The Garden

Chuck’s life has taken him through several very different chapters. He grew up in rural Ohio, played football under legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes, won a national championship with the Buckeyes, spent several seasons in the NFL, built a career in business leadership, and eventually made his home in Asheville. Retirement brought an unexpected challenge: without the pressure and competition that had always driven him, Chuck struggled to find his sense of purpose. He tried golf, mentoring, and nonprofit work, but what he really needed was a challenge: a reason to work with his hands, and something he could build himself.

He found it just 40 yards from his front door. The yard was buried beneath nearly a century of undergrowth, so dense that neighbors across the street didn’t even see there was a house behind it. What began as two years of clearing by hand eventually became Bucky’s Run, a 1.75-acre garden with roughly 3,500 plants, including 76 species of Japanese maples. Chuck never set out to create something worthy of recognition, but six or seven years in, members of the French Broad Garden Club saw what he had built and asked to sponsor it for inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Gardens. Today, it is preserved there under the name Bucky’s Run, after the black lab that was Chuck’s constant companion through eight years of work in the garden.

For Chuck, the garden became another expression of the philosophy that has carried him through every chapter of life: rely on yourself, adjust when things change, own the outcome, and keep going. He practiced it on the family farm, on the football field, in business, and eventually in the garden. The same process of reinvention led him to write Getting My Hands Dirty and, later, The Climb. The garden was never just a hobby. It was where Chuck found his footing again, and where one of the most important chapters of his story took root.