PIGSKIN LOVE STORY
By 3:45 PM your Friday (and sometimes Thursday) night heroes are making memories on high school football fields all over Caddo and Bossier parishes this fall, a rite of autumn for red-blooded American teens.
There is the football team for sure. But also the band. Pep squad. Cheerleaders. Dance team. On it goes. They’re all part of the “A” in America. (Hey, “athletics” starts with an “A” too.)
But these fall Fridays have a huge impact on another group or two. One is the moms and dads, the grown-up fans. The other is a group I was in a long time ago, the group some little boy is in this fall, a little football-loving kid who’s living now what we lived all those autumns ago …
If you go back 50-plus years to your hometown, and if you were lucky, it might have gone something like Carolina in the 1960s, something like …
I remember …
That glorious football season of the Sunrise Auctioneers held little drama, truth be told. With J.Q. Jr. running and passing and with Cricket blocking and tackling, the Aucs cleaned everybody’s plow with little trouble.
“They’re putting the snicker on whoever passes by,” is what Roscoe Watts liked to say. And since Roscoe was the team’s play-by-play man and maybe the most famous person in the whole county, what with his having a weekday radio show and all, we listened. The Aucs were tough as two acres of garlic.
After losing to Class AAA Dillon, 12-7, to start the season, the Auctioneers won three straight non-district games, then put together a district championship season that looked like this:
Sunrise 27, Hannah-Pamplico 7
Sunrise 57, Hartsville 6
Sunrise 44, Timmonsville 0
Sunrise 38, Latta 0
Sunrise 42, Mullins 0
Sunrise 28, Hemingway 7
A few football-ignorant locals were antsy during that final district game since the victory had been by a too-close-for-comfort 21 points and Hemingway had actually scored a touchdown, something only Hartsville had managed to do during district play, and that had been back in early October. But most everyone recognized that Coach Petey Pate was saving a little juice for the next week’s playoffs.
J.Q. Jr. and Cricket played only a quarter and a half in the Hemingway game; they spent most of the second half on the bench playing Scissors-Paper-Stone.
The ease of it all seemed to confuse the barn-sized Cricket, my boyhood hero. It was almost as if he were bored with it. He wasn’t himself at church. Even there he seemed a little sleepy and locked in some kind of perpetual daydream. He didn’t grab me and throw me in the air like he always did after preaching. He even missed a couple of Sundays. It was probably because his brother was in Vietnam and not in vocational school in Lumberton, someone said, a reason that made little sense to me at the time.
A leaf in the wind otherwise, Cricket was still himself on the football field. The Aucs thumped Sumter, 28-10, then beat Cheraw, 30-7, to win Lower State. The state championship game against the Graniteville Rocks was an almost anti-climactic 35-0 butt-busting.
It was a beautiful thing for a kid like me to watch his high school heroes paste everybody, to be in the middle of the whole town in the stands on a Friday night, to trade high-fives with J.Q. Jr. and Cricket and all the other happy Auctioneers outside the fieldhouse.
But it was confusing that Cricket had started to understand the world outside his hometown and mine. Or not so much to understand it — no one could ever fully understand it — but he’d started to be disturbed by it.
You get a certain age and the world expands past Friday nights. It hadn’t yet for me, not back then. Not for a guy who lived and died with his Friday night heroes, not when losing a game was as bad as life could get. The glory of those autumn weekend nights might have been the final taste of innocence for us farm kids old enough to drive tractors but still young enough to be stuck in elementary school.
The Auctioneers football team was a thing you could depend on. Real life, we’d learn later, that was a whole different ballgame.
