Chris Lockwood (1978-81) reflects on career at SIU

CARBONDALE, Ill. — Saluki Football alum Chris Lockwood (1978-81) recently retired from a highly successful business career in Colorado, specializing in transportation leasing and equipment rentals. One of his first destinations in retirement was Southern Illinois, where last weekend, he and his wife celebrated their 40th anniversary.

Lockwood was a two-time, first-team all-conference offensive tackle for SIU in 1980 and 1981. He recently reached out to head coach Nick Hill, who set up a facility tour last Friday and invited him to watch practice. Afterward, Lockwood spoke to the team, and several players stuck around to ask him about his life and career.

In our conversation with Lockwood, he reflected on meeting Gale Sayers, playing for Rey Dempsey, his successful playing career, meeting his wife, campus life at that time, the student referendum that saved football, Halloween, his career in business, and many more topics.

StrongDawgs conversation with Chris Lockwood

SD: Tell me about growing up in the Chicago area. Bears fan?

CL: Definitely a Bears fan, and I'm sure you know, at one point we had Gale Sayers here (at SIU) as athletic director. I still remember meeting him on my recruiting visit, and I could not talk, literally. I just could not talk. It was Gale Sayers.

I grew up in North Riverside, where we would have blocks of kids playing sports all day long. One of the kids down the street, you may remember his name, (NBA All-Star) Jeff Hornacek. I was a big kid and took a liking to football, and fortunately, I grew into my body and one thing led to another.

I grew up in a single-parent family. We moved in with my grandparents, eight people in a two-bedroom home. An older kid in town who was a role model for me was George Plasketes. He went to Ole Miss and wound up getting drafted by the Packers. He was a great guy, and anytime I came across him, was very encouraging.

SD: How did you end up at SIU?

CL: I loved it when I came here to visit, absolutely loved the school. I loved the atmosphere. I mean, this place was on fire. The coaches were great recruiters, hopped in a car and drove me around. I love the outdoors, and I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. I had no idea this was down here. So I was hooked from day one. I had a feeling I could probably play pretty quickly, because at that point, we were pretty thin in the offensive line.

SD: Your freshman year, you ended up starting in Game 9 versus Indiana State, and I read that afterward, they said they probably should have started you the whole season. Do you remember that?

CL: I do. And that's a great story. I came from a 1-8 program, not really knowing how to win and not much coaching other than block somebody or tackle somebody. I absolutely fell in love with the grind, the coaching and the technique.

We had some great guys, upperclassmen who mentored me, challenged me. I thought, why are they doing this? It was because they want to win. They don't really care who you are. They want to win. A lot of it was tough love, make no doubt about it. Guys like Byron Honore, John Schroeder and John Hall. Mike McArthur was a senior who I actually replaced. He was one of my biggest supporters. It was amazing. A great group of guys brought me along.

SD: Rey Dempsey described you as “an excellent technician.” What was it like to play for him?

CL: Coach Dempsey's one of a kind. Not having any experience with other college coaches, I just assumed they're all like Coach Dempsey, and that's really not true. He was a different type of guy. He was a psychologist and he used psychology. He was a taskmaster, very, very demanding. Decades later, he told us about the whip and the sugar. You can only whip a horse so much, and then a little bit of sugar to keep him going. Man, I remember the whipping. Don't really remember the sugar part of it, but a great coach who put together great staffs that were absolutely driven. I maybe didn’t love him every day at that time, but looking back on it, now I get it, now I appreciate it.

SD: By your junior and senior years, you were all-conference. Was it a smooth progression for you?

CL: No, because my sophomore year was not a good year. I do remember that. We had a change in (offensive line) coaches. Not that one was better than the other, they were just different. Rick Trickett came into town, and he made it clear that he was going to get the absolute most out of us, and just a different style of coaching. We had a great running game. We had great guys on the line with Darren Davis at center, Greg Fernandez and Steve Piha at guards. Mark Mielock, the strong tackle, in my opinion, was better than me. Obviously somebody must have felt I was worthy, so very honored. But Mielock was a great offensive tackle, so I'm not sure what the heck happened that I got all-conference.

Going into my senior year, I stayed down here in the summer and got a lot bigger, a lot stronger. I knew I was going to have a good year and just got after it. Everything just fell into place. There were some guys I went up against that played in the NFL. Overall, it was a great year, we had a great running game and just came together.

Lockwood was a two-time all-conference offensive tackle.

SD: Do you remember how much bigger you were by your senior year?

CL: I was about 235 when I got here, and right around the 270 range is what I played at my senior year. If you look at the media guides, they're not accurate. I mean, they used my freshman picture for the senior media guide. I think they had me at 250. Weight training back then is not what it is today, but 270 was a good weight for me at that time.

SD: They listed you as a quick tackle. Does that mean you played left tackle?

CL: So they gave it the name quick tackle instead of calling it weak tackle or weak-side tackle. They didn’t want to use the term weak. We flip-flopped our line depending on the formation, so I could either play the right side or the left side. The entire line would flip-flop. I would be on the quick side, also known as the split side, with no tight end.

SD: And the media guide description said you were really outstanding as a pass blocker.

CL: No, I was probably better as a run blocker. I was not as good as a pass blocker. That was probably my weakness. I hated it. I was a run the ball type guy, much preferred to run it. By the time I was a senior, I was good at pass blocking, but not fantastic. Back then, techniques were a whole lot different. We couldn't even extend our arms until, I think, 1980.

SD: You did a lot of winning, though, 25 wins over four seasons, three winning seasons, but there wasn’t a postseason opportunity at that time.

