YOU HAVE TO LOVE FOOTBALL IN DIXIE...

     To live in the Deep South is to love Saturdays in the Fall. However; you have to live through those anxiety wrought Friday nights. For a lot of us we can go watch high school football. That doesn't always always work. You might be entangled in those games as well. I graduated from Cleveland High School in 1965. That was half a century ago. I still love my old high school. The Panthers who have had a lot of bad seasons of late are currently undefeated. Tonight they play their final regional game against Section High School. The 7-0 Panthers should be 8-0 in a couple of hours. 

          I vividly remember homecoming my senior year. At halftime the Queen was crowned. The football team gave our coach a shotgun and a recliner. I always thought that an odd combination but it sums up the Deep South in so many ways. Our coach was the late Hugh "Pea Soup" O'Shields. He was an excellent coach. To be honest, I hated playing football. It was my fear that I'd get hurt and ruin my chances at getting to play college basketball. My family was poor. That was about average for everyone in Cleveland. Blount County, Alabama isn't now, and wasn't then a very wealthy area. I needed a scholarship in order to go to school. Around my area I was known as a basketball man. That meant I knew the rules, and loved the game.The truth is that track and field stole my heart.

        The other thing I remember was the class of 1915 was recognized. The class of '15 finished high school 50 years prior to that cool October night. A dozen or so souls stood up to the applause of the "crowd". Maybe 500 hundred were in attendance. After the game I made a point of going to talk to a couple of the men in that class. They had fathers who fought in the Civil War. They missed WWI, but were prime conscripts for WWII. They seemed so old. Now I am that old, but I don't feel old. Well, maybe near the end of a long day of golf I feel old. My mind doesn't feel old at all. I realized what one of them told me that night was true, "with a little luck you may live to go to your 50th High School reunion." At the time that felt preposterous.  I was 18 years old and bullet proof. Of course, I'd live that long, but it seemed so far away. It wasn't. The man told me the truth. If you are lucky enough. I have been lucky. Others in my class weren't so lucky. 

         Here is one thing that age brings - in sports you live long enough and you'll see the greats. You can compare players. Your brain becomes a storage file of sports knowledge. You never get so old that what you know regardless of how little younger people believe you know. Anyone who thinks that older people are past your prime about sports is a myth. I've seen Bear Bryant coach football and I've seen Nick Saban coach. One is not above the other. Both are great coaches. Older fans think Bryant is the best. Younger fans think Saban is the best. Both are wrong in my opinion. Could Bryant's best teams beat Saban's best? I doubt it. The real point is whether each coach be as good a coach in the others era? They could. There is no back in the day. We only think that is true. Each of us grew up in different times of American life. So, on a Friday night full of recollections I thought I'd pass that on.