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Date with fate post 35 part III - A chance to play football; Early high school gridiron 1970-'72
This entry was posted on 3/15/2011 1:30 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies, Football Blue Collar Wisconsin.
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Word made the rounds that if you wanted to play football in high school you needed to get yourself to the campus a few weeks before school started and get in the process. I had dreamed about playing organized football for so long, the culture shock of the new environment did not jilt me in the least. The high school on Elizabeth Street in Whitewater had been built in the late 1950s to accommodate the huge Baby Boom generation. It was modern and sleek. The building had wings that were dedicated to each of the four grades...Freshman Hall, Sophomore Hall, Junior Hall, Senior Hall.
To my surprise, the culture shock of moving to the new environment was inviting. It spoke to the mantra we had been sold all through our previous education:
"You are the new generation after World War II. America helped save the world from fascism. The future is at your disposal. You can do anything you want in life in America. The United State is where people of the world look for freedom and guidance. We are fighting communism as we speak. We as the older generation are going to help you Baby Boomers by building new schools that offer you options to facilitate your goals and keep The American Dream alive."
Even in the throws of the Vietnam War era, the above rhetoric was hard to disparage. In the summer of 1970, I headed to football practice at the quasi new campus.
Some kids were culled to go on to the Junior Varsity from the get-go - a couple moved right up to Varsity. Here I would be introduced to..."the politics" of sports. If your family was prominent in the community and/or your family donated resources to the various athletic clubs, they wielded power to get Junior Boy farther up the sports ladder than us farm kids from Lima Center.
On a beautiful Wisconsin summer day, my mom drove me into my first football meeting at the high school. As part of the faceless rabble, I would be on the Freshman Squad. I did not care about the lowly status - I was going to play football. Even in my naive and lazy 14-year-old state of mind, I somehow knew this activity was important. A great term surfaced decades later - I was a consummate "slacker." But for some reason a yearning came from a place in my psyche; I immediately buckled down to hold the course - showed up for all the practices and tried to follow the instructions of the coaches. How could I be afraid? These city kids did not scare me in the least; and I had been working with old grumpy farmers for years. And, I had played two years of feral tackle football at the Lima school with tough boys in their farm work cloths and shit-kicker work boots.
By coming to football practice at the campus prior to the school year, we learned the lay of land before our fellow Freshmen did. I remember showing my classmates around once school started. One other thing hit me like a brick. The relatively newer high school was everything the ancient junior high was not. The high school staff seemed to be comfortable addressing us as young adults as opposed to the Soviet-esque junior high timbre. There seemed to be classes offered that actually were relevant to finding a niche in life after school.
From my scrappy sandlot football days and farm-kid past, I had learned to "knock heads" on the gridiron without much complaint. I had also learned to pace myself. All this I brought to camp combat-ready. I found myself being bumped around to fill in on special teams, defensive nose guard and offensive guard. At some point before the first game, I was placed ahead of several city kids (who had originally been pre-anointed to be starters) and firmly locked in at fullback on offense as a starter, and several positions on defense as a backup. I was put in that backfield position primarily as a blocker and rarely carried the ball.
The Green Bay Packers influence constantly lingered like a specter in the back stage of our football experiences. Lombardi was famous for using a drill called...."the nutcracker." You simply set up two padded tackling dummies about five feet apart and run a play with three guys - one tackler, one blocker, one runner. You must stay within the dummies. It was exceptionally violent....even for the pro football level. But, any coach who was worth his salt in Wisconsin or New York (Lombardi's home town), knew of the infamous nutcracker drill. It was in this drill that I frequently prevailed in at all three positions, as we were all expected to rotate our obligations. The coaches ran the drill over and over again. We all stood in line and waited our turn. I became a guy nobody was fond of standing next to in line. Hence, I supposed I owe a bit of my starting position to Ol' Vince.
The role of beating the odds against the deck-stacked city kids, played well to my parents who had always had to struggle for their rewards in life because of their farm, Irish, Scottish, poor, and non-college backgrounds. We had a pretty good season I believe if my memory is correct, only losing one game.
The following season I headed to the Junior Varsity team. Here I learned the lesson of culling and attrition. We lost some players to the varsity. We also dropped off some players from the previous year that gave up on the sport or found themselves working either on family farms or elsewhere. It was the 1970s; farming still pulled kids from school activities as well as school in general. A neighborhood kid who played football quit school at the then legal Wisconsin age of 16 to work on the farm.
