Where it all began
Leo’s football team takes me back to first newspaper gig
FREEPORT, Ill. — A jangling telephone jarred my pregnant wife awake in the wee hours of a Saturday morning more than a few years ago. A call at that hour is rarely a good thing, but I was in bed and accounted for, so I hadn’t been arrested, and our kids were not yet born, so they hadn’t been arrested, either.
This call was quite innocent, if a bit irritating. A local man who was in France on business was desperate to learn whether Freeport High School’s basketball team — the Pretzels, by the way; long story — had won its regional championship game that Friday night. In those pre-Internet days, he figured his best option was to try the sports editor of the local newspaper at home. The cost was his problem; the seven-hour time difference mine, though his apology was sincere, and he offered to buy me a beer after learning the Pretzels were on to sectional play.
Another reminder of how seriously folks took high school sports in this part of the world.
My first newspaper job out of college brought me to Freeport, and my current job at Leo High School brings me back. Our Lions faced the Lena-Winslow Panthers in the IHSA Class 1-A football semifinals Saturday in Lena. Lena-Winslow, 13 miles northwest of Freeport as the tractor pulls, was one of the farm-town teams we covered in the Journal-Standard, but rarely to the satisfaction of those Lenites and Winslonians who detected a bias toward conference rival Freeport Aquin, a Catholic school.
“You fish-eaters have to stick together,” a guy groused over the phone one day. He wasn’t calling from France.
And he wouldn’t have cared that meatless Fridays ended with Vatican II a decade earlier, so I didn’t tell him. Besides, fielding those complaints helped prepare me for the frequent carping I heard from White Sox followers over the years I spent running baseball coverage for the paper that owned the Cubs.
If my fish- eater friend is still alive, he gets the last laugh — Lena-Winslow was tough, smart and talented in putting it on us pretty good, 45-22.
Nothing against Freeport, but it was not what I had in mind for a career debut. Two years covering Al McGuire and Marquette basketball had me thinking Red Smith had better move over, an opinion no one else shared, unfortunately. Meanwhile, the Watergate story was turning journalism into a sexy line of work, so jobs were hard to come by, especially in Chicago, where Chicago Today was in its death throes and the Daily News was wobbling like a spent fighter.
So when Freeport called, I answered. I did three years here, and if I didn’t learn how to be a newspaperman, I learned how badly I wanted to be one, which was just as important. I was basically a one-man staff, so the sports section was going to be as good as I could make it, which is not a bad way to learn a trade. Colleagues who were spared this small-paper dues-paying missed out on something, I think. In hindsight, I wish I could have slowed down and enjoyed it more, but I was restless with ambition, so impatient to get where I needed to be that I didn’t always appreciate where I was.
Still, my daughter was born here, and I remain friends with some people I met here, so the good memories far outnumber the less good ones. Nearly all of them proved useful. Years later, when I was covering college basketball for a “big-time” paper in San Francisco, Stanford hired Dr. Tom Davis to coach hoops. The bio sheet distributed at Dr. Tom’s introduction revealed that he got his start coaching high school basketball in Illinois.
“Whereabouts?” I asked him.
“Real small town. You never heard of it.” “Try me.” “Milledgeville?” “The Milledgeville Missiles, the Ashton Aces, the Mount Carroll Hawks …” I remembered and recited every team in Milledgeville’s conference, plus its nickname. Dr. Tom probably thought I was an idiot savant, but he never let on, and we would get along just fine.
“Homecomings,” I think, are overrated. It would have been nice to close the circle with a Leo victory and a trip to the state finals, but we ran into a better team — Tyler Oakley is as good a back as we saw this year, and never let it be said that farm boys can’t tackle.
The longer a team extends a run, the harder it is to see it end. Leo’s kids — my kids — are hurting. I feel for them.