Texas Football.   A statewide passion .

                                                       By Dave Hamby

              Well it’s that time of the year again, the hottest part of the summer when all of the young men in Texas begin to don layers of armor and run out in the hot sun in order to prepare themselves for the official obsession of the State of Texas, football.  

             Any unfortunate young man suffering from heat stroke while doing this will be lamentably deemed as unfit for our favorite pastime, and be replaced by another aspiring and perspiring hero.

             I have personal memories of practicing in 100 degree heat wearing a helmet and shoulder pads, doing my dead level best to knock the stuffing out of a fellow team mate.   The problem was, I was one of the smallest guys on our team and spent a great deal of my time lying on my back with the stuffing knocked out of me.

             It was the summer of 1964 and my dad, a professional soldier, was doing a tour of duty in the United States.  We were living in a small town west of here in a part of Texas that was mostly populated by horny toads and big red ants.  Littleburg (not its real name) was close to a military base and was small by anyone’s standards.  What it lacked in size, it made up for by having absolutely nothing for anyone to do.  Football was the town’s main passion.

             Now I was one of those kids with a rare natural athletic ability.  That would be the ability of being the last kid anyone ever wanted on their team.  I was a big fella for my age, so when the Junior High School football coach had to resort to fifth grade students in order to fill his roster; he asked me if I wanted to play football.  

             Since this was the first time in my life that I can recall anyone actually wanting me on their team, I jumped at the chance.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that he really just wanted someone to sit on the bench.  

              Some of my buddies surmised that this was just in case a fierce West Texas wind came along that might blow the bench out onto the playing field.  It was later explained to me, (by my oldest daughter when she became a high school coach,) that it looks bad for a coach to have everyone on his team out on the field at the same time

             He already had what he needed to have a football team capable winning theDistrict title in the form of a six foot tall sixth grader named Bobby Rabbit, (not his real name).  

            In addition to being really big, Bobby could run like his namesake, a rabbit.  One of the reasons he was so big was because he was probably sixteen or seventeen years old. He wasn’t very bright.  

            I was told the reason he wasn’t playing on the high school team was because the high school coach wouldn’t stoop to recruiting at an elementary school for his team.   Had he known how long it would take Bobby to graduate from the 6 th grade, he might have changed his standards.  

            At any rate, our team’s offensive game plan was to give the ball to Bobby and stay out of his way.  The defensive plan was get out of Bobby’s way so he could knock down whoever it was on the other team that had the ball.  Anyone on our team who would get in Bobby’s way and cause him to trip or fall down was in big trouble with our coach.  

             This plan was good enough of us to win the District title that year, and I was told, when I revisited the town some twenty years later, that our Junior High School would continue to win District every year until a few years later when Bobby finally graduated to the 7 th grade.  That’s when he was drafted onto the High School team where they would win the State Championship for three of the next seven years.  

            I asked why I never saw Bobby playing in the NFL, and was told that by the time he graduated from High School, he was too old to play professional football.

            Coach told me that my contribution to this championship team was to sit on the bench and look fierce, so as to intimidate the opponents.  At the first game I made the fiercest faces I could.   I was told later that I succeeded in looking constipated, alternating with sheepish grins.   The next game the coach explained to me about the importance of keeping the bench from blowing out onto the field and that I no longer needed to look fierce.

            My big moment of glory came at our homecoming game when we were beating our opponents about 95 to nothing.   The coach sent me in.  “See that kid there,” he said, “Keep him from catching the ball.  Somehow I managed to line up against the correct kidand when the play started, he took off in a flash.  I was chugging as hard as I could in an effort to keep up with him when I felt a big whack on the back of my helmet.  

            Now my helmet was loose fitting, after all I was only in the fifth grade, and that whack pushed the helmet forward and down over my eyes.  I stopped to fix it and when I was done I looked up just in time to see the football coming straight down into my arms.   It seems the other team’s quarterback had hit me in the back of the head with the football, and it shot straight up into the air.  

             Somehow I managed to catch the ball, then spun around a couple of times before all of the training in the hot sun took over, and took off as fast as I could for the end zone.

             Fortunately Stephen Jones, the other fifth grader on our team who was also getting to play his first game, came running up to me and said, “Hey stupid, you’re going the wrong way.”  I was wondering why guys from the other team was blocking for me. With him knowing so much and all, I just handed him the ball and said, “Here, you take it.”  He headed off in the other direction and went all the way for yet another touchdown.  

             Our local paper, the Littleburg Wipe, describing that play in the next issue, kindly said I intercepted the ball and handed it off on a reverse to Stephen who went in for a final touchdown.  The Coach knew better though, and I didn’t get to play again for the rest of the year.

              The next spring my Dad got transferred to his last tour of duty in Germany before he retired, and I never got to play organized football again.  This was just as well though, sitting on the bench for extended periods of time can make your butt hurt.