Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Not the Seasons I Expected
SECOND INSTALLMENT
PEEWEE LEAGUE DREAMER
Inspired by The Big Shootout, in the fourth grade I played peewee league football. The Whirlwinds of South School wore white jerseys with red numerals, which somewhat resembled the Hogs’ away uniforms. The coach put me at quarterback, chiefly because I could remember the plays and help the other boys get lined up in the right spots. The only downer was that I never actually threw the football, which, at regulation size, was too big for my hands. Whenever our coach called a pass-play, I took the snap from center and lateraled to the halfback, our best runner and passer. My role thusly circumscribed, you could say I was little more than a game manager.
At my insistence, I wore number 10, same as Bill Montgomery, the Hogs’ dapper quarterback. On television, I had noted everything about him: the shape of the white facemask on his red helmet, the white sweat bands up his forearms, the slash of eye black on each cheek, the hand towel that hung out of the front of his white pants. Bill Montgomery was who I wanted to be. One day I, too, would quarterback the Hogs, a dream as vivid to me as was the Ponderosa Ranch on the “Bonanza” TV show: Facing a crucial third down, I signal timeout to the referee and trot to the sideline to confer with Coach Broyles. I wipe my face with a towel, then put my helmet back on and, with my chinstrap dangling, trot back to the huddle where I take one knee and look up into the expectant eyes of my Razorback teammates and bark out the play call.
My goodness, how fantastic was that going to be!
Actually, the odds of any such future for me were quite long. My father was five feet eight, and my mother stood at five feet — both of them the smallest of their several siblings. When my mother was pregnant with me, she and my father had fretted over whether they’d have a boy or a girl, a concern my plainspoken grandfather had considered misplaced. “You two had just better worry about not having a damned midget,” he declaimed.
Like The Big Shootout the previous December, the opener in 1970 against Stanford was also broadcast on national television, thus perpetuating my belief that Razorback football was a matter of world-shaping influence. Led by Jim Plunkett, Stanford jumped out to a 27-0 lead. Then in the second quarter, with the score 27-7, a black Razorback player named Jon Richardson caught a 37-yard touchdown pass from Bill Montgomery to cut the lead to 27-14. Until that day, it had never occurred to me that a black guy would play for the Razorbacks—or for any opposing team, for that matter. All players on both sides in The Big Shootout were white, and rest assured when the Hogs had played Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl the previous January, all the Mississippi players had been white as well.
Did I realize that Jon Richardson’s appearance in this game represented something momentous? No, I did not. Jonesboro was still mostly segregated, with a so-called “colored” neighborhood just east of downtown. Sure, there were two black girls in my fourth-grade homeroom class, but I didn’t think of them as symbolic in any way. They liked me and thought I was cute, and I liked them and thought they were cute, too. There were no black boys on my peewee league football team, and the only black man I knew did odd jobs for my grandfather. Nevertheless, sports can open minds: If a black player wore a Razorback jersey and lined up at running back behind Bill Montgomery, that was fine by me.
Late in the fourth quarter, the Hogs cut the lead to 34-28, but Bill Montgomery came up inches short on fourth-and-two inside the fiveyard line. While this took some of the shine off of my number 10 peewee-league jersey, I still then dreamed of quarterbacking the Razorbacks one day. But that lingering ambition was soon to suffer a mortal blow.
One Saturday morning, the South School Whirlwinds, in our white helmets, were pitted against a crosstown rival, the black-helmeted East School. The dew-soaked grass was tracked with footsteps, and as the sun rose higher my team faced a crucial fourth and one. We all huddled with our coach, a gaunt man with what I took to be the world’s largest Adam’s apple. He called a quarterback sneak. This was to be my moment to shine. All 11 of us fourth-graders broke the huddle with an almost synchronous clap.
I lined up under the center, but across the line of scrimmage, staring at me with his pit bull eyes, was a thick-necked linebacker named Scott Reed, a savvy player whose father was the football coach at Jonesboro High. Certainly, Scott Reed knew I was about to attempt a quarterback sneak. In an effort to confuse me, he darted around behind his nose guard, crouching off his left rump, then his right rump, then back and forth like a madman. I glanced at our coach, who, in a show of confidence, declined to call a timeout. My eyes went back to Scott Reed in his dastardly black helmet, and I knew that one of two things was going to happen when the ball was snapped: I would either go left of the center and Scott Reed would go right and I’d easily pick up the first down. Or I would go left and he would go left, too, and it would get ugly. Obviously, if I went right of the center, the same calculus of limited possibility applied. Only when the ball was snapped did I decide which way I would go.
Woozy and likely concussed, I walked slowly to the sideline. After I gathered my wits, I examined my heretofore scuff-free white helmet and was impressed by the long black scar near the crown; there was even a rough-grained chip in the white of my helmet. Meanwhile, the game went on and whenever one of my teammates came to the sideline, I showed off my scarred helmet as if to justify why I hadn’t picked up the crucial first down. But our peewee league coach didn’t call any more quarterback sneaks, and my duties as the team’s signal caller were even further narrowed. I became a caricature of the quarterback as game manager.