Friday night lights

Whatever you do, read the last paragraph of this blog.

I’ll never forget the Friday nights. The lights were on, the stands were packed. And there I was in the little press box, all of 17 years old, a sports writer! Yes, I was pretty full of myself, chronicling the up and downs of the Sulphur Springs Wildcats my last two years in high school.

The biggest challenge turned out to be this: How many ways can you describe a loss? The Wildcats’ record those two seasons was one up and 19 downs, in other words 1-19, and at the conclusion of the second season in 1961, the team had not won against a District 6-AAA opponent in five years.

I’ve reread my stories from the 1960 season. Nothing to brag about here—both the writing and the football playing. My stories from those ten games were largely uninspiring in a literary sense.  The best I could do was this, about the season opener: “A gangling, sweat-stained end who performed like a halfback, with only 20 seconds remaining in the game, spelled defeat for the Sulphur Springs Wildcats Friday night and gave the Commerce Tigers their second triumph in two starts, 14 to 13.”

By the 1961 season I was getting better at describing the creative ways the Wildcats managed to lose nine of their ten games.

October 29, 1961: “Perhaps they played their best game of the season. Perhaps they played like it was win tonight or die tomorrow. Perhaps Randy Wilkie’s 83-yard pass run was the spectacular play of the game. But Mt. Pleasant had a fellow on their side named Bernise Alderman. The 140-pound halfback, quarterback, field goal kicker and crack runner set the stage for a first quarter touchdown and kicked a three-pointer in the second period to lead the Tigers to a 10-0 victory in Mt. Pleasant Friday night.” The problem with this lead, of course, is that I never said that “they” were the hapless Wildcats of Sulphur Springs. But I was at least starting to get edgy.

November 5, 1961: “ ‘They’re crying their hearts out,’ said glum Wildcats coach Harry Lander at the end of Friday’s game. ‘They deserve a better fate than this.’ They did deserve a better fate, but spectacular last-minute tactics by the Greenville Lions spelled doom for Sulphur Springs as the visitors grabbed a 14-8 victory here.”

November 19, 1961: “It took the Paris Wildcats 24 minutes on the play clock to warm up here Friday night. And when they did, the Sulphur Springs Wildcats could offer little opposition as Paris rambled past 20-6 for its 23d victory in 26 years in the divisional rivalry.”

I’d show up in the stadium press box, which at home games meant a little shed at the top of the bleachers barely large enough to accommodate me and three broadcasters from radio station KSST. Using an ancient portable typewriter belonging to my dad, I typed a running description of every play—who carried or caught the ball, who made the tackle and so on. A line of my notes might read like this: “10:19 1st & 10. Wilkie over right tackle for 3. Tackle by Wright.”

I was grateful to have the KSST folks at my side. Smooth-talking station owner and general manager Bill Bradford and one of his ad salesmen, Buddy Funderburk, a bubbly and excitable guy, did the play by play. They made a good team. Listening to them with one ear, I made sure I got all the details right. Color commentary came from Gerald Prim, a loyal Wildcat fan and president of the Sulphur Springs State Bank. Prim was a terminally shy man, and he spoke so softly I doubt many KSST listeners could understand him. And if you did hear him, he didn’t have much to contribute. But what are you going to tell your biggest advertiser, who wants to become Howard Cosell? And besides, I liked those three men, who treated this kid as their equal. We had a lot of fun as the Wildcats plowed through two seasons of almost winless football.

After the games, I’d go to the Daily News-Telegram office and spend an hour compiling the statistics—yards rushing and passing, first downs, passes attempted and completed and so on. Next, I would tap out a two-paragraph summary of the game and phone the sports desk of the Dallas Times Herald, acting as that paper’s Hopkins County correspondent. Saturday afternoon’s Times Herald would include two pages crammed with brief descriptions of North Texas high school football games. Finally, I could go to the drive-in restaurant on Gilmer Street and share a Coke and fries with my friends. I had all night to figure out how to write the story Saturday morning for Sunday’s Daily News-Telegram.

Okay, now I think it can be told, the great unpublished story about Sulphur Springs football during my years as its chronicler: Maybe coach Harry Lander’s team couldn’t score on the field. But Harry was scoring regularly on the side, conducting an affair with the wife of the president of the school board. When word got back to the cuckolded husband, a prominent businessman, of what was happening right under his nose, that was it for Harry Lander in Sulphur Springs. Oh, the spilled secrets of small town life then.