50-year Turkey Bowl tradition serves as reunion
Beverly Wendorff was hotter than the family oven roasting the Thanksgiving turkey. Her four boys were wrestling and scuffling and getting on her nerves. She told them to get out of the house and blow off steam somewhere else. So they called around the neighborhood, and soon two dozen or so boys assembled at a field of dreams where a game of touch football broke out, as if by spontaneous combustion.
That was 50 years ago in Albert Lea, Minn. And these boys to men have been at it every Thanksgiving since.
“People ask, ‘ Why do you still do it?’ ” Paul Wendorff tells USA TODAY Sports. “Well, we’re really competitive. We still want to beat each other. It’s all about love of the game, love of the guys.”
Roughly three dozen combatants are expected Thursday morning on the regulation field set in a natural bowl next to Fountain Lake, home of all the Turkey Bowls since Wendorff’s mother was the mother of its invention. Today’s players include a phalanx of younger generations, but three of the Originals come back each year, from near and far. Rick Harves has the easiest commute. He lives just up the hill.
“People have family reunions and school reunions,” Harves says. “Well, we think of this as a neighborhood reunion.”
Albert Lea’s first Turkey Bowl arrived seven weeks before the NFL’s first Super Bowl, before either was called by those names. Some of the teenagers who played in that first one are nearing Social Security age. Wendorff is 64. He lives in suburban Minneapolis. He’ll drive roughly 90 miles on In- terstate 35 to his old stamping grounds Thursday morning, play football for two or three hours and then drive back, dirty and sweaty, for a dinner with all the fixings.
Neighborhood Turkey Bowls are tradition in many towns and families across America, but few annual games are as old as this one. Old men morph into boys for a couple of hours, as if Fountain Lake were the Fountain of Youth, and they go by their boyhood nicknames again: Bengal, Bino, Bang-Bang, Black Dog, Muncies, Wein, Harv, Itch, Fatty.
“The reason we kept going all these years,” Black Dog says, “is no one wanted to stop.”
Black Dog, in real life, is Jim Nielson, 63. He lives in East Bethel, Minn., about 130 miles from Albert Lea, and will celebrate 39 years as a die caster next month. Harves, 64, is a retired elementary school teacher who continues to work as a substitute. Wendorff is a technology executive in Minneapolis. They are Originals who still strap on spikes on the fourth Thursday of every November.
“We’ve been through a lot together,” Wendorff says. “College, weddings, kids, funerals.”
Albert Lea is a city of about 18,000 named for a topographer who surveyed much of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa in the 1830s. The old meatpacking plant was a big employer back in the day. Now it’s the Mayo Clinic Health System, where some Turkey Bowl players can wind up postgame with broken fingers — or worse.
“We’re getting to that age where things happen,” Harves says. “We don’t have blocking and tackling but, believe me, we go all out.”
Turkey Bowl rules allow multiple forward passes on the same play with no regard to the line of scrimmage. It makes for wideopen action and sprinting helterskelter downfield.
“It’s always a run-and-gun game,” Wendorff says, “with long, beautiful passes.”
The Originals are in their 60s now. Their kids who play are largely in their 30s. Grandkids are getting in on the action, starting when they hit 10 or 12.
The first 50 Turkey Bowls have seen most kinds of weather the prairie offers. They’ve played in snow and sleet and rain and shine. One time they needed snow blowers to clear the field, though it’s in a natural bowl that blocks wind and keeps out cold. Wendorff has missed the game once, seven or so years ago, when black ice on Interstate 35 forced him to turn around. That Thanksgiving just wasn’t the same.
Marion Ross, the Happy Days actress who played Richie Cunningham’s mother, hails from Albert Lea, where the performing arts center is named for her. The TV series is set in the 1950s and first aired in the 1970s; the Turkey Bowl was born in that decade between. Mrs. C was a TV mom who loved her own kids and had enough room in her heart for the rest of the neighborhood. And that’s how the Originals remember Beverly Wendorff.
“We really lived Happy Days lives back then,” Nielson says. “The moms were, quote-unquote, stay-at-home moms, raising their kids. The dads worked in the factory and were home in time for dinner. Paul’s mother sort of was Mrs. C — that’s what she was really like. All the kids in the neighborhood could go to their house. Everyone was welcome.”