The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (24 page)

The game was invented in 1934 by Stephen E. Epler, the coach at Chester High School in Nebraska, who was trying to figure a way for tiny schools with not many boys to play football. The schools in Coach Epler's neck of the prairie must have been
really
tiny. When the world's first six-man game was played on Sept. 26, 1934, four schools had to contribute players to put two teams on the field. Chester and Hardy Highs battled Alexandria and Belvidere Highs to a 19-19 tie.

The team that Coach Epler devised consists of a center, two ends and three backs. Most of the game rules are the same as for 11-man football, but with some important differences.

A six-man football field is 80 years long and 40 wide, not 100 long and 50 wide. The goal posts' uprights are 25 feet apart, not 23, and their crossbars are nine feet high, not 10. Each quarter of play is 10 minutes, not 12. The ball must be moved 15 yards for a first down, not 10. A field goal counts four points, not three, and the scoring for extra points is reversed—a kick is worth two points, and a run or pass is worth one.

Also, the quarterback—or whoever takes the ball from the center—can't run across the line of scrimmage with the ball unless he hands off to another player and then receives it back. Also, any member of the team is eligible to receive a pass.

These rules, plus the sparcity of bodies on the field, make for fast, wide-open, razzle-dazzle play, full of options, end-arounds, reverses and faked punts and field goals. It isn't unusual for the center to catch a touchdown pass. It isn't unheard-of for the center to
throw
one—to the quarterback. High-scoring games are usual, replete with 60-yard runs and 70-yard passes, lacking the piles of bodies at the line of scrimmage that characterize 11-man football.

“I tell my friends in Dallas, if you want to see some
real
football, come down to Milford on a Friday night,” says Max Kimrey, who lives in Milford and commutes to work in Mesquite. “Compared to six-man, regular football is plain boring.”

Trent beat Panther Creek, 89-69, last year. Lazbuddie beat Wilson, 64-44. Strawn beat Newcastle, 52-47.

“The only time six-man is boring is when it's a real tight defensive game,” says Joseph Calderon, a 1989 Milford graduate who has driven 75 miles from Tarleton State University in Stephenville to watch his old teammates scrimmage Gordon. “In the game for the district championship last year, we beat Covington, 22 to 20. That was pretty boring.”

But scoring can get monotonous sometimes, too. Hence the 45-point rule: If a team has its opponents down by 45 points or more after the first half, the game is over.

“We played Moran last year,” says Mr. Calderon, “and we had them 50 to nothing at halftime. They drove 200 miles down here and then had to leave after only 20 minutes on the field. Their coach told our coach, ‘You've got to come to Moran next year. You'd better be there.' It was kind of a dare. He was pretty upset.”

According to the rules of the University Interscholastic League, which governs public school sports in Texas, only high schools with fewer than 100 students may compete in six-man football. A decade ago, 58 teams played it. This year there are 86 six-man teams, and their number is growing. “As the small towns of Texas get smaller, so do their schools,” says Bob Young of the UIL.

Nearly all the six-man schools are west of I-35, in the barely populated vastness of the West Texas cattle and oil empire. Milford and the other schools in its district—Covington, Blum, Buckholts, Aquilla, Abbott, Bynum and Boles Home of Quinlan—are the eastern end of six-man country.

In the 1940s, Milford had seven churches, two cotton gins and 30 businesses. Most of them are gone now. The town's population hasn't shrunk as small as many of Texas' old farm communities, but it hasn't grown, either. About 800 people lived there at the end of World War II. Its official city limit sign says 664 live there now. One hundred ninety-three children attend Milford School. Forty-nine are in high school.

Seven of Milford's 10 football players graduated last spring, so Coach Ray and Coach Lane are constructing a new team around the remaining lettermen and a transfer from Waxahachie. “We don't have much experience,” Coach Ray says, “but we have speed.”

