WASHINGTON STILL WINS
A deadly tornado last week demolished a large chunk of this central Illinois town, but there was joy and hope Saturday, even as its football team lost 44-14
With 2:51 to go in the game, Washington guard Brogan Brownfield left high school football forever.
The fireplug All-Mid-Illini guard came to the sideline, mingling there with the other starters who had been yanked by coach Darrell Crouch in this state 5A semifinal game against Sacred Heart-Griffin on SHG’s home field. The starters had been pulled because the game was out of hand and younger players needed to get a taste. And then Brownfield began to sob. Not just trickling tears that smeared his eye black. There were those, yes. But they were punctuated by sobs. From the belly. From the heart.
Brownfield hugged his brethren there in front of the many fans who had bused in from Washington. And his teammates hugged him back. And they began to cry also. And sob. Who wouldn’t? I tell you, if there’s more emotion, more real-world conflict and pain that teenage athletes could face in the week of the biggest sporting event of their lives, well, let’s not think of it.
Yes, the Panthers lost to the Cyclones in a 44-14 rout, and that’s a tough way to go out after an undefeated, 12-0 record brought you one win away from the state championship game. And if you know as a senior that a loss means the end of your football playing days — forever — it stings even more. Indeed, as coach Crouch had said, “Baseball, basketball — those sports you can play pickup games. Football, (if you don’t play in college) it’s over.”
But throw in the fact that a massive, terrifying EF4 tornado touched down Sunday in Washington and cut a swath of destruction through neighborhoods where many of the players lived, and you have the recipe for near mental breakdown.
On Thursday night Crouch had said that everyone on the team was “tired and exhausted from all the interviews.” Not to mention they had worked physically to help clear some of the debris from the hardest hit parts of town. And their own stories of loss were incredible.
Ten players lost their homes in the storm. Others had wind-damaged houses. Players were living with teammates, sleeping wherever they could. While the phone lines, gas and electricity were out during the first two days after the tornado, the only way Crouch could find players was via cellphones or sometimes not at all. One sophomore linebacker disappeared to Chicago to stay with relatives, and nobody knew.
Brownfield himself went down into his basement as the storm was roaring toward his family home at 900 Westminster Drive. He and his family huddled against the southwest wall.
“It was definitely an emotional roller coaster,” he said Friday, thinking about the chaos. “Right after it happened I was just so happy that my family was OK, and I know they were extremely happy that I was OK. And then I went outside and saw the rest of the neighborhood.” And? “It was shock.” It was as if a runaway, gargantuan bulldozer had lurched through the scene. Everything was jagged, flattened. The Brownfields’ house was destroyed. Their cars were demolished. People came out of basements the way innocents in a nuclear war might when the mushroom cloud is gone.
“By the time I got out, other people around us were out — at least a considerable number were,” Brownfield said. “People came running to our house, looking for all of us.”
Did he remember the noise of the destruction?
“It happened so fast that the sound really didn’t stick with me,” he replied. He though for a while. “I guess it sounded like a house falling over.”
To see the devastation is to marvel that only one man was killed in Washington. “As you can imagine, with 190 mph winds, it was terrible,” Tazewell County Coroner Jeff Baldi said of that death. But it was Sunday, 11 a.m.; people were in church, people were working in their yards; homes in central Illinois almost all have basements. Had this happened at night — no sense thinking about it.
The stories of disorientation and loss for the Panther players were everywhere, as they were for many Washington students. Quarterback Colton Marshall was working at the Tractor Supply Co. on Sunday morning when he heard the civil defense sirens. He hitched a ride and ran the rest of the way to his house on Hampton Road to find it vanished. But his family was OK.
Stories like that were everywhere as citizens gathered at the 5-Point Community Center to receive charity blankets, food, diapers and other goods Friday. Brownfield’s mother, father, and sister were there as the team practiced across the street at the partly damaged Panthers’ home field.
Mike Brownfield, the dad, who played tight end for stellar Washington teams in the mid1980s, took a ride with a visitor, through the police ID-checking post, into the subdivision where his house once stood.
He descends once more into the basement that saved his family. It is wet and filthy. The mayhem lies above. There are boards, shingles, tree branches, chairs, ruined cars — including the red VW bug that daughter Hannah, who turned 16 Tuesday amid the rubble, was going to drive. She could drive it yet, if she climbed in through the windshield and used her feet like Fred Flintstone.
“We are lucky,” said Mike, who works at a retirement home in Metamora. He chuckles grimly. “Our family’s good. We’re rebuilding. Right here.” What about the ruined trees? “I hate raking leaves, anyway,’’ he said.
In the stands at the game, 18-year-old Washington senior Drake Jackson still cheers feverishly for his team, his town. He wears only shoes, orange sweatpants and a white, fake-fur, Sonny Bono-style vest in the frigid air with a windchill in the teens. Isn’t he cold? “Not at all!” he replies. He has cotton stuffed in one nostril, which is bleeding. He got so excited he banged faces with another student a few minutes ago. It happened at an earlier Panthers game too. “I have to earn my heat,” he continues excitedly. “These are my friends, my brothers.”
Actually, Jackson does have a new brother. His name is Camden, and he was born just two hours before the tornado.
“I was at the hospital during the storm when he came out,’’ Jackson said.
What a legacy for that little kid, huh? And for all the Washington players. And for the community, which has banded like one family.
“Some are going back to nothing,” Crouch said of his players after the game.
Not really. They have each other. They have the world.