High school football’s siren call

Texas high school football season is upon us. And for reasons I can’t adequately explain, I’ll once more write weekly game stories about the fortunes of the 2018 Southlake Carroll Dragons.

Practice begins in two weeks, and the Dragons scrimmage Arlington High on Aug. 25. They open the season against South Grand Prairie in Warrior-Gopher Stadium on Aug. 30.

So the end of summer is nigh, and it’s time to shake off the cobwebs and to check in on Carroll's latest gridiron stalwarts and their new coach, Riley Dodge. What will Dodge Ball 2.0 bring us all?

To be honest, I had some reservations about continuing my game accounts. After all, I’ve never made any effort to gather an audience for Dragon Tales, and my readership is so small that I could probably accomplish the same result with a couple of phone calls.

And although I enjoy the games and like the challenge of capturing their flavor and content, the writing and analysis does take a sizeable chunk out of my weekends.

Ultimately, I decided to give it another go. I’m fascinated at the prospects of the legendary Todd Dodge’s son taking over the team and the resulting excitement it has generated throughout Dragon Nation. But I’m motivated by something else that I have always had trouble explaining to my friends and family.

I’ve been following Dragon football ever since my daughter started high school. I had attended a few Southlake playoff games over the years, but I didn’t become a Dragon fanatic until Rachel started playing clarinet in the Dragon Marching Band.

That was back in 2006, and the Dragons were at the tail end of their legendary Run, when they traveled to five straight state championship games and came within a single point of winning them all. As it was, they had to settle for only four out of five, a record that perhaps will never be repeated.

Marice and I followed Rachel and the Dragons that entire season, missing only a frigid, wind-swept playoff game against Odessa Permian in Texas Tech’s Jones Stadium. Southlake won that one, and every game that season, including the championship game against Austin Westlake in San Antonio’s Alamodome.

It wouldn’t win another state football title for five long years, but I was hooked on the Dragons. I’ve missed only a handful of games since then, but I’ve had my butt in my pricey season green seat for every single home game.

I know. It’s a sickness.

My passion for high school football in general and Carroll Dragon football in particular didn’t come naturally. My friends who are aware of my obsession are surprised to learn I never played the game. To my lingering shame and dismay, my mother deemed the sport too dangerous and forbid me from playing.

I meekly submitted to her wishes, an act of cowardice I wish I could take back. I seriously think my reluctance to challenge her decision is the reason I’m such a contrarian today, suspicious and wary of authority in any form. I resist as much out of reflex as I do conviction. I’m still trying to prove to myself that I’m not a milquetoast who shrinks from conflict and kowtows to brute force.

When it came time for my son to play sports, he seized on football early. He loved flag football, and when he got old enough, he told me he wanted to put on pads and play tackle.

“I’m ready to hit somebody,” he said, secretly delighting me.

And he played with joy and ferocity, suffering his share of nicks and bruises and more serious injuries, including a broken wrist and, alarmingly, a concussion in his first 8^th grade game.

He played another year after he recovered from that injury, but at the end of his freshman year he told me he wanted to hang up his cleats.

“You told me,” he said solemnly, “that I was playing for me, not for you, and that when I wanted to quit, I could. It’s time.”

As I looked at him with a complicated mix of pride and regret, I felt the hot sting of tears.

Sadly, I reflected that I would never labor on game nights with the other football dads to erect the huge, inflatable football helmet that Dragon players run through before opening kickoffs, a desire I had harbored in secret since the first Carroll game I ever attended.

Instead, I would have to be content to be a Dragon fan, to sit in the stands and cheer on other dads’ sons as they participated in the grand, colorful, exhilarating tradition of Friday Night Lights.

So if I’m completely honest, I guess my affection for high school football is in some measure a pathetic attempt to recapture an experience I missed both as a youngster and as a father. That makes me a sad-freaking-sack, doesn’t it?

Of course, there’s more to it than that. I love the pageantry and hoopla of the whole affair – the marching bands, the drill squads, the pyramids of cheerleaders, the parade of flags carried across the field after every score.

And I love the purity of high school athletics. In this era of scandal-plagued college programs and the ego- and money-driven excesses of pro football, high school programs have largely escaped unscathed, at least so far.

It’s true that there are haves and have-nots in high school programs. Full disclosure, Southlake Carroll is definitely in the have category. Its well-heeled parents guarantee it. But money hasn’t corrupted the system at the high school level in the way it has in college and the pros.

A few of the best players on the field will go on to play college football at some level. But most will not. They are not playing for college scholarships or for the dream of an NFL contract. They play because they love the game, the comradeship, the teamwork, the satisfying rush of being involved in a desperate struggle with your brothers in arms. School spirit, a laughable concept anywhere else, has real meaning on the turf of a high school football stadium.

