Cross-town rivals: Southlake Carroll 42, Colleyville Heritage 17

A soggy night

It took just 23 seconds to dispel any concerns we may have had about how a two-hour rain delay might affect the Southlake Carroll Dragons’ preparation for their matchup last night with Colleyville Heritage.

As remnants of the storm that disrupted games across the Metroplex drifted northeastward, the Dragons came roaring out of the chute, putting 7 points on the board in two plays, and never looked back. The stunned Panthers could only stand and stare.

And although we didn’t know it yet, Dragon history was about to be made. Here’s the setup.

After an opening kickoff return to the Heritage 43, a personal foul by the Panthers brought Carroll to the 28. From there, quarterback Will Bowers carried Carroll to the 1 with a toss to receiver John Manero, and star rusher T.J. McDaniel then swept into the end zone.

  Making history

Enter senior kicker Madison Martin, the first female ever to play varsity football for Southlake. A standout goalkeeper for the Lady Dragons soccer team, Martin is no stranger to football. She was a Dragon kicker in middle school.

But now she appeared under Friday night lights and lined up for the PAT, booting it squarely through the uprights, the first of five extra points she would make for the night.

After the game, Martin still was overflowing with excitement at being the first female to play varsity for the Dragons.

“It meant the world to me,” she told radio announcer Chuck Kelly. “I’m so excited. It’s unreal. I’m so blessed. To be honest, I’m still in shock.”

How did she feel after making her first kick?

“Oh, my gosh,” she said, “I saw it go through the uprights, and I said, ‘I did that. I’m out here. It’s real.’”

She admitted she worried about how the rest of the team would react to a woman in their midst. But the players and the coaches reacted just fine.

“I’m their teammate,” she said simply. “Family.”

Martin couldn’t have picked a better game to make her debut. After a sloppy season opener against South Grand Prairie, the Dragons put it all together for their 11^th meeting with Heritage.

The Panthers have never beaten the Dragons, but they had high hopes last night, despite the burden of history. With 4-star receiver Kam Brown and a trio of promising quarterbacks, Heritage hoped to lift the Dragon curse.

It never came close.

After its initial scoring drive, the Dragons piled up three more unanswered TDs, ending the half with a commanding – and insurmountable – 28-0 lead.

Looking at the numbers

Bowers, after his disappointing performance last week, showed marked improvement. He completed 65 percent of his passes for 169 yards on 26 attempts and 1 TD. Not only that, he peppered his relatively inexperienced receiving corps with on-target throws, completing passes to seven separate receivers. But for several balls that passed inexplicably through the hands of receivers, his stats would have been more impressive.

The most prolific receivers were Manero with 7 catches for 75, followed by Glenn Mitchell (5 for 45) and Wills Meyer (2 for 39, 1 TD).

Bowers also was good on the ground, piling up 90 rushing yards on 9 attempts and 1 TD. His 11.7-yard average exceeded even the phenomenal McDaniel.

As for McDaniel, who was bottled up by a stubborn South Grand Prairie defense last week, he was more effective against the Panthers D-line. His 63 rushing yards on 13 tries, while modest by his own high standards, came at critical times and his 2 TDs established Dragon dominance.

Meanwhile, the opportunistic defense took no prisoners. The Dragon secondary stymied the notable Brown throughout the decisive first half. Most of his 127 receiving yards, on 9 attempts, came in the second half, when Carroll had matters well in hand. He never reached the end zone.

Trey Flint carried most of the load at quarterback for the Panthers, completing a bit over half of his passes for 247 yards and no TDs. His counterparts A.J. Smith and Colin Losack weren’t factors.

Turnovers plagued the Panthers all night. They lost two fumbles and Flint threw one interception that disrupted promising drives.

One fumble near the end of the 3^rd period resulted in Carroll’s final score. Heritage had smartly marched to the Dragon 25. Flint coughed up the ball as he was hit behind the line.

Junior defensive end Brandon Howell snatched it up and rumbled 79 yards for the touchdown.

Howell described the play in a post-game radio interview.

“As I was running toward the goal, I saw myself in the jumbotron,” he said, referring to the screen on the Dragon Stadium scoreboard. “I saw someone coming up behind me and then (linebacker Graham) Faloona cut him off. Faloona just cut him off, and I sealed the deal.”

