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!