A bullet fails to halt team

~ Eight months after being gunned down in his office, a coach leads his team into the Texas state playoffs.

CANTON, Texas -- Eight months after being gunned down inside his office by an angry parent, Canton High School football coach Gary Joe Kinne is making history in the temporary space he now occupies.

The school is building him a new office, equipped with the security and door locks that might have slowed Jeff Doyal Robertson from barging inside April 7 and firing a single shot to Kinne's abdomen, leaving him critically wounded and bringing tumult to this two-intersection East Texas town.

In the meantime, Kinne is focusing on his team's unprecedented playoff run -- including Canton's upset of defending Class 3A state champion Gilmer last week.

Now 11-1, Canton was to play the first third-round playoff game in school history Friday against Emory's Rains High School in Mesquite -- the Dallas suburb where Kinne last coached before moving to Canton in 2003.

"I have instant name recognition," Kinne said. "It would be nice to do something on the field to back that up, otherwise I'll just be remembered as the coach who got shot. Maybe this can be a better story."

Kinne's temporary office is sparsely furnished. There's a baseball bat in one corner, a box on the floor and an 8-by-11 framed photo of his highly recruited son, quarterback G.J. Kinne, standing with Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer and a cache of trophies in a portrait aimed to prod G.J. toward the Volunteers in 2007.

Trophies on Kinne's desk take up the most space. He cleared room for another last week after the defeat of Gilmer, among the biggest upsets in Texas' glutted high school playoffs.

Kinne's story so far has read like a made-for-TV script:

A coach takes over a historically irrelevant football team in a small town about 60 miles east of Dallas, and decides to start his hotshot son at quarterback on the varsity his freshman year. Then he's gunned down at school by another player's father known for his temper and an arm tattoo of cartoon character Yosemite Sam brandishing two guns and the words "Born to Raise Hell."

Authorities say Robertson, whose attorneys concede he was the gunman, then fled to nearby woods and slashed his wrists before being arrested.

The bullet destroyed 80 percent of Kinne's liver, but the 38-year-old coach who once starred as a linebacker at Baylor recovered in time for Canton's first practice in August. Weak and nearly 90 pounds lighter, Kinne led practice from a golf cart the first two months but was pushed by his wife, Laurie, to resign for the season after a liver infection hospitalized him the morning before Canton's third game against Sabine.

A midseason return

Kinne likes the last act best: He returned to the team by midseason, ditched the golf cart, packed on about 35 pounds, watched colleges like Alabama and Tennessee jostle for his son's attention, coached Canton to its first district championship in 41 years and led the football team to its best season in school history.

"I knew I was going to pull through," Kinne said. "There would be days where it would be frustrating, where I'd think, 'Why did this happen? Why me?' That self pity. You wonder how much you can take.

"It was never in my mind that I wasn't going to make it. Part of what we're going through as a team has brought us so much closer together. It's brought our kids closer, it's brought our families closer, it's brought G.J. and I closer and it's brought me closer to God."