Not everything was peaches and cream. Penalties continue to be a problem. The Dragons were flagged 9 times last night for 90 yards, many for unforgiveable false starts.

Practice will iron out such glitches, and Dodge appears to be a firm believer in what he calls “reps and more reps.” Repetition in drills.

In his post-game interview with Dodge, Chuck Kelly was curious about a possible connection between last night and 2011, the last time Carroll won the state title.

“Coach, this is the first 2-0 start of the season for the Dragons since 2011,” he said. “Any significance in that?”

“No,” Dodge replied firmly. “None at all. It was just the guys taking care of business. We’ve got to continue to do that. We’ve got a tough one next week.”

Indeed, they do.

Mojo on the rise?

The legendary Odessa Permian Panthers are next up for the Dragons. The magical allure of Mighty Mojo has dissipated in recent years, but the West Texas ruffians are hungry to regain their former lofty perch in the state football hierarchy.

West Texas once was known as the heart of Texas high school football. The schools in Midland, Odessa, Abilene and San Angelo – with Big Spring being a relatively insignificant member of the club – formed a district known as the Little Southwest Conference. Known for gritty, hard-nosed football, its district winner frequently vied for the state title.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Permian surged from the pack and captured a string of state championships, ending up with a total of six. It was immortalized in Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, his epic tale of Permian’s 1988 season.

Over the years, the center of gravity for high school football has shifted from the windswept plains of the west to the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston suburbs. West Texas teams were left in the dust.

Permian dreams of changing that. To raise its state profile, Permian scheduled two highly regarded Metroplex teams this year. In their season opener, the Panthers hosted DeSoto, falling to the Eagles 38-28.

Next Friday, they’ll try to do better in Dragon Stadium. I say bury the past. The future is tinted green.

Go Dragons!

Season opener: Southlake Carroll 25, South Grand Prairie 8

'I like the W'

GRAND PRAIRIE -- To his credit, Riley Dodge didn’t try to sugarcoat the performance of his team in his first outing as head football coach of the Southlake Carroll Dragons.

“It wasn’t a great start,” he admitted ruefully in a post-game radio interview. “Things didn’t go the way we wanted. We had to grind it out. It wasn’t pretty, but I like the W.”

Oh, brother, was he right. The Dragons’ victory over the South Grand Prairie Warriors wasn’t pretty, at all. It was ugly, ugly as can be.

In fact, during the first half, both teams looked like drunken sailors on shore leave – energetic but ineffectual, determined but unfocused, loud but incoherent. It was the worst half of Dragon football I’ve watched in the last 12 years. The score at intermission? 0-0.

And trust me, the ordeal for fans watching the sordid affair from the stands was more acute than the score would indicate.

True, the second half was better, but not enough to wash out the bad taste left by the first.

Luckily for me, the Dragon Marching Band set up shop across the aisle from me, and its young musicians proved to be same inspiring, entertaining bunch they were when my daughter played among them.

The Torquemadas who run the band had the kids dressed in their heavy uniforms, tunics buttoned to the throat, gloves in place, despite the 93-degree heat. Their counterparts in the Warrior band were dressed in short-sleeves and shorts, but our kids were in full kit.

Their bright faces gleaming with sweat, they didn’t let the heat dull their enthusiasm. I was particularly fascinated by a pair of contrabass bugle players, two mere wisps of girls, one with a beet-red face who I feared might collapse at any moment from heat exhaustion.

Instead, she and her companion, their braided hair flying, were throwing their massive instruments around as if they were harmonicas, lifting them over their heads, swinging them to and fro in time to the music, their cheeks puffing out like Dizzy Gillespie as they played the deep-throated contras.

If the Dragons below had performed with the same intensity and skill as these two youngsters, it would have been a different game.

But it wasn’t. As I watched the brilliant Emerald Belles perform at halftime, I fervently hoped Dodge and his coordinators could organize their players into some semblance of a football team.

And they did. Less than two minutes into the third quarter, the Dragons asserted themselves in a dramatic way and indicated they were finally ready to play.

The shift occurred, as it often does, with a misstep by their opponents. Warrior quarterback Drake Logan had executed several shovel passes in the first half. Facing a 3-and-20 from his 12 yard line, he tried another.

