David Parks, Hall of Famer

His name will be "Dave Parks" on the plaque hanging in the College Football Hall of Fame, but I still think of him as David.

David Parks, left end, Abilene High School Eagles, 1958-59. I was on those teams, for four games in 1958, and the whole season in 1959, when Parks really started on the road to national stardom. Now he is a new inductee into the National Football Foundation's College Football Hall of Fame, focused on his brilliance as a split end at Texas Tech. Even more American football fans remember him as an all-pro wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers.

But the old Eagles cling to him as one of them, and he and we together cling to the team, and a man, that many of us consider the starting place for the rest of our lives.

Parks, interviewed about his induction by The Abilene Reporter-News, said when he was in seventh grade, all he wanted to do was be an Abilene Eagle. The Eagles won the Texas state Class AAAA championship that year, 1954, under their new head coach, Chuck Moser.
"By the time I was in seventh grade, I knew all of their cars when they passed on the street," Parks said. All I wanted to be was an Abilene High Eagle -- not a starter or anything like that, I just wanted to be on the team, be a part of the Abilene High Eagles."
Abilene High won state championships again in 1955 and '56 and ran its winning streak to 49 straight games before losing in the state semifinals in 1957, when David was a sophomore.
"I didn't have the size. I just had the want-to," he said. "My junior high coach said to go over to Abilene High for spring practice. He said, you probably won't make it, they'll just use you as a blocking dummy. He was right -- but it didn't make any difference. I just wanted to play."
David did have the want-to, and he acquired the size, and speed, and skills in catching a football that provided some spectacular photos in the Saturday morning Reporter-News in the autumn of 1958 and 1959. But he acquired something else, as did we all, who were on those teams, from the stars to the scrubs.
"The last time I ever stepped off the football field in the NFL, I was still using the basic techniques I learned at Abilene High," Parks told The Reporter-News. "When I went to Tech, I never considered myself the best player there, but I was so much better prepared than the quicker, bigger kids. I saw better athletes than me who didn't have the knowledge and thinking, 'God, if they knew what I knew.'"
This is a story you hear over and over, from kids who played for Chuck Moser, then went on to college ball. A lot of it was X's and O's, but a lot of it was better preparation, on and off the field, designed by a coach who wanted to provide his team and his players their best chance to succeed. Moser died in 1995, but when the players get together at reunions, he is still at the reunion's center. His teaching, and its role in all the directions that lives can take, gets much attention.

In 2000, at the end of the century, those Moser teams from 1954-57 that compiled the long winning streak were collectively honored as the "Team of the Century" in Texas high school football. I wrote a book, "Warbirds," recounting the details of those years. As I was doing this work, I came to understand that the reason for the book was the winning streak. But the book's content was about how they played the game. That's what David Parks took with him to Texas Tech, and the NFL, and now into the College Football Hall of Fame. There are men out there who do know what he knows, and that makes us all feel select.