He was The Fury That Would Be

My friends call me Lenny. . . only I ain't got no friends.

A story in the Lifestyle section of the Tennessean yesterday caught up with the recent activities of Randall "Tex" Cobb, the former heavyweight fighter and longtime Nashville resident. Cobb was a lousy boxer. I have vivid memories from when I was a kid of his getting absolutely pummelled in a title fight by Larry Holmes. The remarkable thing is that Cobb never went down--he just kept coming back for more punishment round after round. Cobb's real fame, however, comes from the movies, most notably in his career-making role as bounty-hunter Leonard Smalls, "the lone biker of the apocalypse" who roared out of Hi McDunnough's nightmares in Raising Arizona (1987).

He was especially hard on the little things, the helpless and the gentle creatures.

I once had a brief encounter with Cobb. While living in Nashville, I got my hair cut in the chair next to Cobb, and we chatted for a minute about some of the Vandy theme t-shirts currently in circulation. (This represents by far my most meaningful "celebrity" sighting, edging out the time Reba MacIntyre shot a TV movie rape scene in the apartment upstairs from mine, and the time I saw Tom Cruise ordering a Hoagie.) He seemed like a pretty normal guy, as normal as you can expect a "warthog from hell" to be. So now comes news from the Tennessean that Cobb is currently on full scholarship to Temple University in Philadelphia, where he's completing a degree in comparative religions. How'd you like to be in that class? How'd you like to be teaching that class? Could you give the lone biker of the apocalypse a bad grade? He may not still sport that "Mama Didn't Love Me" tattoo, but come on. I wonder where he's going with this. College professor? Buddhist monk? Evangelical preacher? Preacher-slash-politician? Somebody get that man on the stump. He'd be an apt symbol for our era.

He was the Fury That Would Be.