WHEN he entered Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship in the autumn of 1958, Kris Kristofferson, right, had already been bashed about on the football fields of his native California.
Every match for Pomona College amounted to a triumph over adversity for a student short of the physical attributes necessary for survival in grid-iron but long on stickability. College coach Jesse Cone remembered a start-end player lacking height, strength and speed.
“Kris really wasn’t very tall,’’ Cone told The Washington Post. “And he wasn’t really very st...