Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It’s funny, and not in a humorous way, how your view of the world changes with the passing years. Football is a great example in the world of sports of this phenomenon.
As a teenager, football was the most exciting thing in my, and my friend’s lives. No, none of us were that good, but we were able to play a game we watched on snowy Channel 10 out of Thermopolis on Sunday afternoons and that we listened to on the radio.
I can remember being glued to the 1927 Zenith upright radio that Roy Walker gave me when we moved onto the place he had farmed for so many years. I still have it, and yes it still works though it’s approaching a century in age.
One afternoon in 1972, I listened as Steve Cockreham from Lusk, orchestrated perhaps the biggest upset in UW football history with a stunning 45-43 win over Arizona State. My friend Nick Bebout was a tackle on that team.
I remember the Pokes taking a huge lead then surviving a furious Sun Devil comeback before taking the improbable win.
A couple of years later, as I played my final games as a senior at Wind River my dad and I listened to the Broncos and Steelers through an open window in our house as we replaced the old stucco siding with green steel.
The NFL instituted overtime that year to end ties and make it easier for playoff calculations. The game at Mile High ended in a 35-35 tie at the end of regulation. They played another 15-minute overtime period, and the first game to use overtime to break ties ended in a tie. Even at 17, I thought that was quite ironic.
Living in the football dorm, the magic of college athletes wore off pretty quick. They were just knuckle draggers like the rest of us, nothing special. I became friends with quite a few of them, and by my senior years (yes, I went twice after switching degrees five times) my roommate Frank and I had a reputation as duck and big game hunters. The UW coaches, especially assistant coach Jim House contacted us to see if we’d take out freshmen to the Snowy Range, Lake Hattie, the Laramie River and Twin Buttes Reservoir. No problem, we had a good time with all of those guys.
Coaching high school and then junior high football for 30+ years, you learn the game, but more importantly you learn how to handle kids. You can sense the ones that need a little extra handling and the ones that need a figurative kick in the pants. Contrary to the experts, not all kids are the same, and they sure don’t learn the same way.
By the time our son Brian began playing RJFL, football was old hat. As he advanced from youth, to junior high, to high school and then to college football, my view of the game grew alongside him.
I watch RJFL dads these days and get a grin in seeing how intense they are at the game. That’s a good thing, their sons can sense it and feed off the enthusiasm, but remembering it’s just a game played by little kids should always be in the back of your mind.
One day at Brett Watson Field I was volunteering to officiate and the two teams were about to kick off. As we began to set the ball, a Life Flight helicopter buzzed the field on its approach to the hospital. Every player, all 22 of them stood there like turkey chicks in the rain with their mouths open, looking at the chopper.
No amount of whistle blowing was going to get their interest. Once the chopper passed, they came back to reality and started to play.
As Max Mercy said to Roy Hobbs in “The Natural” when talking about players, “They come and they go, Hobbs, they come and they go.”
Junior high and high school coaching were important to me, and hopefully I instilled that in my players. I scouted other teams even in junior high, came up with game plans, adjusted defenses and tried every way I could to get the most out of the boys.
I enjoy watching coaches do the same thing today, and we are blessed with some outstanding coaches in Fremont County.
After Brian finished playing at Dickinson State, the college game became just like junior high or high school. It was a right of passage for him, but an adjustment back to my days as a college student when those huge offensive linemen were just clowns like the rest of us and aside from a handful that went on to play on Sunday, they were just guys living down the hall or across the street.
My view of professional football is the same.
I used my Wyoming Press Association pass many times to get on the practice field with the Pittsburgh Steelers at training camp at St. Vincent’s College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania and used it again to get press and field credentials at Heinz Field.
Interviewing Joe Green, Jerome Bettis and Dick LeBeau were a blast, but in the process of speaking with them, they are just regular guys who had more size, power and aggression than most of us but who had the same insecurities, the same family dynamics and the same hopes for their children and grandchildren.
Football is a fabulous game, a game I enjoyed as an athlete, was honored to have coached for over a quarter-of-a-century and have now covered every weekend for the last three decades.
The thrill of victory never gets old, and the agony (I’m copying ABC Wide World of Sports here) of defeat never gets any easier.
No matter the level, it remains a game. Despite the million-dollar salaries, the fame, the recognition and living life in the spotlight, the players are still those little fifth graders staring up at a helicopter. They’re just bigger, faster and more focused.
We all should be.