Thigh Pads, a Mud Puddle, and a Dr. Pepper

Our varsity head coach sat us all down in the bleachers when the uniforms were given out. For “the talk.” Coach had a way of speaking directly to the idiots without singling them out. Much of “the talk” may have been about how to succeed, but I only remember the part about inserting your thigh pads into your football pants.

Those pads had an unusual shape: at the top, they were angled outward–toward the hip. Coach said, “If you put these suckers in backward, the pointed part will be aimed right at your groin. And, at some point, you’ll get hit the wrong way, and we’ll have to come on the field and extract the thigh pad with a big pair of pliers.” He was obviously aiming at the lowest common denominator—a likely majority of our less-than-stellar group.

Our varsity basketball coach was in charge of this motley group of freshmen footballers. We don’t think he had any help. Looking back, it’s amazing that he had to manage, instruct, and herd almost 70 crazy boys by himself. (Maybe he did have help, but we just can’t remember.)

He once had to miss practice, and a pop-up “substitute coach” showed up. We had no idea who he was, but we think his name was Bob. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and just happened to be a lunatic. The only memory of that day is that this idiot found a giant mud puddle and led us right to it. It seemed that we went one-on-one in that dang hole the entire time. Maybe we’re remembering it all wrong, but this kind of stuff seems pretty consistent with the times. We never saw the guy again.

We recall one special nutjob on the team. Already a very tall kid, he eventually grew to 6’7″ by our senior year. What a waste: He was a big-time flake who would never play high school sports again. Obnoxious and clueless about how people perceived him. To top it off, he had, as we called it back then, “sugar diabetes.” We’ll call him “Billy.”

When things got really tough (primarily during sprints and grass drills), Billy often had a “spell” and sat over to the side. We became increasingly resentful each time it happened.

Jerry was an eyewitness to this classic Billy moment: “We were lined up in a v-huddle, so Billy (tackle) and I (tight end) were standing next to each other. I noticed that Billy’s eyes were rolling back in his head, but I had cottonmouth so bad I couldn’t tell the coach. Anyway, Billy fell out right there in the huddle. Coach was sick of this kid’s antics: ‘Manager, drag his butt over to that light pole!’

The manager dragged him over and sat him up against the light pole, his head hanging forward. A few minutes later, Coach yelled, ‘Manager, go get him a Coke!’ The kid sprinted right by Billy and headed for the gym where the drink machine was located. As the manager flew by, Billy the Scorned One, head down, murmured, ‘Dr. Pepper.'”

That was our world.