John King has plopped into the front seat of Longview’s pregame bus ride exactly 293 times as the Lobos head coach. The Week 5 game against Rockwall last fall was the first time he ever filmed it. 

When you’ve done something every Friday night for 26 years like King has, it becomes a ritual. Normally, he stares blankly out the window without seeing anything, instead envisioning what will happen when the bus stops — his Lobos file off, then knock the snot out of a team they’re tougher than. But tonight, he took his phone out and filmed his view, the Longview campus getting smaller as the bus rolled on with a police escort leading the Lobos off to war. 

And if you listen close enough, you hear a faint sniffling behind the lens. Is that… surely it can’t be… is John King crying?   

“He comes off as this old, grumpy guy that’s a hardass,” his son, Haynes, said. “At the end of the day, he does have a couple of soft spots. I’ve got to throw that out there, to make sure everybody knows he’s not as tough as he portrays.”

Turns out, Lobo football is one of those soft spots. 

We don’t know which of his 242 career wins did it. But somewhere along the way, King became so intertwined with Longview football that it’s impossible to imagine one existing without the other. The town and the coach had to reckon with that possibility when King was diagnosed with mouth cancer on August 21, 2025. When King coached the season opener against Lufkin before his surgery, he didn’t know when his next home game would be. Or if he’d ever get one again. 

“Hell, you don’t know if you’re gonna live or die,” King said. “That’s the first thing that went through my mind. I wanted to live. And I was gonna do whatever it took.”

Do not let the fact that King technically only missed three games convince you that mouth cancer simply goes away with a quick procedure, almost like removing a mole. It requires a fight, and even the victor carries scars. The surgeons cut half of King’s tongue off and ripped 35 lymph nodes out of his neck. But the real scar is when his brain flashes a quick joke that his mouth can’t say as well as it used to. That’s when he’s reminded of his mortality. And that knowledge might be the biggest change in King’s life post-cancer, because his entire journey before it was defined by his sense of invincibility. It’s why his team walked into every game knowing they would win, even if the odds said they should lose. It’s also why King continued chewing tobacco even though the longer he did it, the more his cancer odds went up.

“Life is about the choices you make. I made some bad choices in my life to put me in that situation,” King said. “I had to own up to it. I’d been warned. But, being bull-headed, sometimes you think you’re invincible. I made bad choices, and it cost me. Luckily for me, it didn’t cost me my life. I still have a chance to learn from it.” 

He credits the reason he’s still here to the Good Lord and his wife, Jodie. During the extended hospital stay, she morphed into his coach. There’s a bit of a Mandela effect surrounding King - he’s so synonymous with Longview that people assume he’s always been there. He and Jodie actually met when they were both coaches at West Ouachita High School in Louisiana. She still calls him ‘King,’ because back then there were two other Johns on the staff. That, and if she ever says, ‘John’ around Longview, people go, ‘Who’s that?’ Coach King is his name as much as his title. 

In many ways, Jodie still operates like a coach herself. King says that, for all his notoriety as a drill sergeant, Jodie was the disciplinarian for their two kids at home. In that hospital room, she had her husband standing at attention. 

“You’ve told everybody all these times to get up, Lobo up, and go,” Jodie said. “It’s time for you to do the same thing. Your time is not over. There are a lot of people who need you back.”

King’s cancer battle was the definition of ‘Lobo Up.’ Longview has had its fair share of gifted athletes. But, by and large, they aren’t a team that wins the game when they step off the bus. They do, however, get after your ass for 48 minutes, lining up in the I-formation and running the football down your throat over and over. You will quit before they do, because they are playing for something bigger than you are. And they’re reminded of it every time the band goes on, the ‘LOBOS’ chants break out, and the hairs on the backs of their necks stand up. That’ll help you find whatever gas you need left in the tank. 

Jodie was right to tell King how many Lobos needed him back. While he was hospitalized, she’d sometimes drive to the school in his old white truck to pick up something from his office. He practically lives there, the first guy in and the last guy out, seven days a week and 365 days a year for nearly three decades. But before she’d get out, she’d idle with the truck on for a minute. It was only when she saw how people reacted to King’s white truck in the parking lot, their eyes lighting up, seeming to say, ‘Is King here?’ that she realized her husband’s impact. 

“The kids, football staff, even coaches from other sports, they’d come on down those steps at the Lobo Den and see the truck,” Jodie said. “It’s like everybody kind of stepped to it a little bit quicker and made sure they were doing right.” 

Except it’s only a half-truth to say King was motivated by how much his team needed him. He always tells his players that this program is bigger than one person, most of all himself. Longview still managed a second-round playoff appearance in 2025 with King in the press box for the final eight games, a remarkable coaching job given the circumstances by interim Oscar Wilson and the rest of King’s staff. 

‘You want to know the real reason I came back so fast?’ King asked his team in the pregame locker room. One morning in the middle of his hospital stay, he’d woken up at 5:30 a.m. with an overwhelming sensation. He needed to pee.  

