When we were kids, baseball was the thing. We dutifully shoveled off the baselines on the old B&M Railroad field sometime in early March, then the mound, and finally the home plate area in an effort to get in a couple of innings before everybody froze to death. Since I was the main instigator of this foolishness, it’s a wonder these early games never earned the title “Killeen’s Follies,” so impossible were the playing conditions. Life expectancy of the average baseball was about thirty minutes and that’s if a long fly ball wasn’t lost in the snow. You know how an occasional pitched ball hits the bat in such a way your hands sting? Try it at 8 degrees. Our baseball “season” extended from then until the World Series was over in October. Basketball was a non-factor in those days, although the relatively new National Basketball League was gaining a little traction. For us, though, when baseball was over, we went right to football. We played it, we listened to it, we collected the pro trading cards which came in the packets of bubblegum. I’m fairly convinced that not a single package of bubblegum ever would have been sold if it was not accompanied by some sort of sports card. The gum, itself, came in crisp little pink sheets. You could sharpen them and easily stab someone to death. A small number of chewing gum savants even figured out how to blow giant bubbles. I wasn’t one of them. My bubbles were small and unsatisfactory and I was reduced to being a mere chewer. But we’re talking football.
In those days, there were no organized leagues prior to high school so the various neighborhoods got up teams and played one another. Our chief rivals were the kids who lived on the other side of Winthrop Avenue/Parker Street, which ran the length of South Lawrence. They were led by John Kelly and Bob Catineau and featured a large, musclebound running back named Paul Higgins, who strongly resembled a Louisiana bar fighter. It was easier to knock a train off the tracks than it was to tackle Paul Higgins. But we tried. Some of us.
The biggest game we ever had with Kelly’s team came in a year when we were both undefeated. It was held on their turf, which the city called the O’Connell Playstead and we called the South Common. Amazingly, about fifty people even showed up to watch, an all-time attendance record. We got the ball first and after grinding out about twenty plays, managed to score. There were no goalposts on the South Common, so you had to battle through another play for your extra points. We got our first one and led, 7-0. The subsequent kickoff went right to Paul Higgins, who shredded would-be tacklers like hollow bowling pins and went in to even the score. It was like Sherman marching through Georgia, without the flames.
We came right back on a long pass play from Bobby to Joe Trepanier, our brother act, but the extra-point try was stuffed. We kicked off again, leading 13-7. We tried kicking the ball along the ground so someone other than Higgins would pick it up first. Alas, the opposition parted like the Red Sea, Higgins grabbed the ball and stomped over ten guys before a lucky tackle from behind got him at our twenty. Three runs later by the behemoth tied the game and they went ahead on a Higgins extra point. I was more than annoyed. This wasn’t happening again, I vowed to noone in particular.
Once more, we worked our way down the field to go up, 20-14. Okay, Higgins—this time, you’re toast. We got off a great kick to their goal line and Higgins caught it. The monster crushed two tacklers—and I’ll be honest here: not everybody was all that interested in risking their lives any longer—but I drew a good bead on him at the twenty. Suddenly, however, he no longer looked like a human being—more like an angry, snorting bull just jabbed by a cattle prod and thinking Bill was the prodder. My brain kind of froze and instead of tackling Higgins, I just ran right into him, full-speed, all 125 pounds of me. The ballcarrier flew about five yards through the air, landed with a thud and came up a little lame. I just rested there on my hands and knees in some lesser stage of consciousness until I could walk off the field. I didn’t play much more that day but Higgins’ right leg was compromised and he was a shadow of his former self. We scored twice more and won the game, 34-20.
On the way out, Higgins sneered at me and said, “We’re better than you guys and you know it.” I looked back at him in feigned disbelief. “Paul! How dare you? Do you know how to spell U-N-D-E-F-E-A-T-E-D? Take a look at that (chalk) scoreboard. What’s it say? Why, Paul—I believe it says ‘Points talk and bullshit walks!’” I was staring straight ahead at the time, before finally risking a look over my shoulder at the beast. I expected a shot to the head at any moment. Instead, I turned and caught a remarkable, once-in-a lifetime sight:
Paul Higgins was smiling.