Senior defensive end Alex Kingston sniffed out the play immediately, snatching the ball at the 15 and lumbering into the end zone. On the conversion, quarterback Will Bowers, appearing to hold for kicker Neal Koskay, instead spirited untouched for 2.

Kingston’s heads-up play was one of three turnovers that sealed the Warriors’ fate. Defensive back Brandon Howell snagged one Logan pass, and four-star recruit R.J. Mickens, perhaps the best athlete on the team, caught another.

After the game, Kingston was still buzzing with the thrill of it all.

“The adrenaline was pumping,” he said in a radio interview. “It was fantastic. The last time I scored a touchdown was on the freshman B team when I played running back. I’m honored to have scored the first touchdown of my senior season. I’ll remember this for the rest of my life.”

Dodge acknowledged Kingston’s heads-up play was the spark the Dragons needed.

“It gave us momentum,” he said. “It got the second half off to a good start.”

South Grand Prairie quickly responded, smartly marching 75 yards in a10-play drive that ended when Keodrick Young sprinted 25 yards for a touchdown. For the conversion, Young lined up in the wildcat and tossed the ball to Logan in a corner of the end zone for 2. That tied things up.

 The teams would remain knotted for the remainder of the 3^rd and well into the 4^th quarter. Then the Dragons surged ahead after struggling to the 3 in 12 tortuous plays.

From there, 3-star recruit T.J. McDaniel plunged over for his first, and only, TD of the night. Three minutes later, the Dragons tacked on a 24-yard field goal by punter Joe McFadden to lead 18-8.

If the Warriors can take any comfort from the loss, it would be their success in bottling up the talented McDaniel for most of the night. They kept him well under 100 yards in 24 carries, and denied him leading rusher honors for the Dragons. That laurel went to Bowers, the offensive star of the evening, such as it was.

But nothing came easy for Bowers last night. He completed barely 50 percent of his passes for a paltry 69 yards, overshooting his inexperienced receiving corps for much of the evening. True, he frequently was scrambling, harassed by sturdy Warrior linebackers who repeatedly shredded the O-line to disrupt passing and rushing schemes.

The passing game was one of the question marks hanging over the Dragons before the season began. After opening night, it still is. Consider this: Bowers completed passes to six different receivers. But McDaniel led the pack on the strength of 4 catches for 16 yards.

 Bowers also led in rushing. But most of his 97 rushing yards came on a 69-yard TD sprint around the left sideline with less than 4 minutes left.

By that time, the Dragon band had already struck up “Hey, Baby,” the traditional signal that Carroll victory is nigh.

Dodge was reminded by radio announcer Chuck Kelly after the game that at least he won his first game as Carroll head coach. It took his dad, the revered and beloved Todd Dodge, four games to get his first win. Did Riley plan on calling his dad to gig him, Kelly asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” he quickly replied.

His players know, too, that they came perilously close to screwing the pooch on this one.

Senior offensive lineman Henry Mossberg told Kelly his teammates had worked hard all summer (presumably unsupervised) to prepare for this season. Along with their coach, they had keenly anticipated this game.

“I have mixed feelings about tonight,” said Mossberg, a team leader. “I felt like I executed OK, but as a team we weren’t working together like we should. At halftime, we made some adjustments and worked some things out. The second half was better.”

Indeed. Mossberg and his teammates stiffened in the second half, allowing the offense to shake off its lethargy. Likewise, the D-line kept the young Warrior offense at bay, save for that one impressive drive in the 3^rd.

Despite the disapproving tone of this report, all is not doom and gloom. Last night’s desultory performance should serve as a wakeup call, a signal that much hard work lies ahead and an opportunity to identify what needs to be done.

Let’s hope so because the Big Cats are coming. Carroll hosts the Colleyville Heritage Panthers next Friday, cross-town rivals who have never beaten the Dragons and would love nothing more than to do so.

The week after, the Odessa Permian Panthers blow in from West Texas, eager to remind the Metroplex that once upon a time, they ruled Friday Night Lights.

The future of these Dragons still is shrouded in uncertainty. But one thing is clear. They love their new coach – and the legacy of greatness he represents. They trust him to carry them forward.