At 12:50 p.m. on the season's first game day, every Milford School student, from innocent kindergartener to worldly senior, gathers in the cafeteria to pump school spirit into the Bulldogs. The cheerleaders bounce and jump. The boys in the audience bark like bulldogs. The coaches and the two seniors on the team, James Claiborne and Carl Essary, deliver speeches promising great effort and victory. Ron Scott, whose custom-made poems have become a pre-game tradition at Milford School, reads his new work, “The Battle at Moran.” The room quivers with cheers and laughter. The kindergarteners, seated on the floor at the front of the room, stare wide-eyed at the glory of it.

About 2 p.m., the players start loading the school bus for the drive to Moran, the longest trek the Bulldogs will take this season. “Oh, I love these trips to West Texas,” Mr. Scott says. “You go so far out there you think you're going deer hunting, and you find the little bitty town—some of them don't even have a water tower—and you play the game, and then you get a couple of 99-cent hamburgers and a big Coke, and you get on the bus and come back home. That's what it's all about. It's fantastic! It's a thrill!”

“This is going to be a mad house,” Coach Ray says. “Look at all this stuff. It's like we're going to camp.” When the football equipment and cheerleaders' megaphones, coolers, duffel bags, makeup boxes and radios, eight cheerleaders, 11 football players, coaches, managers and sponsors are piled in, Coach Ray issues an official admonition—“I don't want you acting up and making a lot of noise. There's no call for that”—and at 2:30 the bus departs with Mr. Scott at the wheel.

Highway 22 to Hillsboro, then to Fort Worth via I-35W, then to Cisco via I-20, then to Moran via Highway 6. It's a long, long road, and hot. All the windows are wide open, but the breeze generated by the bus's movement is hot, too. The passengers settle down with books, magazines and Walkmans, and sweat.

At 3:30, Coach Ray hands out sandwiches and soft drinks. At 4:15, as if obeying some silent signal from nature, the eight cheerleaders simultaneously open their kits and launch a fluster of lipstick application, brushing and spraying of hair and painting of nails, beclouding the bus in cosmetic chemicals. At 5:15, Mr. Scott stops in Ranger for gas. Coach Ray declares the rest of the way to Moran a “quiet time,” to “get our minds set.”

The time and temperature sign at the Ranger bank says its 98. At 6:20, the bus pulls into Moran, population 335, and heads for the school at the foot of the town water tower. The players catch sight of the football field and gasp.

“God! Look at that! That's no field, it's a cow pasture!”

“They must have plowed that field, boy!”

“I'll bet they have rodeos on it!”

“Don't worry about the conditions,” Coach Ray says. “Just think what you're doing. We're here to play football.”

The field is a brown adobe brick of a place, strewn with rocks and a few sprigs of long-deceased grass, not of the kind usually grown on football fields, but the kind that the buffalo and longhorns used to eat. In both end zones and on the north sideline, where the visitors' cheerleaders will stand, are huge beds of red ants large enough to wrestle small puppies to the ground. A tangle of mesquite and prickly pear is threatening to swallow the visitors' bleachers, and there's no sideline bench for the visiting team.

A Moran school official explains to John Lilley, the Milford principal, that things are as they are because of a dearth of water and the electric company's unwillingness to erect a pole for a line to a pump that would bring water from a distant tank to the field. “We put up a new scoreboard and built a new fence and a new pressbox this year,” he says. “We were hoping that's what you would notice. We plan to have a new field next year.”

In the Milford dressing room, Coach Ray says, “I tell you what, guys. That out there is enough to make me want to go home at halftime.”

At 7:30, when the announcer calls for the national anthem, Milford's eight cheerleaders and eight fans and the whole populace of Moran lift their voices, but they fade to a dry whisper under the sun, still a vicious disk high above the scoreboard. There's no flag on the pole the singers are facing, but after the anthem and the school songs are finished, someone goes into the school and gets one and raises it.

Milford kicks off, but after only a few plays Moran fumbles. Milford's Scooter Lynch recovers, and John Morgan later runs it in for a Milford touchdown.

But Moran is tougher this year. Clouds of dust rise from the field with each tackle. At the end of the first quarter, Milford leads only 6-2, and by the end of the half the score is only Milford 19, Moran 2.

Mercifully, darkness has fallen. The moon is high in the southwest. While the coaches pep-talk their teams at opposite ends of the field during halftime, the crowd watches two sparrow hawks chase bugs in the glare of the field lights.

