Eight Feet Deep

If you have ever watched NBC’s right­fully, hit TV show, “Fri­day Night Lights,” saw the Peter Berg movie of the same name or read the excep­tional Buzz Bissinger book that inspired both shows then you might know why peo­ple around my area are excited right now.

This is “Week 0″ in Texas. That is all you need to know although it means that it is the first week high school foot­ball teams can offi­cially play over an 11-week sea­son. If they played last night or tonight or Sat­ur­day they will have to take one week off dur­ing that time. Or at least that’s how I under­stand it. If I am wrong sorry.

One high school game tonight inter­ests me greatly. Had cir­cum­stances not been beyond my con­trol I would prob­a­bly be one my way to watch the game.

It is the clas­sic class 2A bat­tle of the New­ton Eagles and the Corrigan-Camden Bull­dogs. The game will be played tonight in Cor­ri­gan, which is about 90 miles north of Houston.

Now my inter­est is two-fold but more accu­rately two-fold times two-fold by some­thing or other square. Please for­give my math. I went to New­ton High School. Actu­ally, my poor math is owed more to my dis­in­ter­est and dis­dain for arith­metic than the abil­ity of that school’s teach­ers to teach it.

As an aside, Coach Cur­tis Bar­bay, 67, now in his 35th year as New­ton head coach — who is the No. 8 win­ningest HS coach in Texas with a 302–93-6 record and who led his Eagles to three state cham­pi­onships – was my World His­tory teacher dur­ing my sopho­more year. Coach was less than inspir­ing as a his­tory teacher and as I men­tioned before, he once used his ham-handed fist to power a pad­dle that beat my ass for talk­ing in class. When the Eagles won their last state cham­pi­onship in 2005, I finally for­gave Bar­bay for that. Nonethe­less, he was at least more than 35 years ago a mediocre his­tory teacher — back then and my opin­ion only — but I even­tu­ally came to love the sub­ject and gen­er­ally excel at it. Although, I will admit I was prob­a­bly a pretty mediocre if not excep­tion­ally lazy stu­dent. I was, after­all, voted Lazi­est in my school.

With all of the for­mer high school ani­mos­ity out of the way, I have long been a fan of high school foot­ball and as well one of my old high school team. The fact that Bar­bay was able to win 300-some-odd games over 35 years as well as hav­ing few sea­sons with­out his team in the play­offs speaks to an excep­tional coach­ing abil­ity. But beyond that, it shows some­one who can find raw tal­ent and turn lit­tle into lots.

As for the Cor­ri­gan end of the equa­tion, I lived there for a cou­ple of years. It was where I had my first news­pa­per job as edi­tor of the town’s lit­tle weekly. Now I must state here that even though I don’t plas­ter my name all over my blog, I have never made it dif­fi­cult for those whom I do not know to find out just who the hell I am. So, I still am not going put my full name here there and every­where just to add a lit­tle, imag­ined at least, mystique.

It was inter­est­ing edit­ing the weekly and basi­cally doing every­thing by myself with the excep­tion of the three dif­fer­ent sec­re­taries who worked for me dur­ing those two years and my won­der­ful sales rep and friend who helped me leave that paper a lot bet­ter than it was.

The town itself gave me an edu­ca­tion and insight into small-town Amer­ica that my own child­hood in an equally small town nor a truck­load of Sin­clair Lewis nov­els could have hardly afforded.

My feel­ings upon being the small-town edi­tor that I often related to my friends was of it seem­ing as if “I was the full-time mayor though not elected.” When I vis­ited the local gro­cery store, I was on, I was edi­tor. I remem­ber one old man, a fairly well-educated ne’er do well, sit­ting out­side that store who threat­ened to whip my ass because I laughed about his indig­nancy over an error in the paper over which he could not cause me to cower.

