Kristofferson

 

Kristofferson didn’t seem to know how to do anything but spend himself. He was just 5-foot-10 or so and 165 pounds, but at Pomona he made the varsity as an end and a linebacker — while he also commanded his ROTC battalion, made Phi Beta Kappa studying literature and won prizes in a short story contest sponsored by the Atlantic. In his summers, he beefed up for football on brutal construction gigs such as dredging on Wake Island in the Pacific and working for a railroad in Alaska as a firefighter. When he was pushed to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, Kristofferson sought a recommendation from a philosophy professor, who talked to the football coach, Jesse Cone. That resulted in the following exchange, as memorialized by Pomona’s College magazine.

“Well, Kris really isn’t very tall,” Cone replied. “And he isn’t really very strong. And really, he’s not very fast.” The coach thought for another moment and added, “Kris is a football player by the will of Kris Kristofferson, not by the will of God.”

“I imagined myself into a pretty full life,” Kristofferson told NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 1999. “I was certainly not equipped, by God, to be a football player, but I got to be one. And I got to be a Ranger and a paratrooper and a helicopter pilot, you know, and a boxer and a lot of things that I don’t think I was built to do. I just imagined ’em.”

... mopping floors and smelling oil after rejecting his Army commission, Kristofferson was in debt, going through an early divorce and had basically lost everything. Yet “I never felt like I was failing,” Kristofferson told Hawke years later. “What is even more difficult than failure is when you are perceived as a ‘success’ and you are failing,” he added.

- from WaPo article by Sally Jenkins