Chad S. Conine - The Republic of Football: Legends of the Texas High School Game

THE REPUBLIC OF FOOTBALL

Legends of the Texas High School Game

CHAD S. CONINE

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright 2016 by Chad S. Conine

All rights reserved

First edition, 2016

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:
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Austin, TX 78713-7819
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Conine, Chad S. (Samuel), 1977, author.

Title: The republic of football: legends of the Texas high school game / Chad S. Conine.

Description: First edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000147

ISBN 9781477303719 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 9781477310489 (library e-book)
ISBN 9781477310472 (nonlibrary e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: FootballTexasHistory. School sportsTexasHistory. Football playersTexasBiography.

Classification: LCC GV959.52.T4 C66 2016

DDC 796.3309764dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000147.

doi:10.7560/303719

In memory of Odell Lowe and Milton Conine

Contents

Introduction

I remember being nervous as hell as I walked through my high schools wide main corridor on an August morning in 1993.

As a sixteen-year-old sophomore, I already knew I wanted to be a sportswriter. I was pumped to have been named the sports editor of the Midway Panther Post. I was excited because the beginning of football season loomed, only days away. But mostly I was trying to suppress that anxious feeling in my gut as I walked down the main hall, through the cafeteria, and into the gym. I had my first assignment: introduce myself to the head football coach, Kent Bachtel, and tell him I would be covering the football team that fall.

It turned out I had nothing to worry about.

Bachtel couldnt have been better suited or more willing to help me along my chosen career path. I know of a couple of coaches who wouldve nodded politely and told me they could try to help, but they were actually very busy. Not Coach Bachtel. He enthusiastically shook my hand and we figured out a game plan. I would come to his office on Saturday mornings after the team had met to watch film and I would interview the coach about the previous nights game.

I would write down a few questions, but mostly we would have an open-ended conversation about football. More than two decades later, when I began working on this book, I used pretty much the same formula.

When I went to college, I talked the Lubbock Avalanche-Journals sports editor, Doug Hensley, into sending me out to high school football games on Friday nights. I had a bulky Toshiba laptop that would connect to the Internet by using a dial-up service called Juno, which was just e-mail. That was about a million communication revolutions ago. Of course, my older sportswriter friends would say I had it easy, since I never had to lug around a Trash-80 (the TRS-80 was an early personal computer made by TandyRadio Shack). Anyway, when the football game ended, there would be a mad dash to write a game story and find a phone line to connect to and send the story via e-mail. I would find myself at the Springlake-Earth coachs house or behind the counter of a Blockbuster Video after begging the clerk to let me use the analog fax line. Desperate times called for desperate measures, but it was a thrill to be learning to be a sportswriter through the trials of covering high school football in West Texas.

Since that time, Ive spent every Friday night during football season at football stadiums from the Panhandle and South Plains to DallasFort Worth to Central Texas and wherever the playoff wind blows. Plenty of Saturday afternoons and nights, too. Ive seen a few thrillers, one of which is included in these pages. Ive also seen lots of duds. The duds arent so bad, really. When its 420 at halftime, I bang out the requisite number of paragraphs while the two marching bands fill up the twenty-eight minutes between the second and third quarters. Many times, Im happy to file my game story and then meet up with friends for a beer. An ordinary ending to an ordinary night.

Ill admit, there are even times when spending Friday night at a high school football field is a tiny bit of drudgery. Just like everything else in life, its not always magical. High school football can be the very definition of ordinary American life.

When its special, its electric. And thats the theme throughout these forty-one chapters.

I attempted to capture as many angles as possible from as many points of the high school football experience as I could. LaDainian Tomlinsons breakthrough game, the first nondistrict game of his senior season, came on a sweltering Thursday night when the Waco University Trojans kicked off the season against Austin LBJ. Colt McCoy showed his first flash of brilliance in his first seventh-grade game. Robert Griffin woke up one Saturday morning, the playoffs looming a week away, and found himself struggling to walk. There are stories of dynasties that won multiple state titles, and there are stories of teams whose dreams died hard early in the playoff s.

Collectively, the stories give proof to a couple of bold statements. Anywhere football is played, Texas has influence. It leads the nation in producing college and NFL stars, and has for decades. Its powerhouse programs, which combine progressive ideas with traditional fundamentals, set the tone for how to build a winner. The evidence couldnt be contained in a dozen volumes, and I certainly didnt set out to write a comprehensive account. I was able to talk football and tell some of the stories passed along to me by Hayden Fry, Spike Dykes, Bob McQueen, Lovie Smith, Art Briles, Lawrence Elkins, Warren McVea, Ray Rhodes, Dat Nguyen, Zach Thomas, Drew Brees, Johnathan Gray, and many others.

While interviewing, researching, and writing, I camped out in the moments that we crave as fans. The phrase Friday night lights has become ubiquitous in relation to Texas high school football. But Im here to tell you that the game is at its absolute best on sunny, crisp Saturday afternoons in December: that time of year when the teams on both sidelines believe its their destiny and birthright to move on to the next round. The fans in the stands cheer their heads off, partly to stay warm but mostly because they want the ride to continue forever, or at least right up until Christmas.

While traveling to NFL training camps for this project, I found myself in a hotel room in Chicago in late July. While preparing to drive to Detroit to interview Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, I discovered a YouTube video with thirteen minutes of highlights of a Highland Park versus Stephenville game from the mid-2000s. The sound track was simply the crowd at the game. Listening to those fans scream and those Stephenville fans shake their propane-tank-filled-with-ball-bearings noise contraptions for dear life, I was transported from that hotel room back to Texas in December, where football is as rich and electric as it ever gets.

I knew right then that that was the game Stafford and I would talk about the next day. That game and so many others like it are the reason Ill never stop covering high school football.

Those are the moments featured in this book.

HAMLIN

1984

The Tie That Doomed the Pied Pipers

Its so easy to connect the dots from a Class 2A football game in 1984 to Baylors rise to relevance in the Big 12 that it seems like a massive oversimplification.