Sometimes, if a man grows up in deprivation, he dedicates his life to assuring others don’t experience the same fate.

Buddie Hodges knows that McDowell County, West Virginia, is 535 square miles of Appalachia where the war on poverty is a battle cry with little ammunition.

“We lived in the coal-mining camps of West Virginia, west of Bluefield, where it was rated as the poorest county not just in West Virginia, but in the whole USA. Daddy worked in the mines. The community was the worst of the worst,” he said. “You sorta had to pipe in daylight. I went back up there a few years ago, and my wife literally got sick. I’d told her she probably shouldn’t go.”

Hodges and his nine siblings lived in a too-small house. No one played sports, or had access to such things. During his visit, he noticed many of the houses were crumbling, as were the churches and schoolhouse. The county is so poor, that it is devoid of street signs.  “The only people still living there are the people who can’t get out,” he said.

Hodges’ daddy moved the family to Mount Holly in 1958, for a promise of construction work with Duke Power, raising power plants. Hodges was in 11th grade. “I’d never been around any organized sports before,” he said. “But halfway through my junior year, the football coach asked me to play, and I got to play some before the end of the year. You learn in practice and by scrimmaging. We went to the state playoffs.

“I was the other side of the first-string offense, and you got to block the starting players, so you learn pretty quick. It was physical stuff. I wish I’d had the opportunity to play a little more.”

Hodges took his newfound passion for sports and cultivated it so others could benefit. He studied the game. He studied other sports. Because he devoted so much of his life to helping others play, he is the recipient of the 2014 Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame Community Spirit Award.

After high school, Hodges married the former Becky Cannon, moved to Stanley, and joined the Optimist Club. He coached football and basketball, and ran the concession stand at football games.

Hodges went to Gaston College, then the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and took an engineering job with Bell Telephone Laboratories in Greensboro, working on anti-ballistic missile systems and military projects during the era of the S.A.L.T. talks.

While in Greensboro, he met a guy who coached Little League baseball and got involved with officiating. Bell Labs transferred him to Charlotte, then Atlanta, working the engineering switch to fiber-optics. He moved back to Mount Holly in 1973 and filled his days with the Optimist Club.

“I was umpiring, and I coached some football, soccer and t-ball, but I ended up doing more officiating back in that era,” he said. “I was Man of the Year one time, so I guess I evolved into officiating pretty well. The Optimists had a basketball program before the city had anything, and I officiated for them a good many years.”

By the time he was 48, he said, he was umpiring high school and American Legion games. “Hundreds of games a year, on weekends, basically,” he said.

He coached Mount Holly’s t-ball teams and helped start the program. He officiated basketball games for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Parks and Rec, and was voted one of the league’s top two officials.

He officiated women’s sports, too, including professional softball and did the women’s pro baseball world series. He also did high school regular-season softball and playoffs.

In all, Hodges, 72, is credited with devoting more than 30 years to youth sports.

“You learn by doing,” he said. “I’m a very detailed person, and I believe in knowing the rules to the ‘nth’ degree. Most people, when it comes to officiating stuff, they say they wouldn’t think about doing it. But I didn’t feel that way. I actually enjoyed it.

“I was able to be involved with the sport without playing the sport.”

He wanted the youth of Mount Holly to have what he did not, back in McDowell County, W.Va.

“I just enjoyed seeing them play and having the opportunity to play. I know where I was at, nothing like that existed,” he said. “Now, around Mount Holly, it’s more common than it was 20 or 30 years ago.”

With time, comes change. Hodges is a believer in playing the game for the competitive comaraderie of it being merely a game. That doesn’t always happen now. “I sometimes see parents fuss at their kids because they didn’t play well. I mean, most kids are not going to become professional athletes. And sometimes coaches lose track of that, and parents lose track of that,” he said. “And at the professional level, some of the acts you see from time to time turn me off. Peoples’ priorities seem to make it a life or death matter on how some team does, or how a particular player plays. There’s more to life than that.”

Hodges said he’s thankful to receive the Hall of Fame award. “But I wasn’t in it for any kind of recognition. I really enjoyed doing it.

“It cost me money out of pocket, getting from point A to point B, and I bought the equipment sometimes, but I enjoyed 99.999 percent of anything I ever did. You owe it to people to do the best you can.”