CL: We were Division I, but there was no I-AA, it was all Division I. In fact, 1981 was a pivotal year, and I hope it's not forgotten. That was the last year at SIU of a Division I team. In 1982, they went I-AA and were not eligible for the playoffs. In 1983, they're eligible. So ’81 was pivotal.

The other key thing about that year was we were picked to be one of the worst teams in all Division I by a certain magazine. Nobody expected us to win. We were coming off a bad season, didn't have momentum, we lost a lot of starters, but we wound up winning seven games that year. It was also a pivotal year because there was a student referendum to increase the student athletic fees, and if that did not pass, probably no more football. In fact, a couple years after I left, Wichita State dropped their program, West Texas State dropped their program. Drake dropped their program. So it was a tough time, but they passed a referendum, and actually looking back, if Fred Huff's numbers were accurate, we had the best attendance in 1981 of any year in the history of Saluki Football. In fact, we sold out the Drake game in November, second-to-last game of the season, during hunting season. So I don't buy the whole hunting season, excuse (for lack of attendance).

The first three games in 1981, we lived up to the prediction, we were 0-3. In the first game, we fumbled six times, but we lost the two other games tight, and then we had to go to Tulsa, which was like a Big Eight-type team in our conference, and we went out there and beat them. Then we rattled off six in a row, but we got beat up pretty badly. We lost a lot of guys, and then we played Drake here, which was basically the championship, and we just didn't have enough gas left and came up a little bit short, but that one filled the stadium. It was amazing.

Lockwood with Coach Hill

SD: What was campus life like at that time?

CL: The school had grown to 23,000, and it was tough for some people to find housing. The dorms were so full, some rooms they had to put three to a room. I visited some Big Eight or Big Ten schools, but the enthusiasm and energy here, and the attitude was fun. Look, every school was a party school. This place had the well-deserved reputation, but it’s just because we did it better, and it was a lot more fun. There was just this live-and-let-live fun attitude, and you could find whatever you wanted to on The Strip. A couple times a year, it would get so crowded that they actually put up barricades and had to divert traffic around because there were so many people down there.

Halloween, of course, was legendary. I only got to experience one, my freshman year. It was Homecoming weekend against Northern Illinois and Bob Dylan was playing the arena, and rugby had their big tournament. I wasn't the most naive 18-year-old in the world, but, man, that was quite an experience. Not surprisingly, every year after that, we played out of town and stayed the night and flew back on Sunday morning to see them cleaning up.

It was just vibrant. Walking through campus, you had to jockey your way down the sidewalk to get to class. People were here to learn. We had some great academic programs. Accounting and finance was off the charts, communications put out Mike Reis. I originally said I wanted to go pre-law, but instead I went into administrative sciences, which was the data-driven end of management, within the business department.

Lockwood visited with SIU's offensive line room.

SD: When you spoke to the team, you talked about how football prepared you for your business career. Can you elaborate on your successful career after SIU?

CL: It was 1982 and unemployment was around 10 to 12 percent and interest rates were in the high teens. It was tough out there.

I had friends that got degrees and had to go into the trades. Not that that's a bad thing, but it wasn't their aspiration. I was fortunate. I wound up in an entry-level program in equipment leasing, transportation equipment. I had a great mentor for a manager that brought me along.

The lessons from football, I could take any situation in business and relate it to something with football. Part of that learning process was being coachable, having a plan, executing it, immediate feedback, the grind, right? I progressed from an operations entry-level role into a sales role into a management role fairly young. I had no business becoming a manager, but quite honestly, I ran it like a team, had the right players in the right roles. I had to earn respect, they had to understand where we were going, how we were getting there, had to be sincere about it, and developed a reputation for having good, tight, high-performing crews with low turnover.

Throughout my career, I've always wound up doing startups or turnarounds, and both of them just relate so well to football. You have to put a team together, or you have to come in and take over a team that's not performing well, make some tough choices and get the thing back on track. I loved hiring athletes. They understood it. Coach Dempsey used to say, these four years go by so fast, it’ll make your head spin. Here I am 44 years later, and I still can't believe I'm retired. Things went by so fast.

Pam & Chris Lockwood

SD: You met your wife at SIU?

CL: Yes, she lived in Schneider Hall, and when I came in as a freshman, if I needed a haircut, there was a bulletin board with a phone number, so I had this girl cutting my hair, maybe twice a year. And she said she wasn't coming back, so I happened to be in the cafeteria at Grinnell Hall, talking to our quarterback's girlfriend. She said, “my roommate cuts hair,” and that’s how we met. My wife, Pam (Karstens), has four brothers and learned by cutting their hair. One thing led to another, got married and celebrate our 40th anniversary this Sunday.

SD: How does it feel to come back 40 years later and visit campus?

CL: It feels great to be a Saluki. If you meet a Saluki grad, especially from our generation, there's just an attachment to this place.

My wife and I talked about it this morning — there's an aroma in southern Illinois, the trees and whatever is taking place. It's fantastic. I'm a proud Saluki and I wear the gear. I just I wish people can get the word out, get people down here to see this place. I know the Chancellor is working hard to get the enrollment back to where it needs to be. I see they're gonna close the strip and do Halloween, and hopefully it goes safely without incident, because I do believe things like that can help bring people down here. We need to get kids from other schools for that weekend so they can transfer here. It's a tremendous place. And I think if people come down here and experience and see it, it'll help with the recruiting efforts. I love coming back. It just brings back emotions and memories of hard knocks and the friendships to this day after all these years, that we still have. A pitcher of beer, we can go on for hours.

---

If you are a Saluki Football alum who would like to visit for a facility tour or attend practice, please email tomweber@siu.edu