Partly because our JV team having a limited number of players and the fact I "kept plugging away" as my mom would be known to put it, I played offence and defense and special teams. I still held on to my fullback role on offence, as well as some offensive guard work; but, I found myself as the starting middle linebacker on defense. I was now in the same position as one of my heroes, the infamous Number 66, Green Bay Packer Ray Nitschke.
I was a 60 minute guy. I loved the chance to play, but be careful what you wish for. I would get very tired. And now decades later we know it was not all game fatigue. I have a congenital heart and blood condition which was only officially diagnosed in 2001 - congenital and genetic respectively. It had however plagued me prior to that diagnosis in various manifestations for years - even long before I played in those Lima Center football skirmishes.
The full-time role on the field almost had a negative effect. The regimen made me so tired, sometimes discouragement set in that I was not playing as well as I had hoped for. Non-the-less, I would always talk myself up again - a trick my mom had drilled into me. Another testimony to the resilience of youth. As I recall, our small team only lost a couple games.
One of my favorite tasks as a big shot for the JV team was that a couple times a week we were called on in practice to play the taxi-squad for the varsity. In other words, we were brought up to "the big field" to be fodder in scrimmages to help prepare the varsity for their next Conference game. It was dangerous but right up an old Lima player's alley.
I loved going up to play the varsity. But more importantly, it introduced me to the two regionally famous varsity coaches. There he was; the legendary Jim Crummy marshalling his troops, the decades-long head coach of the varsity squad and a man who had no known enemies in the whole of the Southern Lakes Conference region. And there too was Coach Crummy's equally legendary assistant, Jack Mead, a former professional football player who actually had played with the New York Giants.
Their solid football reputations and professional demeanors preceded them both.
Note: If you would like to see all six sections of this story together as a finished publication, go to the Cool Dadio Media Website's "Stories Page" by clicking on the following link. A chance to play football .
Wisconsin Military Service Person Special Mention of the Week
(each week Cooldadiomedia mentions a Wisconsin service person killed in Iraq or Afghanistan)
Air Force Staff Sergeant Christopher Scott Frost, 24, of Waukesha, Wisconsin, died Monday, March 3rd, 2008, near Bayji, Iraq in a crash of an Iraqi Army Mi-17 helicopter. SSgt Frost was assigned to the Public Affairs Office, 377th Air Base Wing, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted Frost was the editor of the military publication The Advisor, a semimonthly publication of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. Frost is remembered as an aspiring photojournalist. He is also remembered as a guy who relentlessly pursued stories and was willing to tackle any assignment or any mission as a journalist. Frost's father is quoted as saying, "[Christopher] loved the challenge and the relentlessness of his job," He was said to be ecstatic when one of his stories got picked up by a Spokane, Washington, newspaper. Christopher Frost was a graduate of Mukwonago High School in the Town of Vernon, Wisconsin. Frost had enlisted in the Air Force right after high school. He was deployed to Iraq in fall of 2007. Christopher Frost's grandmother, Mary Jean Frost of Waukesha, took care of him from the age of 4 months until he started first grade so that both his parents could work. She is quoted as saying he was a good kid.
The Website findagrave.com notes Christopher Frost was born on May 4th, 1983 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The site noted Frost's death as occurring on March 4th, 2008, in Salah ad Din, Iraq. He had been in the Air Force for six years. He was deployed to Iraq in September 2007. The aircraft he was killed in was a Russian made M-17 helicopter. It crashed during a dust storm south of Beyji, Iraq. He was on-board the helicopter in pursuit of one of his story assignments.
The Website legacy.com via obituary information also notes Frost's death as March 4th, 2008. At the time of his death Christopher Frost was survived by his wife Ashley; parents Garry and Bridget Frost; daughter Mackenzie; son Mitchel; brother John (Elizabeth) Frost; and, grandparents Marjorie Strabel, Mary Jean Frost, and Galen Kurth. Staff Sergeant Frost was laid to rest in his hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Staff Sergeant Christopher Frost was the 88th Wisconsin military service person killed in Iraq since the spring of 2003.
As of this blog entry's posting date:
99,980 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
9,830 Iraqi Security Forces have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
4,442 Americans have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
1498 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
318 Coalition soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
863 Coalition soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
32,050 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
10,543 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
103 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
28 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
146 journalists (several nationalities) have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
21 journalists (various nationalities) have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
Wisconsin military service person special mention of the week, military casualty, and journalist casualty information sources: Committee to Protect Journalists; cnn.com; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; washingtonpost.com; thehighground.org; Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs; iraqbodycount.org; www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf; and, icasualties.org.
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