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A chance to play football; Early high school gridiron 1970-'72 - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 10/18/2011 1:45 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
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, and Senior Hall.
To my surprise, the culture shock of moving up to this new environment from the old junior high 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 become 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..., your 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; for, 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 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, losing only 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 on the squad, quit school at the then legal Wisconsin drop-out age of 16 to work on the farm.
Partly because of 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 the diagnosis in various manifestations for years - even long before I played in those Lima Center sandlot 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 JV team only lost a couple games.
One of my favorite tasks as a big shot for that same 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 Crummey 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 Crummey'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: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
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