Legends Of The Fall
When my grandmother married her second husband, Bob Vogler of nearby Methuen, I got bonus football. The games in Lawrence were played on Sundays but Methuen High played a day earlier and the entire Vogler family attended. This now included my sports-oblivious grandmother, who wouldn’t know a football from a bathysphere, and me. We even went to road games. The Voglers, by virtue of long attendance, had somehow inherited the first two rows of seats on the fifty-yard-line of Methuen’s tiny Highfield Stadium, so we were right on top of things as the band blasted out the MHS fight song and the pretty little cheerleaders, arm-in-arm, promised us that “our team never falters,” the words and melody to which I remember to this day.
Later, when the Voglers diminished to an aging few and priorities failed to include football, I would hitchhike up to the little stadium myself to watch the games. The trek required walking down neighborhood streets and through backyards, often rife with the burning leaves of Autumn and, when I encounter the same smell today, those Highfield Stadium memories immediately reinsert themselves. Football is both the game and all things attendant, the sounds, the smells, the excitement in the air that few other events can equal. It is the anticipation of the the game, the thrill of the moment and the joy in the retelling. It is the spirit of a crowd joined in one purpose, the elation in victory, the sadness in defeat. As a sport, as an event, it has few equals. This game, this clever game—it seizes you as a boy, nurtures you as an adolescent and owns you for life. It is fun. It is serious business. It is eternal. Football.
The infamous snow plow game.
“Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Gloom Of Night….”
In terms of weather, baseball fans always hope for the best. Baseball is not an enterprise that tolerates discomfort well and the occasional frisky rainstorm has been known to deter or even cancel a game. When you are on your way to a football game, you know that short of an apocalypse, it will be consummated. Rain is a mere trifle, snow of no consideration. Freezing temperatures? Don’t make me laugh. The only cancelled game that I have ever attended in seventy years happened last year in Gainesville, where scary lightning bolts raked the stadium for 180 minutes and refused to leave. Three hours from the scheduled starting time, they began the game anyway, ran one play and the lightning returned. Amazingly, most of the crowd was still there.
Pro fans fondly remember the Ice Bowl, a moniker given the 1967 National Football League Championship Game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys played at the former’s Lambeau Field on December 31. The temperature at game time registered a hair-raising MINUS thirteen degrees but 50,000 parka-clad fans braved the elements to watch the Packers annex their third consecutive title, 21-17.
On December 12, 1982, after heavy rains had soaked the Astroturf surface at New England’s Schaefer Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, temperatures plummeted and the field quickly froze over. Then, just for fun, a heavy snowstorm began right after the game started. As a result, an emergency ground rule was established for the game: the officials could call timeout and allow the crew to use a snowplow to clear the yard markers. Even with the rule, the ground crew could not plow often enough to keep the field clear. Due to the conditions, nobody scored late into the fourth quarter. With 4:45 left in the game, however, New England drove the ball deep into Miami territory and Patriots coach Ron Meyer ordered snowplow driver Mark Henderson to clear a spot for a field goal attempt. Instead of driving over to the ball, Henderson cleared a spot directly in front of the goal post and the befuddled officials somehow let New England place-kicker John Smith make the attempt from there. Dolphins coach Don Shula went berserk, and when the kick was good, protested the game, certain the League would overturn the Patriots’ victory. He was wrong. New England got the win, though the NFL did throw Miami a bone—the Dolphins would not have to play another December game in New England for ten years.
