How to Play the Game

On Friday, Oct. 8, 1954, the Abilene High School Eagles beat the Borger Bulldogs, 34-7, at Fair Park Stadium in Abilene, Texas.

I was there. I was in the sixth grade.

The Eagles did not lose another football game until I was in the ninth grade, in December, 1957. In the interim, Abilene High won 49 straight football games and three straight state championships in the large-city classification.

For this, in 1999 the Eagles were named the “Team of the Century” in Texas high school football. Anyone aware of the stature of high school football in the Texas culture will be aware of the magnitude of the Eagles’ achievement.

Last year, the 50th anniversary of that first victory, I researched, wrote and published a book, “Warbirds – How They Played the Game,” to commemorate the streak. There is a copy in the San Diego City Library. The project began as nothing more than a journalist’s assignment to re-create history, restore long-forgotten details of that team and its achievements for a city that remembered maybe five or six highlights of the streak.

But before I was halfway through, I realized the heart of the book was not about football at all. It was about values and principles.

The coach of that team, Chuck Moser, arrived in Abilene in 1953, carried his materials into his 10-by-10 office in Eagle Gym, and cranked up the mimeograph machine. The most important single piece of equipment described in the book is that old blue-ink mimeograph machine, that in February, 1953, started reproducing the philosophy of a teacher of football who didn’t begin with X’s and O’s, but with values and principles.

That philosophy, organized into rules and policies, set into motion the Eagles’ ultimate success before the first football was ever snapped at Chuck Moser’s first spring practice in March, 1953. The system was unabashedly virtuous and a literal manifestation of the sports writer Grantland Rice’s famous declaration made during a more virtuous age: “When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks – not that you won or lost – but how you played the game.”

Before the book was completed, “How They Played the Game” had become the subtitle, and it describes precisely the content of the book. It tells how the coach gave his team its best chance to win – the best that any coach can do – with a system based not only on rules of football, but rules of living. And the coach lived the system. He knew he had to, but he did it because he wanted to. There is a difference. Very quickly, he was not only the high school football coach, he was a Sunday School teacher, and a civic leader, and president of the local Kiwanis Club.

That was the true history being recreated. Chuck Moser was a teacher for his time, and for any time a people understand the importance to their future of success built on values and ethics, and the threat to that future of success built on greed and manipulation.

Moser’s teaching re-emerged in a time in which winning without principle has become the saddest form of defeat. His story, and the proof of his story in his Eagle teams, is not only for Texans wishing to recall some football glory days. The story comes to a national audience that in 2005 not only knows, but fears, what has been lost to the greedsters, and feels a strong yearning for what might be regained if principle is recovered, and the value of values is practiced once more. It is a history that should be repeatable in America, and in San Diego. We could sure use a winning streak. All we need is a leader.