“Coach Dodge is the best coach I’ve ever had,” said Kingston on the greatest night of his young life. “He played on three state championship teams. He knows what it takes to get there.”

A man who stood out

John McCain and I were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But that is less important than the fact that he was a man of rare integrity, a man of genuine courage and a man of deep convictions.

In the present state of affairs our political system finds itself, McCain stood out.

History, I believe, will be kind to McCain, not because of the positions he took on political issues. In my opinion, he was wrong on most things. But history will record that in a time of political turmoil and bitter rancor, at a point in our history when we’ve never been more divided, McCain stood for respectful discourse and reasoned debate.

He could be a formidable opponent, but as a man of character, he did not demonize those who disagreed with him. At the end of the day, he believed in America, the country he sacrificed so much to serve, and all the principles for which it stands.

One final thought. I invite you to compare the touching tribute Barack Obama issued to the family of his former adversary with the perfunctory tweet Trump offered many hours after McCain’s death was announced.

The contrast between those two messages speak volumes. McCain, I suspect, would not have been surprised by either.

One T-shirt, two stories

A couple of days ago, I was in Michael’s buying Halloween decorations (yes, it’s early). At the checkout counter, the cashier, a young guy wearing a man bun and horn-rimmed glasses, eyed the T-shirt I was wearing (see below).

 “Is that a political statement or a personal one?” he asked mildly.

“A bit of both, actually,” I replied. “Definitely a political one. But I also worked in newspapers for almost 40 years.”

“A local paper?” he asked.

“Almost 30 years at The Dallas Morning News,” I said.

“Hmm. You look like a journalist,” he said.

“Whatever that means.”

“I don’t know,” the young man said with a shrug. “News people have a kind of air about them. A sense of gravity. Have a nice day.”

“I will,” I said, trying to hide my delight. “Don’t forget to vote.”

Yesterday morning, I’m wearing the same T-shirt as I wait in McDonald’s to get my sausage egg biscuit.

A man in his early 50s, with closely cropped steel-gray hair, was leaning against the wall, waiting for his order, too.

“You a journalist?” he asked without rancor.

“For almost 40 years,” I said, turning toward him.

“The hatred of journalists is pretty bad these days,” he said. “Or has it always been that way?”

“We’ve never had many friends,” I replied. “It’s the nature of the business. But this is the first time we’ve had a president who is trying to get some of us killed.”

That surprised him, but he didn’t take the bait. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “the far right is pretty extreme. But you know, the left is just as bad. I've got to where I can’t stand to watch Fox News or CNN.”

“I don’t agree with the comparison,” I said. “But here’s something I do know. This fake news business is pure crap, the strategy of a guy with a lot to hide.”

“Oh, the press just slants everything,” he said, warming to the topic. “They write about what they want to and ignore everything else. What about that meeting between Clinton and Lynch?”

I could see where this was heading and decided the McDonald’s checkout counter was a lousy place for a political debate.

“That’s all you’ve got?” I asked, taking my breakfast biscuit and turning for the door. “All the accusations against Trump and his minions, all the lies, and all you’ve got in response is Clinton and Lynch? All I say to that, my friend, is that it’s not the same. Not even close. Have a nice day.”

Two stories, one T-shirt. I don’t know what it means.

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.

The transformative power of storytelling

Storytelling is a noble art, and I guess I should think so. In one way or another, I’ve been chasing stories my entire working life in a never-ending effort to discover the most effective way to tell them.

At UNT Health Science Center, where I ended up after almost 40 years in the newspaper business, the president calls my team his “storytellers.” I can’t think of a higher compliment he could have paid us.

Even before I made a living by finding and telling stories, I sought them diligently as a kid, tracking many of them down at the Howard County Library in Big Spring. I devoured the entire Hardy Boys series – following Joe and Frank and their buddy Chet as they hopped in their jalopy and pursued criminals all over the countryside.

Then I moved to the science fiction section – soaring to the stars and traveling back in time to roam with the dinosaurs – and on to countless other books that carried me away from the dull, dusty streets of West Texas and took me around the world and beyond.

I was particularly entranced by the tales of Robert E. Howard, an author of fantasy stories set in a mythical time and place. If the name isn’t familiar, his most famous character probably is – Conan the Barbarian.

