperhead Courier. They had moving signs in his yard by lunchtime.)

The entire Coffeetown football team spent the next several hours un-piling the rubble around Bell’s body

“I really gotta thank Paul and Danny over at One Nation Excavation,” Bell said, as he pointed to the hat on his head with a One Nation Excavation logo on it.

“They weren’t there to dig me out, never even met em. But ever since the accident I’ve kinda been a celebrity and they’ve been payin’ me to say it.”

Bell’s ‘celebrity’ status comes from his Lazarus Syndrome.

An actual medical diagnosis, it’s what happens when the body goes into cardiac arrest and then gets revived.

“It was cool meeting the Dateline crew, but I was bummed I didn’t actually get to meet Keith Morrison,” Bell said.

The Lazarus Syndrome record reportedly belongs to a woman named Velma Thomas, of Nitro, West Virginia.

Thomas ‘died’ for 17 hours before coming back to life.

Bell was under for 15, just two hours and one minute shy of beating the record.

“But really, I coulda been dead under those pines and concrete for longer than that woman out of West Virginia. There’s no tellin’.

I might actually have that Lazarus record, other than Jesus of course, but it just ain’t on the books.

Still kinda chaps my hide they won’t consider it, but hey. When you gotta move big boulders off your lifeless shoulders, be sure to call One Nation Excavation. They can’t move heaven, but they’ll move the earth.”

Bell says he doesn’t remember much from his time between this plane and the next

But he knows it “just wasn’t time to call it quits.”

“I feel like I’m just playing overtime of God’s football gameplan for my life,” Bell said.

“I mighta shoulda lost it there, but someone decided I still had some plays to run. Wish I coulda said the same for our boys that night. Should’ve tried to put more of a good word in when I was in heaven for a few minutes I guess. I ain’t thought of that till now. I’ve forgotten about a lot of it, to tell ya the truth.”

There is one sequence of visions that sticks with Bell after his brief encounter with the beyond, however.

And not surprisingly, it has a lot to do with that Friday night jackpot in his heart.

“I saw The Lord. I sure did. And it was a beautiful light, bright, melted my face off but it didn’t hurt. I just couldn’t stop laughing and singing songs I didn’t know I knew the words to, but realized I always knew ’em. Sometimes I try to remember ’em and hum the tunes, but it all sounds like ‘Simple Man.’

Anyhow, after I saw that and felt a love all through my entire soul and body that not even a Sunday mornin’ on Lake Stangley sittin’ on a cooler filled with largemouth can sniff, I had a little time to reflect,” Bell said, with tears in his eyes.

“And I thought about Donnie Chuggs and Ronnie Chuggs. Ashley Holt and his Grave Digger tattoo and his resiliency after that boar took him out at Root Creek. And I thought of Nacho Davis and his sister Dawn’Tonya, and even Bartrez. And I thought about how much I loved watchin’ Reptile Henderson throw a magnificent 45-yard post, even though he just got called for three straight unsportsmanlike penalties that backed us up to a 4th-down and 50. I thought about all those other teams with players that wish they were as cool as ours, and I just couldn’t help but feel grateful that I even got to know our boys and their coaches and their mamas at all.

It’s somethin’ special, it truly is. And even though I still hate Briarton because they’re dirty cheats – and I’m prayin’ for em, I am.

But I realized it’s all bigger than our team. This high school football and high school sports thing. It’s just a beautiful part of life in a way that college and pro ain’t, not that they’re bad, it’s just not as special in a lot of the ways that high school is.

I guess one way to put it is high school games and teams and towns still feel like magic and college and pro are startin’ to feel too much like a science.

And as long as I’m here playin’ this overtime game of life, I’m gonna try as hard as I can to make sure other people realize how special this one magical little part of our time on earth really is.

And if you got a little part of earth, or a big part of earth on your property givin’ you trouble, be sure to dial up One Nation Excavation. If you don’t dig em, their first dig’s free.”