All in a name: Check local playing fields
Once, in my formative journalistic years, forgetting for a moment that satire should be left to masters like Lenny Bruce and Oscar Wilde, I took liberties with an opening paragraph to a high school football story.
Hot Springs, fallen then from its 1970s and early 1980s peak periods, played Northside High one September night in Fort Smith. The final score escapes memory but the outcome was never in doubt. (If memory serves me correctly, the next day’s sports section led with the story that Oaklawn would introduce the pick-six wager, which it called Classix, the following season. The Trojans are still around, thankfully, even if Classix is not.)
Drawing upon the host school’s stadium and mascot, I penned this line: “Checking into the Mayo-Thompson clinic, the Hot Springs Trojans learned Friday night, can be a grisly experience.”
Mayo-Thompson Stadium, on Rogers Avenue, is one of the great playing sites in Arkansas football. It has hosted many a game pitting the Northside Grizzlies and crosstown rival Southside. Sports writers invariably would call that the battle of Rogers Avenue even if Southside is on Gary Street, down the road from Hardscrabble Golf Course.
That line about the Trojans neither won many friends nor influenced many people. Joe Reese, then the Trojan head coach, had enough questions about that team to engage with a local sports writer thinking he was Skip Bayless. That fence was easily mended and Reese supplied the key quote in a later playoff loss to Fort Smith Southside. Regarding a key interception that cost his team the ball and momentum, Reese said, “I didn’t make the call, but I’ll accept responsibility.”
Reese, like Lou Holtz, tended to have a quote to suit any occasion. Previewing a game against a struggling team, he said one day, “I’m not sure what (offense) they’ll come out in, because what they’ve been using hasn’t been working.”
After a home game one night that the Trojans could have named the score against Bryant, then the highest of snacks on the schedule, Reese was asked what he exchanged with opposing coach John Brainerd postgame. “He shook hands,” Reese said, “and said ‘thanks,”’ for keeping the score down. (How times have changed: No Garland County team dares play Bryant now, which has won four straight Class 7A titles at the state’s highest classification level. Thirteen seasons have passed since a local team won an 11man state title — Fountain Lake in 2009.)
What the Arkansas Activities Association calls Week Zero, the first round of season openers, is fast approaching. Games Aug. 26 include Lake Hamilton at Lakeside and Vilonia at Hot Springs. No matter what you may hear locally, the game to watch in Week One is Benton vs. Bryant on Saturday, Aug. 27. The Salt Bowl, that Saline County pairing is called, and they play it in Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium, where the occupant of longest standing (hint: its campus is in Fayetteville) does not play again until 2025.
Knowing the local teams’ mascots by heart and some of the history involved, I might be really into the new season with a spectator’s guide.
It’s confusing enough that so many names sound alike: Fountain Lake, Lake Hamilton and Lakeside. Mascots tend to run together with not enough Sand Lizards (Dardanelle) or Wampus Cats (Conway) to break the monotony. One thinks of our sports writers who committed these names to memory, sometimes at an editor’s urging. Now, it’s a matter of unsolving the playing sites.
The Lake Hamilton-Lakeside game will be played at what the host school now calls Lakeside
Stadium. In my mind, the ballyard on Malvern Road remains Austin Field, named for the late Rams coach who often said, “The best place to be on a Friday night in the fall is a high school football game.
Some schools have sold naming rights to their stadium or playing field. Banks and automobile dealers, in particular if it helps the athletic budget or other school needs, fine. Other times, a former school official or coach receives the honor: Stanley May at Mountain
Pine, Don Phillips at Jessieville, former Principal Larry Beckham at Fountain Lake; the latter school named its new basketball area in honor of past Superintendent Irvin J. Bass. Eagle Field has suited Cutter Morning Star’s needs all these years.
That said, what of Hot Springs? Three men (you may think of more) come to mind when tracing that school’s football success. The school has thus honored Reese and the late Tommy J. Holt, the longtime principal.
But why isn’t Bobby Hannon’s name on something? All he did was win a state championship two of his first three years with a program that had fallen on hard times, therein hiring an all-star staff, some with Arkansas Razorback connections.
These schools have overriding concerns, I know, besides naming stadiums — paying teachers adequately comes to mind. And we haven’t even started on basketball arenas.