Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
The answer is yes. I am ready for some football.
The high school season starts this week.
I started liking football in 1967 when the first game I can clearly remember played out on my granddad’s color TV set – the Dallas Cowboys played the Green Bay Packers in the “Ice Bowl.” The temperature was 15 degrees below zero. Most fans considered it pro football’s championship game, though the Super Bowl was still to be played.
My granddad was for the Cowboys because … Tom Landry, I think. Everybody in Texas loved the Cowboys coach in those days and it didn’t matter that his boys could never seem to win the big one.
At 8 years old, I decided I would be for the Packers because I’d heard Donny Anderson was the “Golden Palomino.” For that reason alone, the Packers’ running back was my favorite player and so I had to root for my favorite player’s team, even if they played Granddad’s Cowboys.
The Packers won that game, 21-17, with Quarterback Bart Starr sneaking into the end zone with 16 seconds to play. It remains the greatest football game I’ve ever watched.
I celebrated for a few seconds before realizing my granddad was near tears. Football can do that to you. I’ve never rooted against the Cowboys again.
I started my newspaper life reporting on football. The first game I covered was in Childress, Texas, in maybe 1980. The Greenbelt Bowl featured local high school all stars.
My editor told me I had to be on the phone at 10 p.m., prepared to dictate a game story. At 10 p.m., the game was still being played and not close to being decided. We had to change the lede – newspaper jargon for the beginning of the story – about five times before that phone call was complete and the game story sent to print. As I recall, the losing team returned the final kickoff about 85 yards, but failed to score, as time expired.
I covered hundreds of high school football games after that and loved them all. I think my favorite was in Phillips, Texas, when dogs kept getting on the field and nobody could keep them away.
With hundreds of games, came thousands of interviews with football players and coaches.
Zach Thomas told me about getting run over by a pickup truck when he was 2 years old before he told that story during his Hall of Fame induction earlier this month.
Mercury Morris, while visiting his college alma mater in Canyon, Texas, told me a tragic, detailed story about a fatal bus crash he said he’d witnessed one training camp. Dozens of sports writers were killed, he said. The “tragedy” was that the bus was only half full. (I think Mercury was trying to be funny.)
And I interviewed Tom Landry in 1988, just a few weeks after he was fired as the only coach the Dallas Cowboys ever had. I’m glad my granddad wasn’t alive to see that awful episode in Cowboys history. But if heaven has the NFL Network, I’m pretty sure where my Granddad Stevens will be come Sept. 10 when Dallas kicks off its 2023 season against the Giants.
We’ll be watching together in spirit. Go Cowboys.
David Stevens is publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at:
