Wilson: Best Melvin Nusser stories can't be told

I approached Melvin Nusser during the 30-minute interval of a Ram baseball doubleheader.

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“Did you get in trouble?” I asked Nusser, then Ram baseball coach, during his between-game meal.

“Nope,” he said before inhaling a chicken strip. “Did you?”

That was one of the smaller conversations I got to have with Nusser, who will retire as Portales High School principal at the end of the school year.

The Rams had, just days before, lost a doubleheader at Lovington in embarrassing fashion. Six errors. Home runs to end 10-run losses, and the bored Wildcats even trying to run Little League hidden ball tricks to pass the time.

I’ll never forget the postgame quote: “You’re not going to beat an over-40 slow-pitch women’s softball team making that many errors, let alone Lovington.” I probably didn’t punctuate it right; it should have been in smaller sentences, to emphasize how he paused after every biting word so I’d get it correct.

I found out later that Nusser did get in trouble for that one. Pulled into the principal’s office, to be precise. When asked to explain the quote, he said the quote was accurate. The principal pressed, and he gave another classic Melvin Nusser line: “If you’ve got an issue with my coaching, practice starts at 3. I’ll go make sure there’s a cap in your size.”

That’s what made Nusser’s professional advancement entertaining, too. Oh, you like rankling administration? Now you’re administration. I’m sure he got rankling from his successor, Greg Hill, who once declined to repeat what words made an umpire eject him but noted, “I’ve said worse things about better people.”

Laughs aside, Nusser helped make those who went through PHS better people. You can see it in Ram basketball games, where the video scoreboard shows a game broadcast put together by PHS students. The online course program the school developed under his time has made a tremendous difference in the lives of so many, and the attitude has always been service for those whose learning couldn’t fit an 8-to-3 schedule.

We had disagreements on news coverage or school policy, and he’d emphasize them with a blank stare when we talked the first time following publication of said disagreement. But if there was something kind he could say about a student or coworker, past or present, Nusser always stepped up to the plate.

And nobody rushed to my aid faster when, during a Portales-Lovington district game, I slipped on a bleacher and was parallel to the seats before gravity slammed me into them. I wasn’t seriously hurt, and we had a brief laugh when I said, “I’m just glad nobody saw that.”

Then there’s the other measure of how Nusser did his job — his offspring decided that’s what they’d do, too. His son, T.C., is a coach at Centennial High School in Las Cruces, and his son Dusty is running the Portales High baseball program. I’d love to see the coach-principal battles on that one.

As for other Melvin Nusser stories, I can’t tell the best ones.

I would get in trouble.

Kevin Wilson is a columnist for Clovis Media Inc. He can be contacted at 575-763-3431, ext. 318, or by email:[email protected]