Then John Morgan, standing near his own goal line, receives the opening kickoff of the second half and runs it all the way back for a touchdown. Moran, badly rattled, fumbles on its next possession, and Milford scores again. And again. And again.

“Atta boy, Dawgs!” Ron Scott cries. “You're looking mighty good from here!”

“Get with it, Dawgs!” somebody screams at the Moran team, which also is Bulldogs. “They're laughing at you!”

With 6:21 left in the third quarter, Milford leads, 40-2, and is only a touchdown away from 45-pointing Moran again. In the nick of time, though, Moran scores, and the third quarter ends with Milford leading only 40-8. Mr. Scott shakes his head. “We haven't won this yet,” he says. “I've seen a lot happen in a 10-minute quarter.”

What happens is Milford's Finel Brown passes to Ty Evans for one touchdown, and John Claiborne runs it in for another, and the game ends, 54-8, with 2:39 left on the clock.

The players, who have been on their feet for the whole game because there was no bench for them, shower and dress quickly and climb onto the bus. “Not so fast,” says John Lilley, the Milford principal. “The locker room is a mess. That's not the way we want to be remembered here. Get back in there and clean it up.”

Within half an hour of the game's end, the bus is back on the highway. It passes through a silent Cisco, where the bank sign says it's 10:30 and 95 degrees, and on to Eastland and a stop at MacDonald's for cheeseburgers and fries and Cokes. “Mind your manners,” Mr. Scott tells the kids as they step off the bus. “Remember, you
are
the best.”

Then it's on and on through the night, the kids chattering, bass thumping like heartbeats from the low-turned radios, 18-wheelers roaring past the open windows, the breeze cooling, oh, so slowly. Mr. Scott misses the turn from I-20 to I-35W, and picks his way down some two-lane alternate route past sleazy bars and adult video stores somewhere in Fort Worth, through half a dozen darkened little towns, vaguely southward. The kids gleefully jeer his mistake, and sing songs, and at last, near Waxahachie, only 20 miles from home, they fall asleep.

When the bus stops in front of the Milford School gym, they fumble for their belongings, stumble out the door, mumble muffled goodnights and disappear into the darkness toward their cars and homes. It's three o'clock.

“This was not a trip,” Mr. Lilley says. “This was an odyssey.”

October 1989

HANGING IN

From the mid-1970s to the mid-'80s, the skyline of downtown Dallas changed almost daily. I would be driving to work in the morning and see a skyscraper that I could swear hadn't been there the morning before. The civic tub-thumpers were bragging that the state bird of Texas was the construction crane. Of course, to make way for all those shiny new towers, the developers were buying up and tearing down the more modest structures that had been downtown Dallas. And when the bust came and the construction crane migrated elsewhere, they left vacant lots and empty, decaying buildings where small businesses once had thrived. Still, a few survived
.

“I
‘LL
TELL
YOU
A
STORY
YOU
CAN
TELL
YOUR
GRANDCHILDREN
SOME
-day,” Basil Sideris was saying. “There was a little newspaper lady, by name Margaret. This is a true story. You remember Margaret, the old newspaper lady, Frank? She used to work up and down?”

Mr. Sideris' friend, Frank Foster, nodded. Mr. Sideris' only customer at the moment, he was eating meat loaf and drinking Coca-Cola from one of those old-fashioned little 6½-ounce bottles.

“Margaret was about 80 years old,” Mr. Sideris was saying. “She had two newspaper stands. One by the Baker Hotel and one in front of Neiman's. At these stands was a stack of newspapers and a brick to hold them down and a cigar box on the top. Are you listening? A cigar box on the top.

“The old lady would go around from one comer to the other and collect her nickels. She would leave the papers and the cigar boxes there all night, and in the morning she would find the right number of nickels in the boxes for the number of papers that were gone.”

Mr. Sideris stabbed his finger toward his listener. “Now
that
was the city of Dallas,” he said. “That's why I was so captivated. I thought, ‘This is a paradise. I've got to stay here.'”