How they played the game

Back in the 1930s, a great sportswriter wrote of a boxer: "He was a third-rate middleweight second to none."

I can't find the quote, even with Google, and I don't remember the writer or the boxer. But the writer could have been talking about me as a football player. In every practice and in the locker room before every game, my routine was to acknowledge my shortcomings. I suppose it became psychological, but the shortcomings were real. I was slow. I was a third-rate athlete second to none. Glynn Gregory could cut on a dime; it took me a manhole cover, if it occurred to me to cut at all.

I am setting the scene for a legacy bequeathed me, and so many like me, by Glynn after his death, at 73, of cancer, on Feb. 14. At his funeral in Dallas, and events afterwards, teammates would have told stories about him, and how great he was on the field, and off.

It was a haze of lore that has enveloped me. I was an Abilene Eagle, in 1959-60, sat in the same classrooms as Glynn, practiced on the same field, suited out in the same locker rooms, played for the same coach, Chuck Moser, even got to wear Glynn's old jersey, No. 21, in a spring practice scrimmage in 1958. I blocked a punt that day. It was the highlight of my gridiron career.

Through this mist I can actually enter the Eagles' locker room in 1956, and feel what it was like, before a game, with Gregory sitting in front of a locker, and Jimmy Carpenter, Hayseed Stephens, Stuart Peake, Rufus and Boyd King, Jim Rose, John Young. Pull on a jersey knowing I had the speed and the skill and the will. Not just will. We all had will. We wouldn't have stood practice without it. But the will backed up by the speed and the skill, the athleticism, to go out and do something about it.

I can feel what it was like to be one of those Eagles, ready to just go out and play the way they could play. It reminds me of dreams I have had throughout life, where I could fly, not like Superman, but just above the houses and the treetops, above the neighborhood, liberated from gravity. What must it be like to leave the locker room and trot toward the field, liberated from gravity?

Last week a collection of photos from Glynn's life was circulated to an email list of men who played at Abilene High in the 1950s. For me, one image, from a baseball game, stood out. Abilene won three state football championships in Glynn's tenure, and two state baseball championships while he was playing catcher. In this image, an Amarillo batter, a lefty, has swung and hit a ground ball. Behind him, and even with him, is Glynn, the catcher, flinging off his mask in the same motion he breaks for first base to back up the play.

To kids like me, it is a fantasy photo. For Glynn, it was another happy day at the ballpark.