Thank God It’s Friday
And Saturday. And Sunday. The arrival of fall means weekends spent watching football, up close and on-screen, and yet another opportunity to love the greatest game on earth for all the usual reasons. Forty-nine of them, in fact.
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Every Underdog Has His Day
TCU fans, repeat after me: It’s not about the BCS. Sure, it would be fun to jam a stick in the system’s wheels and play in one of the big-boy bowls come January. But the season’s real coup won’t be played out on the national scene. No, the Horned Frogs are after a prize much more elusive than the crystal trophy: the distinction of being mentioned in the same breath as the state’s gridiron goliaths. With four 10-win seasons since 2000—including last year’s amazing 11-1 debut in the Mountain West—they have momentum for the first time since 1938, when “Slingshot Davey” O’Brien led his team to an undefeated season and a national championship. Lucky for them, a seventy-year drought is just the kind of underdog slump we love to get behind. Who cares if the Longhorns go all the way this year? Yawn. They did it last year. But if the less plausible Frogs can hop their way through non-conference rivals Baylor (not as easy as it may sound) and Texas Tech, success will be all the sweeter. Which players will blossom into outta-nowhere superstars? Which ones will wilt under pressure? Who, wah, wah, who. Give ’em hell, TCU.
- JORDAN BREAL
The Unknown Pioneer
Only forty years ago, if you were a black teenager, you couldn’t play football in the Southwest Conference. And then John Westbrook came along. Like Jackie Robinson, Westbrook didn’t set out to break a color barrier. The Groesbeck native, who was the salutatorian of his high school class, was accepted by lily-white Baylor in 1965 and, against all odds and common sense, went out for the freshman football team and got selected as a running back. It’s almost impossible to imagine the ugliness thrown Westbrook’s way by teammates and coaches, but he was good enough to get a scholarship and—again, like Robinson—forebearing enough to ignore the taunts. On September 10, 1966, in Waco, he got in the game against Syracuse, the first black to play in the SWC (Jerry LeVias, of SMU, who gets all the attention for being the first, actually hit the field a week later). Knee problems cut short his football career, but he earned his B.A. and M.A. in English. He preached, and he taught English, and in 1978 he ran in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor. Westbrook died five years later, his status as a pioneer rarely acknowledged. But the yardage gained by Vince Young in 2005 would have been impossible without the first steps of John Westbrook 39 years before.
- MICHAEL HALL
Never Having To Say We’re Sorry For…
1. Jackie Sherrill. So long as A&M beat Texas and made the Cotton Bowl each year, the Aggie faithful didn’t care if Coach Sherrill’s players made more money than the regents.
2. Barry Switzer. If you Google “Switzer,” “Cowboys,” and “carpetbagger,” your query will produce no relevant results. An NFL championship ring takes care of a lot.
3. Earl Campbell’s knees. If the Houston Oilers hadn’t run him into the ground, maybe the Tyler Rose’s glory years would have lasted past his first six seasons. But that was the only way the Oilers were going to get close to the Super Bowl, and Campbell’s first two years, 1978 and 1979, are still the closest they ever got.
4. Eric Dickerson’s SMU payola (and similar outlays to a great many others). During the early-eighties Pony Express period, SMU climbed higher in the national polls—number two in 1982—than at any time since the days of Doak Walker. That kind of success doesn’t come free. And besides two SWC championships, the era also produced one of the all-time-great sports/political quotes. When Governor Bill Clem-ents was asked why, as chairman of the SMU board, he had lied to investigators about payments to players, he snapped, “This wasn’t like an inaugural day. There wasn’t a Bible present.”
- JOHN SPONG
It’s Not Unusual For The TV To Cost More Than The Beer, The Cooler, The Grill, The Lawn Furniture, And The Tickets
Ah, the joys of tailgating.
- JOHN SPONG
Friday Night Lights Is a Franchise
Buzz Bissinger’s classic, first published in 1990, remains a one-of-a-kind sports book: a biting, fearless study not just of Odessa Permian High School’s football team but of a small town that pins its outsized hopes and dreams on the shoulders of its teenage athletes. Miraculously, it was turned into a just-as-terrific movie in 2004 by Bissinger’s cousin, director Peter Berg, who preserved the book’s tough-mindedness and tossed in a number of white-knuckled football sequences to boot. Now comes the TV version, beginning this month on NBC, which devotes a weekly episode to each of the team’s games. With its zigzagging camera and gifted ensemble cast, it’s a surprisingly accomplished show—and a reminder that what once seemed like a strange, borderline-pathological subculture reaches far into the American mainstream.