And foot­ball! Man, was that town crazy over foot­ball! They also had a very heavy his­tory of foot­ball insan­ity although I thought my home­town had a bet­ter record and didn’t seem quite as deranged about it. The school board meet­ings I cov­ered at their school didn’t draw head­lines over test scores, no it was about some­thing related to foot­ball. That is with the excep­tion of a national story on a slow news day when they decided to have a closed bas­ket­ball game with a neigh­bor­ing school due to threat of vio­lence after a shoot­ing in that nearby town.

I’ve looked at a cou­ple of pre-season polls this after­noon. TexasHSFootball.com lists New­ton as No. 10 in Texas 2A and Corrigan-Camden at No. 32. “Dave Campbell’s Texas Foot­ball” only has 25 slots in their prea­son poll and lists New­ton at No. 10. Of course, “Texas Foot­ball” is the pre­miere foot­ball pub­li­ca­tion in the state, not just accord­ing to me and not just because I think Dave Camp­bell is a very knowl­edge­able fel­low and quite the gen­tle­man. What­ever the polls, it’s a long cou­ple of months. Dur­ing the last few years, schools down here in the south­east­ern cor­ner of Texas have had their ups and downs due to unex­pected guests named Rita, Hum­berto and Ike. Hope­fully, that kind of action will stay away this year.

Let men, women and chil­dren see hope­fully the best of their schools and their towns, big and small. It’s time for Fri­day night lights. And it’s time for some football!

It seems I write about Brett Favre at least once a year. That is mostly because of his waf­fling on whether he wants to retire and stay retired or play for some other NFL team.

Brett Favre with the NY Jets — between the Pack­ers and the Vikings.

My opin­ion, and we all know opin­ions are like a**holes, is that a really great sports star like Favre or a Michael Jor­dan or Emmett Smith should stay retired once they go out on top. This cuts the risk of their last years of a truly stel­lar career end­ing up a stinker. Like­wise, I think the waf­fling appears a lit­tle too cute, like it is being man­u­fac­tured by an agent and for greed. Also, as is in the case of foot­ball stars, they stand to get hurt really bad in any game so why push their luck at 39 or 40 years old?

With that said, I still like Favre. He’s a hell of a quar­ter­back. He’s a Mis­sis­sippi boy. And he was a Golden Eagle from the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Mis­sis­sippi in Hat­ties­burg, one of my favorite col­leges I didn’t attend. I did have a great con­nec­tion with the school though.

While sta­tioned at Gulf­port in the Navy I hung out some with my Mis­sis­sippi cousin Teri who was going to col­lege at Hat­ties­burg. Being a col­lege town, Hat­ties­burg had some killer con­certs dur­ing the mid-1970s. It was there I saw Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thun­der Review with Joan Baez, the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, future mys­tery nov­el­ist and Texas guber­na­to­r­ial can­di­date Kinky Fried­man with his band, the Texas Jew­boys, as well as oth­ers on the tour. I think Teri got me a dorm room to stay in when I saw the orig­i­nal Lynyrd Skynyrd, before the plane crash that killed Ron­nie Van Zant and the oth­ers. Later, I also watched Jimmy Buf­fett play at the school he attended where he would sing at the uni­ver­sity com­mons and hor­rify pub­lic school teach­ers from the rural areas there for con­tin­u­ing ed classes by singing songs like “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?”

I digress, but I thank cousin Teri — the last I heard she was a nurse in Alaska – for turn­ing me on to South­ern Miss and the fact that Favre attended there makes him some­what okay in my books.

Favre also had quite a back story before the pros. From his bio in Wikipedia – although you’ve got to take it any bio there with a bit of cau­tion — it said South­ern Miss was the only school to offer him a schol­ar­ship. He was signed as a defen­sive back but wanted to play quar­ter­back and was some­thing like seventh-string at first. He had quite a bit of his gut removed after a car wreck that almost killed him. But he ended up with a spec­tac­u­lar his­tory at USM and grad­u­ated with an edu­ca­tion degree before the NFL draft and a Hall of Fame career with the Green Bay Packers.

As for the waf­fling on retire­ment, that can be looked at dif­fer­ently as well. To para­phrase ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd — or so I believe it was him — the other day, Favre lives in a big house in the mid­dle of nowhere. And after hav­ing seen the city lights, he gets bored. If he can still play, then why not?

