MOULTRIE — The 75th birthday party that the 1963 Moultrie High football team had planned for their coach Bud Willis had to be delayed some three months.

Willis underwent back surgery in January, when he turned 75, and was not up for the celebration.

But wearing a back brace but otherwise looking fit, Willis was honored by a large gathering of friends and family on Thursday at Chapel Hill, Bobby Cobb’s place on Highway 111.

His former players presented him with a new shotgun and his former coaching adversary Jim Hughes gave him a statue of a coach.

But it was the announcement of a new football award that will be named in honor of the longtime Moultrie High coach that Willis was obviously most touched by.

At the suggestion of the surviving members of South Georgia champion 1963 team, of which Willis was an assistant coach, Schools Superintendent Leonard McCoy, Colquitt County High Principal Bob Jones and current Packers head coach Tim Cokely have established the Virgil “Bud” Willis Character Award.

The award will be presented each year at the football banquet to the player selected by the coaching staff and his teammates as exhibiting “the highest standards of character.”

The award “thrills my heart,” Willis said.

Willis took over as the Packers head coach in 1965 after Knuck McCrary suffered a heart attack on the sidelines during the game against Dougherty High and died the next morning.

The Tifton native and former University of Alabama star coached the Packers through the 1977 season, winning 73 percent of his games and posting a 93-34-1 record.

Cobb and former teammate Bob Montgomery shared memories of Willis, as did Everett Griner, the former radio “Voice of the Packers.”

Jones, then a young coach at Irwin County, remembered watching Willis, then at Cook High, handle a delicate situation involving the two schools “with dignity.”

“That’s something you don’t always find,” said Jones. “That’s what I remember. That was a good man.”

Hughes coached against Willis and his Packers for several years in the 1970s and went on to become the Packers head coach himself in 1983.

Hughes said that he especially remembers a region meeting in 1970, not long after he was named head coach at Thomasville High.

The meeting was held at the Colquitt Hotel and was chaired by Moultrie High Principal Ike Aultman.

Near the end of the meeting, Willis spoke.

“And he didn’t talk about any of the things that coaches usually talk about,” Hughes said. “He talked about football and how much it meant to him. And he reminded all of us of our obligation to football, how to coach it and how to teach it.

“There was never a word about winning or losing. He talked about character, commitment, integrity and honesty.”

Hughes said Willis stressed teaching and coaching football property so the young players would become “a credit to our schools and our communities.”

“If Bud had not said that, it might have gone unsaid,” Hughes said.

Among those in attendance at the birthday party was Fred Tucker, who coached Willis in the late 1940s and later later coached with Willis, working with young football players in Tifton.

Willis married Inita Martin of Hartsfield in 1957 and soon the couple moved to Moultrie, where he became county physical education director. He joined McCrary’s staff as ends coach in 1961.