Howard lived most of his life in Cross Plains, Texas, only a few miles from where I was born. He, too, was intoxicated by stories – stories of his own making that took him out of Cross Plains, a tiny dot on the map peopled by peanut farmers and tradesmen, and took him to the ancient land of Cimmeria. There, Conan, a fearless warrior stout of heart and handy with a blade, fought wizards, defeated armies single-handedly and rescued half-clad slave girls.

What Howard’s racy novels were doing on the staid and sanitized bookshelves of Howard County Library, I’ll never know. But I found them and spent a delightful summer with my head buried in their gory, mystical and sexy pages.

As I grew older, my taste in literature matured. By 13, my two favorite authors were Ernest Hemingway and Leon Uris, the latter a best-selling author in the 1950s, '60s and '70s of such novels as Exodus, Armageddon and Battle Cry. I decided I wanted to be a writer like them, to tell stories like they did, stories that would mesmerize readers like their stories did me.

When I discovered both had worked for newspapers before becoming authors, that settled things. I would be a newspaper man, learn the writing trade like my heroes and eventually become a novelist.

As a young reporter, I ran across a book that had a profound impact on my life and my world view.  During a frenzied 72-hour reading marathon, I consumed Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, an exquisitely told tale about the corrosive lure of power, the inescapable burden of guilt and the soothing balm of love.

Great literature can change the course of our lives, and great stories can teach us lessons we carry with us forever. So it was with Warren’s magnificent opus and me. It taught me the world is a messy, complicated place, and I began to question my childish notion that it divided neatly into clear-cut issues of black and white. After reading of Jack Burden's final decision to "go into the convulsion of the world," I would never look at life the same way again. The boy had become the man.

Some years ago, I received additional insight into the power of storytelling. During one of my trips to Mexico City as the Dallas Morning News’ international editor, I came across a photograph in a weekend street market not far from the DMN bureau there.

It shows a Mexican farmer leaning on the wall of his home, his saddled horse standing ready beside him. In the mid-distance, a wisp of smoke rises from a mountaintop.

It’s a striking photo, very atmospheric, full of shadow and mystery. The farmer stares pensively ahead, his arms crossed, his mood impenetrable.

In some ways, it’s a stereotypical image of Mexico, from the battered sombrero on the farmer’s head to the long serape in which he’s wrapped. But it also demands explanation and illumination. I stood looking at it for a long while before moving to the next artisan’s stall.

But I couldn’t get the photograph out of my head. I turned back and studied it for minutes more. The photographer, a distinguished man in his 70s, white hair swept back from his forehead, watched without comment as I peered intently at the photo and, again, moved on.

On my third pass, he rose from his chair and approached me.

“I think perhaps I should tell you a story,” he said in perfect English.

“He is waiting for his wife. Soon they will leave their home for safety. Because you see, the smoking mountain is a volcano that erupted back in the 1940s in a cornfield in Michoacan. In less than a week, the man’s home and fields will be covered in lava forever.”

The photographer had read me correctly. I was captivated and enthralled by the image, but it took the story attached to it to close the deal. The photograph now hangs in a front room of my home, above the stuffed leather chair where I do most of my reading.

Stories, you see, are important. They are vital. They bring meaning and offer context to the world. Oregon author Brian Doyle said they “are ways to jazz your life – and maybe that shoves us a little closer toward light.”

In my current job, we look for stories that illustrate the important work we do at the Health Science Center and for stories that demonstrate how deeply invested we are in the Fort Worth community.

It’s true that we concentrate on stories that celebrate our successes rather than dwell on our failures. But we’re governed by the conviction that we craft a stronger, more compelling message if we employ the allure of good story-telling, rather than a rah-rah, strongly promotional approach.

At a recent conference I attended in Seattle, where editors of university publications from across the country gathered, one of the main messages was about the effectiveness of story-telling. The emphasis was on finding good stories and telling them in the most effective way. Marketing and promotion rarely came up.

During the meeting, tributes were offered up to Doyle, longtime editor of the University of Portland’s Portland Magazine. A regular at the annual gatherings, he died last year of cancer.

 “I am a storycatcher,” he once said, “charged with finding stories that matter, stories about who we are at our best, who we might still be, because without stories we’re only mammals with weapons.”