The day dawned gloriously on New Year’s Eve, 1988, with temperatures soaring into the thirties at Chicago’s Soldier Field. The Bears had scrambled to a 17-6 lead over the Philadelphia Eagles when a velvet gray mist suddenly descended onto the gridiron. “I thought the parking lot was on fire,” said Bears QB Mike Tomczak. Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling explained it this way: “It was daytime warming that caused this cool, dense air out over the 32-degree water of Lake Michigan to start moving inland—that’s what brought the fog bank in. There’s fog, and then there’s FOG. This was pea soup, London fog, ZERO visibility.”
On the field, it was difficult to see beyond a radius of 10 to 15 yards. The view from the pressbox was completely obscured, as was evident in this conversation between broadcasters Verne Lundquist and Terry Bradshaw:
Lundquist: “Cunningham will throw or run. Sacked for the fourth time. Wait a minute….”
Bradshaw: “He got rid of the ball, Verne!”
Lundquist: “Must have. He completed it to somebody. And we’re not trying to make light of this, but it is actually impossible for us to see the field.”
Jim Riebandt, Soldier Field’s public address announcer, couldn’t see the field or the scoreboard. When he apologized and asked the crowd to ‘'bear with me,” they booed. “Tough crowd,” said Riebrandt.
Said Skilling after the game: “That will forever go down as one of the major weather events ever to hit Chicago. It didn’t kill anybody. Nobody got hurt. There was no property damage. But none of us will ever forget the Fog Bowl.”
The Fog Bowl.
“Oh, The Humanity….”
Football is often dispatched by some “effete intellectuals” or “nattering nabobs of negativism,”—take your choice of Spiro Agnewisms—as a too-dangerous game whose days are numbered. Concussions are the latest issue, an injury, by the way, which might occur far less often if zealous tacklers would stop leading with their heads. Ironically, high-school moms often opt for soccer these days, seeking to eliminate head injuries. A recently released study of soccer injuries illustrates that sport is no panacea—soccer is the most common sport with concussion risk for females (50% chance for concussion). And the would-be highbrows who esteem soccer so much never mention the post-match riots which maim and kill tons of people every year or the South American maniacs who famously offed one of their own players a few years ago for knocking in an own-goal in World Cup competition. Us football fans hardly ever resort to that. Nor do our players start crying their eyes out when somebody knocks them down or kicks them in the shin. There’s no crying in American football. And our players actually get up when someone knocks them down—they don’t lie there in a soggy heap, bawling. Oh, and in our football, we actually score a point or two every now and then. It keeps the fans from sticking needles in their arms to stay awake. So, Ole! to that. See you on the pitch, indeed.
It’s A Small World, After All
Okay, you argue, but football is for Big Guys. Little people needn’t apply. Untrue. While the pro game is pretty much reserved for gorillas, high schools and colleges are full of kids, skinny and short, who grind away each Friday and Saturday, carrying their weight, however little it is. Take Jayson Carter, for instance. Jayson is a 4-9 running back at Rice University in Houston. He weighs 130 pounds. Well, he must be dumb or crazy, you opine, to subject his tiny body to the clash. Hmmn, doesn’t look like dumb is an issue. They say his IQ is 169. If that sounds a little farfetched, whatever it is, it’s good enough for Rice University, not known for admitting morons. Not to mention, Jayson was valedictorian at KIPP Charter School in Houston. Currently, he’s majoring in Computer Science.
A sportswriter wrote a letter asking Jayson’s dad, in his time a 6-1 defensive back at Cal, what it was like to watch his diminutive son endure the rigors of football. Jerome Carter emailed back: “Are you kidding? He’s PUNISHING tacklers!” Jayson doesn’t play a whole lot, regularly taking up his spot on the scout team. He just loves football. The other day, though, the Rice coach put him in against UTEP with 6 1/2 minutes left in the game. Rice quarterback Guy Billups promptly handed him the ball, and there’s Jayson being wrapped up by 240-pound linebacker Horace Miller. And the little guy is falling forward, pulling the linebacker with him. We don’t speak soccer at the football stadium, but if we did there’d be OLEs! all around.
That’s all, folks. Go Gators!
