OPINION

The Friday night fix

If everything goes according to plan, today will be spent at Little Rock's venerable War Memorial Stadium. Bentonville battles North Little Rock at noon for the Class 7A championship. Pulaski Academy takes on Little Rock McClellan at 6:30 p.m. for the Class 5A crown.

My wife learned long ago not to count on me for Christmas parties the first two weekends of each December. Those weekends are set aside for the six high school title games. They play one on a Friday night and two on a Saturday each weekend.

High school football has always been a part of my life. My father traveled the state selling athletic supplies, and many of the adult males I knew as a boy were high school coaches. Dad officiated games on Friday nights and sometimes would take me with him, allowing me to stand on the sidelines. By the time I was playing high school football in the 1970s, he had retired from officiating so he could be in the stands watching my games.

Arkadelphia High School played in three state championship games during the decade of the 1970s. I watched the first one from the stands at War Memorial Stadium in 1970 as an 11-year-old boy. I played in the second one in 1976 as the team's center. And I broadcast the third one in 1979 as a college student who also worked as the sports director of the Arkadelphia radio stations.

For more years than I can count, I've hosted a radio scoreboard show from 10 p.m. until midnight for 12 consecutive Fridays each fall. The program runs on dozens of radio stations across the state, and I get more comments on it than any of the other outside media activities in which I'm involved. It just goes to show how much a part of the cultural fabric high school football is in this state.

In Friday Night Lights, his classic account of high school football in west Texas, H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger writes about spending the 1988 football season in Odessa: "I talked with hundreds of people to try to capture the other aspects of the town that I had come to explore, the values about race and education and politics and the economy. Much of what I learned about the town came from these interviews, but some of it naturally came from the personal experience of living there, with a wife and 5-year-old twin boys. Odessa very much became home for a year, a place where our kids went to school and we worked and voted and forged lasting friendships. It was in Odessa that I found those Friday night lights, and they burned with more intensity than I had ever imagined. Like thousands of others, I got caught up in them. So did my wife. So did my children. As someone later described it, those lights become an addiction if you live in a place like Odessa, the Friday night fix. ... Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness."

My memories drift back 41 years to my own "Friday night fix." The 1975 Arkadelphia team had finished 5-5, and few people expected us to contend for a state championship in 1976. As we won games and gained confidence, a transformation occurred. We began to think of ourselves as champions. We had what they now call swagger. A victory over a ranked Camden High School Panther team (the school no longer exists) got us ranked in both Little Rock newspapers. I remember that game vividly. I also remember the music that we played in our dressing room and on the bus--the album Mothership Connection by Parliament. We would sing and sway to George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell.

I remember the restaurants that would feed us free meals (the Maverick Steak House and the Big T) and the hundreds of cars that sported bumper stickers handed out by Citizens Bank that proclaimed "Arkadelphia Is A Winner."

I remember the major college recruiters who would show up at practices to watch our star tailback, Trent Bryant. Trent later played for the Arkansas Razorbacks and in the NFL for the Washington Redskins and the Kansas City Chiefs. I'll never forget the day Forrest City native Bill Shimek, the University of Oklahoma's star recruiter, showed up at practice. He was wearing a full-length leather jacket and mirror shades. He looked cool in a 1976 sort of way. As we stared at him during offensive line drills, our line coach, Willie Tate, said: "He's only here to see the pretty boy. He has no interest in you sweat hogs. So get back to work."

I especially remember wanting to please Coach Tate. He had coached me since the seventh grade and was one of the most important men in my life. With a record of 11-0-1 (we had tied Hot Springs Lakeside on a rainy homecoming night), we were favored over Mena in the state championship game.

In those days, title games were not all played at War Memorial Stadium, where we had won a semifinal contest against Cabot. The decision was made to host the final game on our home field, Henderson State University's Haygood Stadium. In retrospect, it was a huge mistake not to head back to Little Rock and the artificial turf. It rained all week, and the field was a quagmire. That muddy field nullified our speed advantage, and we trailed by six points late. Twice in the final minute, we appeared to have scored a touchdown. Each time, the officials marked us just short of the goal line.

The result still haunts me more than four decades later.

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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial on 12/02/2017

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