Good Old Southern FOOTBawl

It was the summer of 1967. LBJ was president. Race riots raged across the country. Nearly half a million U.S. troops were fighting in Vietnam. Thurgood Marshall would soon be confirmed as the first Black Supreme Court Justice. Were we paying attention to that stuff? Nope.

We have no idea what the females of the opposite sex were doing to get ready for our freshman year (August of ’67), but most of us boys were drawn to Footbawl. It’s what you did then in Birmingham and, for the most part, still is.

At that time our new high school had two grades (9th & 10th), so there was a freshman team and what was then called a B-Team. The advanced freshmen were immediately “pulled up” to the B-Team. Almost seventy 9th-grade boys were on our freshman team and another dozen or so on the B-Team. That group of 75-80 probably made up 75% of the total male population of the freshman class!

Our freshman team was a motley crew. We endured terrible canvas-like pants that didn’t breathe. We wore heavy cotton jerseys that didn’t breathe. The helmets were unsafe. Our shoulder pads were so big that we looked like mutants in a modern Marvel movie. And I guess we bought our own cleats.

Almost 70 boys were crammed into a PE locker room meant for about thirty students. Uniforms, pads, helmets, and shoes for two players were crammed into each locker. What a stinking mess.

On the field we were blasted with intense heat, a no-water philosophy, and “Here, son, have some salt tablets so you’ll probably die before classes start.” Back then it was all about being tough, kind of like Marine boot camp at Lejeune. And no one had ever heard of “sports medicine,” not even in the NFL.

To provide us a place to practice, someone had bush-hogged a brushy grown-up area next to the main field. We grow some hellacious weeds in the Deep South, and our “field” contained 3-inch weed stobs strong enough to impale a player. Because there was no grass, we we had ourselves a dust bowl within a week or so.

Jesus could’ve spit in that stuff, made a paste, and healed blind people every day. But nobody died that summer. God was watching over us kind of like He had done with the Israelites in the desert. But no manna from heaven, just salt tablets.

The diversity of physiques was staggering. There were 16-year-olds who were shaving and driving mixed together with guys who hadn’t hit puberty yet. In a few cases, we had 13-year-olds who wouldn’t turn 14 until the late summer or early fall.

A few guys were pretty athletic; the majority were not. Some weighed over two hundred pounds; others barely tipped the scales at a hundred. Most would not be back for their sophomore season. There were geniuses and idiots, but the idiots are more memorable.

One of the misfits was a unique man-child. We’ll call him “Studley.” Studley was sixteen, about 165 pounds. He drove a car and worked at Jack’s Hamburgers part-time. When classes started, the coaches were always on his butt about shaving. “Studley, I told you to shave, dang it!” Studley: “I did, Coach”–and he had!

Another true fruitcake was “Pigpen.” A short and stocky boy, Pigpen was at least 15 years old. He seemed to have moved from somewhere out in the sticks. Pigpen was a country strong running back with a special condition: that boy sweated more than a family of horses. All that stuff seeped through his uniform and, because we practiced in a dust bowl, turned into putrid mud. He carried an unbearable stench everywhere he went. One advantage for Pigpen was that no one wanted to tackle him.

In our small dressing room, Pigpen’s uniform came alive and tried to kill us all. And he refused to wash it. Finally, someone brought some bolt cutters, cut the lock off, and threw that mess into the washing machine.

We were animals in a brand new, very small cage. Surviving. And we weren’t even thinking about school. Not yet, at least.