“It was one of the first days I could get up and go to the bathroom on my own, which was a major win for the King family,” King said.

Unable to sleep, he looked out the window and saw the Longview school buses cruising down Highway 80. If he could’ve teleported from his bed to the buses, he would’ve. He missed the kids and the coaches. Most of all, he missed being part of a team. Through the darkest days when he had to relearn how to talk and eat, this Rockwall game was the light at the end of the tunnel.

“They didn’t understand how much I needed them,” King said. “I needed them more than they needed me.” 

That’s why, when the doctor tried to tell King he could ease back into his normal routine, Jodie quickly cut him off.

“No, no, no,” Jodie said. “You have to actually tell him what he can do.”

“He knows what ease means,” the doctor said.

“Ease means he’ll drive his truck right up to the field and coach every day,” Jodie said.

“That’s not what ease means!” the doctor said.

To no one’s surprise, ease is not a word in King’s dictionary. Jodie would drop him off at school for morning meetings, pick him up for radiation treatments, then take him right back to the fieldhouse. King has dedicated his life to coaching the Lobos, and, as a result, so has his entire family. The reason so many coaches’ kids like Haynes become quarterbacks is that the position’s mental demands require them to be connected at the hip to the head coach. There are countless leadership council meetings and film sessions. In other words, it’s the quickest path to spending quality time with your father. 

The King family knew that, for John, this was not just some job at some place until he could move up the ladder. So they convinced themselves the Lobos were a family. But they didn’t really know for sure until that bond was tested by cancer, and the Longview trainers like Deirdre Scotter and Jo Carrol Cox would stay with King 24/7 while Jodie traveled to Haynes’s games at Georgia Tech. 

“We kind of put our whole life in the hands of this community, this town, and, of course, the team,” Jodie said. “To see how many people it actually mattered to, it just reassured me that we made the right decision to look at this whole area as our extended family.”  

In the early days after the surgery, Jodie would sit with King in the pressbox as he watched practice. The assistant coaches didn’t even know King was there - he couldn’t talk at this point - but his presence was still felt. After all, his thumbs worked. 

Down at the field, Wilson, the interim coach, felt his phone buzz. It was a text from John King.

“Tell those guys to get off their knees.”

Wilson whipped his head around. Sure enough, some Longview players had popped their helmets off and were resting by the water cooler. How the heck did he know that? Had the old coach sensed someone slacking off from his hospital bed? It always seemed like Coach King was there, even on those days when he wasn’t. For the three games he missed, Wilson put King’s signature straw sun hat on his assigned seat at the front of the bus. That hat was the last thing each player saw before they got off the bus. They couldn’t possibly forget who they were playing for. When they took the field, they looked up in the stands to see hundreds of people in shirts with Coach King’s silhouette on them. 

“When we went to play opposing teams, those coaches had brought those shirts and worn them in pregame warm-ups,” Wilson said. “That showed me the type of impression he had made on the world. Not just here in Longview, but everywhere we went, they wore those shirts. They were there with him, fighting that battle.”

But King’s bout with cancer was not just an East Texas story. During the season, Jodie would stay at King’s side in the hospital throughout the week, then fly to wherever Georgia Tech was playing to support Haynes in his senior season. She took trips from North Carolina to Colorado to Massachusetts, there for every step of the way for the best season of Haynes’ career, in which he earned the Earl Campbell Tyler Rose Award as the nation’s most outstanding offensive player with a Texas tie. And the more Haynes became a national story, the more his dad’s fight did, too. She’s convinced it helped save his life. 

“I have run into hundreds of people all over the United States, through our kids’ sports, who have prayed for King to get well,” Jodie said. “It definitely worked. There’s no way we would’ve found it. There’s no way he could’ve gone through what he did and not have all the bad repercussions. He came out somewhat normal, where he’s able to continue doing what he loves to do.”

After the bus ride and the pregame speech, the only thing left to do is play some football. King settles in his seat in the press box, ready to coach the Rockwall game. He hasn’t coached from the booth since 1998, when then-Longview head coach Pat Collins told him, ‘Get your fat ass on the field and coach this team.’ Part of him has missed being up here.

“I love the view,” King said. “You can see everything. The game, the sidelines, anything that’s going on. You have a better perspective.”  

For the last 26 years, King has put his head down and gone to work, hyper-focused on winning the next game. God forced him to slow down in 2025. On the sidelines, he’s immersed in the game. But in the booth, he sees the sea of green in the stands, the band starting up, and all the middle school kids playing touch football outside the gate. He can finally see the entire program and the community that’s rallied around it. That’s the result that matters more than any record. 

For a moment, he’s at peace. That is, until a ref makes a stupid holding call that negates a big gain, and he can’t hear King convincing him why he’s a jackwagon. 

“I can tell you this, after being in the press box for eight games, I’m going back on that field,” King said.