Day 19 – Football journey…part 1

After the last two days about my Grandparents and their struggle, I thought I would lighten things up a little with some of my football stories…it is football season now so that sounds logical to me.

The story goes that Daddy broke his leg in high school football in Little Washington, NC where Granddaddy was preaching so he never went any further. He did throw the football to me once or twice, but it wasn’t much fun for me, because I wasn’t very good, and he was very critical.

However, they start football young in Greenville. We had four Elementary schools in town…Elmhurst, Wahl-Coates, West Greenville and our school Third Street and we started football in either the 3rd or 4th grade. There was another school in town called Epps which I think was a 1-12 grade school for the African American children, but this was 1956-1961 in North Carolina so there was no integration until 1967-68.

My school, Third Street, was really bad at football and I don’t remember why, but I can’t remember winning a game…although we might have beat West Greenville once.

I put two pictures here, one of me just starting out at Third Street (I have no idea why I had #30 on, I’m a lineman and have always been a lineman which are 50-80 numbers) and another picture of me as a Senior in High School when I played in the Shrine Bowl Game…quite the journey.

As you can see from the uniform, we played full contact football even in the third grade. No one had ever heard of “flag football” and we would not have even considered it. We played full contact tackle football and Jim and Tim Winslow’s on Sundays with no pads at all, for crying out loud.

Anyway, I enjoyed playing with the kids, nothing serious, just rough housing as they used to say. But then came Junior High and of course, Daddy expected me to play. I went out for the team in the seventh grade and after tryouts, it came down to me and another kid because Coach Castillo told us there was only one uniform. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but I told the coach the other kids could have it. Which I did, not because I didn’t want to play, but I think it was a way of getting back at Daddy. I could tell him I didn’t make the team and be done with it.

The next year, I really wanted to play, so I made the team and started at center, and we went undefeated 6-0 and I was hooked. I was only with Coach Castillo for one year on the football field, but when I played at East Carolina, which was in the same town of Greenville, he used to come to the practices and watch me and Mike Aldridge, who I had also played with in Junior High.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school were okay and I enjoyed it and did fairly well. The summer before my junior year, was the summer Mama divorced Daddy, so he was gone. I put on a lot of weight that summer working at Kentucky Fried Chicken and not having Daddy around to be critical of everything I was doing. I started that fall season out of shape and about 230 lbs. It was an uneventful year with only a little playing time as a defensive lineman, basically just to put my fat ass in a hole to plug it up.

But in the off-season, I had one of the assistant coaches take an interest in me. He was a friend of Mama’s and he tried to tell me I could play college football. Now, that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard of. I had lost some weight and I was barely 6 feet tall. When I told him this he said, “Sam Huff is a middle linebacker in the NFL and he is about the same size as you.” That planted a seed that maybe I could play.

That summer I worked out up at Lake Junaluska in the mountains of NC, with my friend Jim, where we had summer jobs, and came back as a 6-foot tall, 195 pound-lean, mean, fighting machine. By the end of the season my senior, I was first-team All-County, All-Region, All-East, and All-State and played in two All-Star games…Shrine Bowl and the East-West All-Star game…which I’ll talk more about later. I had scholarship offers for college and I was on my way.

We hardly ever get somewhere in life without mentors, and people who believe in us and I truly believe God sent men along the way to encourage me and help me rise up to be my best. That’s one of the main reasons I’ve coached High School football for the last 27 years…that, and the fact that I just love the game!!!