- CHRISTOPHER KELLY
Mecca For Recruiters
Held every year in San Antonio, the U.S. Army All-American Bowl is the one sporting event that comes close to justifying the existence of the Alamodome. More than five hundred of the best high school players in the country participate: They’re timed in the 40-yard dash and the 20-yard shuttle and measured in the vertical leap and bench press. Coaches, scouts, and the like come here in search of the next phenom, the kid who’ll turn their program into a powerhouse. Here is where, a few years back, they first got a look at Vince Young and Reggie Bush. This year, the big catches were Jevan Snead, of Stephenville High, tapped by Texas as a quarterback of the future, and running back Stafon Johnson, of Dorsey High, in Los Angeles, slated to be a star at USC.
- PATRICK FITZSIMONS
James Street Still Can’t Eat In Public Without Someone Telling Him, “Great Game”
Small-town high school quarterbacks have always known that Saturday’s Hungr-Buster at the Dairy Queen will be paid for—or at least interrupted by a slap on the back and an attaboy—if they had a big night on Friday. Former Longhorn quarterback James Street has been living that dream in Austin for nearly forty years, ever since his fabled fourth-quarter pass on fourth-and-three set up number one Texas’s winning touchdown against number two Arkansas in the 1969 game that is still known simply as the Big Shootout. To this day, strangers regularly approach Street to talk about that play. “It happens all the time,” he says. “They used to want to know who made the call, Coach [Darrell] Royal or me. But now they want to tell me about that day, where they were when it happened. They’ll say, ‘I’ll never forget it. We were down on the hunting lease watching it on TV.’ The thing is, that memory endured over the years as the program missed chances at national championships, times where we’d get close but never quite get all the way there.” Vince Young changed that in January, but Street should not expect to be left alone.
- JOHN SPONG
Heisman High
Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas is the only public high school in the United States to produce two Heisman trophy winners. Davey O’Brien, class of ’35—a short, white quarterback—won the trophy in 1938, the year he led TCU to the national championship, and then spent two forgettable years in the pros. Tim Brown, class of ’84— a tall, black receiver— won it in 1987, at Notre Dame, and then played seventeen stunning years in the pros, making the Pro Bowl nine times. Two other U.S. high schools have been blessed with multiple future Heisman winners, but both were private schools: Fork Union Military Academy, in Fork Union, Virginia (Vinny Testaverde and Eddie George), and Mater Dei High School, in Santa Ana, California (John Huarte and Matt Leinart).
- MICHAEL HALL
There’s Always A New Crop Of Studs
Five high school seniors to keep an eye on:
1. Tray Allen, OL, South Grand Prairie
2. John Chiles, QB, Mansfield Summit
3. Richetti Jones, DE, Dallas Lincoln
4. Ryan Mallett, QB, Texarkana Texas High
5. Terrance Toliver, WR, Hempstead
- STACY HOLLISTER
The Real Action Is Off The Field
Play-by-play announcers and color commentators like to talk about “the game inside the game.” High school concession stands are home to the game outside the game. When we were fourth-graders, it was where we played two-below games with the miniature plastic footballs that cheerleaders threw into the stands at the start of the third quarter. If, later on, we didn’t make the high school team, it was where we bought bubblegum to mask the beer on our breath that we’d drunk in the parking lot at halftime. When we came home on weekends from college, it was where we chatted up girls who wouldn’t talk to us in high school, and once we started taking our own families to the games, it was where we found out whose business was succeeding and whose marriage was failing, all the while dodging those same miniature footballs thrown by a new generation of fourth-graders. And through it all, the only things that distinguish today’s concession stand from one of 75 years ago are microwave ovens and cheese in a jar.
- JOHN SPONG
Some Records Aren’t Made To Be Broken
Today, it seems, every season produces a player who’s hailed as the “greatest” this or the “best” that, but no one has come close to touching the numbers that Ken Hall put up more than fifty years ago as the single-wing quarterback at Sugar Land High School. He still holds multiple national records, including most rushing yards in a career (11,232), average rushing yards per game (337.1), yards per attempt (47.3), and average points per game (32.9). No, you didn’t misread those statistics; Hall, who is a retired owner of a barbecue joint and now lives in Fredericksburg, was that good. So when you hear kids say they want to be the next Vince Young, just nod and smile. If they really want to be great, tell them to be the next Ken Hall.
- BRIAN D. SWEANY
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