August arrives, and soon the dreaded two-a-day football workouts will begin at high schools across the nation. This week's archive is from my 2004 book, "Warbirds – How They Played the Game," about the 1954-57 Abilene High School Eagles, voted "Team of the Century" in Texas high school football.
“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.” – Grantland Rice
On autumn Friday nights in Texas, the One Great Scorer is a busy deity. In brilliant metropolitan concrete bowls and in rural settings where the lights are barely strong enough to cast a player’s shadow, thousands of Texas high school boys (and an occasional girl) go at each other on the football field for personal fulfillment and the glory of their schools and towns.
Unless it’s a tie, one school wins and the other loses but the Scorer pays no mind to that. His only care is how you played the game. Still, most of the time there was a predictable correlation between the Scorer’s judgment and the final score. It was possible to receive the Scorer’s highest marks and still lose, but it didn’t happen often.
Thus there were two compelling reasons to begin each season with how you played the game. In Texas high schools, football was not and is not an extracurricular activity. Football is a class in physical education, whose curriculum credits are as necessary for graduation as credits in English and math. In fact football was a very long class. It always began by mid-August, and in some places players started receiving mimeographed instruction from their coaches, their “teachers,” as early as July 1.
Of course there were lots of X’s and O’s, that are central to how you play the game. But it hardly ever began with X’s and O’s. A few coaches might settle for that, but most understood that their first job was to extract from a 16- or 17-year-old boy a commitment to achieve a goal. That was a far more difficult teaching assignment than the belly series or 5-2 defense, and coaches took inspiration where they found it, in convincing a boy that an afternoon at the lake was not as good in the 100-degree heat than putting on 15 pounds of football gear and slamming into each other for three hours.
If the boy accepted that commitment, there was a good chance he would learn what it felt like to win, and winning, he was promised, was a feeling that would serve him well in building a successful life. Not one, but thousands, of coaches have told their teams in August: “Men, football is like the game of life.” Of course it became a cliché and fuel for mockery, but it was a true cliché nonetheless.
Winning was a powerful attraction. Not many 16-year-olds would submit to twice-a-day football practices in order to prepare themselves to lose. Coaches talked about winning, and what it took to win, constantly.
But the coaches knew that every weekend there would be as many losing teams as winning ones. The best they could do was prepare their teams to give them the best chance to be the team that won. If their boys won, the coaches knew they would like the lesson. It was equally important that the boys who lost would feel like they learned something, too. It was the only way they could improve.
Some coaches developed great skill in articulating that truth to their players. Others could rely on the literary sports writer, Grantland Rice, for inspiration, even if they couldn’t recall the Scorer quote verbatim. “Boys,” they would say proudly in both locker rooms, “you did your best.”
Doing your best. What does it take to do your best? First of all, you have to do good. Good, better, best, we all learned in English class. Best is the superlative of good, but good is where it starts.
There are two main ways to do good. You do things good, and you do good things. That is where not just football, but all athletics, start. Before they ever pick up a ball or get into a stance, athletes are taught to do things good and do good things. Many of these they are given to do; others they are encouraged to do. Get in good shape. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Have good eating habits. Have good study habits. Make good grades. Be a good citizen.
If you do things good, you will get better. If you keep getting better, you have a chance to be the best. All over Texas, in rich huge districts and poor tiny ones, those were the first lessons of the season, and they did comprise a good textbook for preparing for the life beyond athletics. Then finally, when you go on the field, make the best use you can of all these good things. As long as the deity is the One Great Scorer, and not God, you could almost call football Sunday School taught on grass and not get in too much trouble with the U.S. Constitution.
Year after year, thousands of times over, the lessons are taught and learned and a team goes into a game with its best chance to win. But every Friday night, someone wins, and someone loses. Then in one Texas town, a team started to learn from a new coach how to do things good and do good things. He was a man who understood that principles were principal to any success on or off an athletic field and he was exact and unrelenting in teaching the value of values. Studying him now evokes a nostalgia for that time when principle and values were unabashedly traditional in the American dialogue. With these lessons and his meticulous knowledge of the game, he provided his players their best chance to win, and on Friday night they won. And won. And won. And won, won so much they made history and set lasting examples for coaches everywhere to give their players about how to be good, and maybe better, and maybe the best. This book is about that coach and that team, and the reason for the book is their winning streak. But its content is about how they played the game.
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