Favre faces some pos­si­ble con­cerns includ­ing a rota­tor cuff issue but, waf­fling aside and the rumors he wants revenge on Green Bay , at least with Favre all the talk will be about foot­ball. This unlike the new Philadel­phia Eagles quar­ter­back Mike Vick and his past prison stint for pro­mot­ing dog fight­ing, or the Cow­boys’ QB Tony Romo and whether he will get back with Jes­sica Simp­son, or the lat­est melo­drama involv­ing Ter­rell Owens and his new team in Buf­falo. With TO, there will def­i­nitely be some melo­drama over something.

Per­haps Brett Favre’s return to foot­ball with the Min­nesota Vikings will gen­er­ate a buzz more cen­tered around foot­ball than some­thing way out in the periph­ery. That is, unless Favre gets abducted by aliens who give him a never-seen-before play that wins the Super Bowl for the Vikings. Then, we have a whole new ball game.

It is the last day of April. It’s steamy out­side. So-called “pop­corn” show­ers abound thanks to that great, sloppy mois­ture off the Gulf of Mex­ico. Top­ping it all off, the Hous­ton Astros are six games out of first in the National League’s Cen­tral Divi­sion. All is right with the world. Astros fan know noth­ing hap­pens until at least early Sep­tem­ber. Then per­haps, who knows?

Pro base­ball remains a rel­a­tively good bar­gain for con­sumers, fans. Minute Maid Park is only 90 min­utes away from where I live and they close the roof on days like today. So I have no excuse, really, for not tak­ing in a game. Yet, I haven’t been to an Astros game since open­ing day in 1987 when Mike Scott faced off the Dodgers’ Orel Her­shiser. The ‘stros won that day 4–3.

Each year I say I am going to at least one game this sea­son, but except for see­ing the Rangers play in Arling­ton about six years ago, the major leagues have been pretty much a sport to watch on TV. And, to be hon­est, no tele­vised sport is half as good as the real thing. Had I not seen the St. Louis Blues two rows from the ice in St. Louis, I prob­a­bly would have never watched hockey at all.

When I lived in Waco I had good inten­tions of see­ing Round Rock, an Astros farm league team which plays at the Dell Dia­mond just north of Austin, play ball. But no, I missed that too. I’ve never watched a minor league game or had the minor league expe­ri­ence. I hear such games can be enter­tain­ing because of it being more than just base­ball. That is sort of roots base­ball as base­ball was often more than just balls and strikes in days past.

Pic­tured above are play­ers of the barn­storm­ing House of Davids team, a sort of base­ball equiv­a­lent of the Harlem Glo­be­trot­ters. The base­ball team, fea­tured play­ers who grew very long hair and beards and who mainly fielded games in the rural U.S. from the 1920s to the 30s. The Davids were basi­cally the fund-raising arm of a reli­gious com­mune in Michi­gan which, in addi­tion to abstain­ing from shaves and a hair­cut, also stayed away from sex and meat. As many times seems to befall such cults, the group was scan­dal­ized over alleged indis­cre­tions by its leader. He was even­tu­ally ban­ished from the colony.

Another vari­a­tion in ear­lier base­ball, this one in the late 1800s, fea­tured drunk­en­ness among the play­ers. I read about this in an old book I had about early base­ball. Where that book is I have no earthly. Nor have I ever heard about or have found a ref­er­ence to this prac­tice on the Inter­net. But if I remem­ber this right, dur­ing the olden days in some semi-pro games a keg of beer was placed on the field and play­ers were required to drink a dip­per full in order to make it to home plate. One would have to won­der if those were high-scoring games and ones rich with bench-clearing brawls?

I don’t know if watch­ing a bunch of ballplay­ers get­ting ripped dur­ing a game would be all that enter­tain­ing. Per­haps we would all be bet­ter off just read­ing about what hap­pens after the game in the police blot­ter as we do today.