If you doubt it, just sit down and talk to a high school athlete. Have a real conversation and ask him or her what motivates them, what sends the football kids to the practice field in the second week of the hottest month in Texas? Why do they devoutly hope – as Dragon players do – that they’ll be compelled to leave their families’ holiday celebrations to attend Thanksgiving Day practices? Because that means they and their comrades are still in playoffs and still in the hunt for a state title.

These are great kids, the last best hope for this sad, battered country of ours. And I feel honored to tell their stories and record both their triumphs and their heartbreaks, even if it is for no pay in service to an audience so tiny it could fit in a good-sized phone booth.

You may see some changes in format this year. They’re intended to increase readability and to encourage brevity over tiresome bloviation, which I have elevated of late into a fine art.

Do you hear that? It’s high school football’s siren call. Go Dragons!

On a summer night in 1969

It’s been 49 years since man first landed on the Moon, and I remember that summer night with a clarity that both surprises and delights me.

I had been a science fiction fan ever since I graduated from Dick and Jane books to more substantive fare. I had traveled to many worlds, countless galaxies and across the universe and back in the company of adventurers, scientists, intergalactic space cops and extraterrestrials of every color, shape and size, aliens good and aliens very, very bad.

Going to the moon? Pish posh. Old hat.

Except, of course, that this was for real, and not some wild tale in Astounding Science Fiction or Amazing Stories, or one of Robert A. Heinlein’s brilliantly imagined novels like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or Starship Troopers, Glory Road or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Nope. This was really happening. Apollo 11 had landed on the surface of the Moon earlier in the day, and now Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were preparing to leave their lunar module (why not just call it a spaceship, dammit) and take a walk around – an event that would change history forever.

My friend Scott Medford and I had been outside most of the evening, too excited to sit in front of my parents' black-and-white console TV and watch news coverage.

Scott lived across the street, and we had been buds since elementary school. He was one year younger than me, but that had mattered little for most of our lives. Things were about to change, however.

I had graduated from high school two months before, and Scott had a year to go. The one-year difference in age was about to widen into a gulf. College men (ahem) did not chum around with high school kids. I didn’t make the rules, I just lived by them. We both were beginning to realize that in many ways, this would be our last summer together, and this night – when man first stepped on the surface of the Moon – would be our last great adventure.

July 20, 1969, was a typical summer night in West Texas. Hot, zero humidity, not a breath of wind. As we lay on the driveway across the street from my house on Big Spring’s Morrison Drive, the wide open sky spread before us and not a single cloud blocked the wide expanse of stars. Strangely, I don’t remember whether the moon was up or not. I should remember that, given the extraordinary circumstances of the day. But I don’t.

I do remember the stars, bright and razor-sharp. If you stared at them long enough, they seemed to envelop you, sweeping you up off the hot, sun-warmed cement and propelling you out into the vastness of space, stars and more stars above you, below you and on either side.

And yet, instead of gasping for breath in the vacuum of space, you were breathing easily, slow, deep breaths, the smell of the newly cut lawn down the street strong in your nostrils.

 Breathing in and out, in and out, in … and then jerking upright at the sound of my mother calling from the front door. “Kerry, Scott, they’re about to open the hatch,” she said, her voice tight with excitement.

We hurried inside and joined her and my father in front the TV to listen to an emotional Walter Cronkite describe the scene with growing delight and satisfaction.

None of us said a word. We sat huddled around the set and watched in complete silence, overwhelmed by the immensity of the occasion and lost in our own thoughts about what it all meant.

I remember feeling a little disappointed and then feeling guilty at being disappointed.

NASA, then as now, was run by engineers who had studiously scrubbed the romance and drama out of every vestige of the space program. For instance, that silly business of calling the astronauts' spacecraft a lunar module. Module? Holy Christ, save us from engineers!

To my teenage mind, NASA needed more Star Trek and less techno mumbo-jumbo. Thank God for Cronkite, who was as gleeful as a little kid and didn’t bother to hide it in stiff-upper-lip jabber like the NASA spokesmen did.

We watched Armstrong descend the ladder and step off into the lunar dust, uttering those famous words. For hours, we gazed in wonder as Armstrong and Aldrin went about their proscribed chores. Then Scott left for home and my parents went to bed. I stayed up until the moonwalkers were safely back in their spaceship, then turned off the TV and went back outside.

I lay down in the grass of our front lawn and looked unseeingly at the starry canopy above me. In eight days, I would turn 18, and I started college in a month. My body was abuzz with anticipation. About what, I did not know.