And when it was done, a newcomer to the Ft. Worth city school football league had accomplished not only the unexpected...it had dumped the long-standing city standard bearer, R.L. Paschal by a single point.
Starting Saturday morning after the Friday night game, the Ft. Worth newspaper writers embarked on an amazing Paschal postmortem seeking to explain what happened to the City's darlings. Praise toward our mighty Highlanders was given grudgingly but there was no shortage of speculation by the writers about some questionable calls, and on, and on. The result was where a Friday night game was usually old news by the next day, this event went on into the following week as the writers kept moaning.
And finally, it was recognized that the old order had been rocked. The Highlanders had 3 more games to play before they could claim the City title, but for a couple of weeks, they sat atop the City rankings all by themsleves.
Highlanders 8 Paschal 7
5 comments:
I was at the game, I guess we were all at the game. But of all the games we played back then. That is about the only one I can remember well.
Yeah, this one shocked the Ft. Worth Establishment to their core. Even members of that Paschal class recall this game after all these years.
Is Paschal High gonna win this game? (Well) no!
We did have a gutsy defense....I remember that game so well....It was really a very talked about game...A lot of whinning by the Paschal fans and "wealthy westsiders" about how much better they were than those eastsiders....I remember how much bigger they were than our team, but we were smart and quick...In truth, if we had played 10 games with them, we might have only won two or so....We actually won on a trick play after our only touchdown, by throwing a tackle eligible pass for two points and made it....We were scrappers, and didn't let their size and historicak record intimidate us...Just loved our team....I was a middle linebacker, and still remembering patting Steve Means, Bob Keener, Leo Lubbehussen, Sam Bartholmew, and others on the butt when we set our defensive formation ....What great team mates we had....Our defense would give, but not break.....I loved that time in our lives....Great friends.....
I even ran into, literally, Dr Phillip Bechtal, a neurosurgeon . He was a running back for Paschal in that game, and I was an inside linebacker. We had numerous collisions....Later in life, I had to have two cervical fusions due to disk issues, probably due to head tackling , which was considered the best way to bring down a runner....at least that is what the coaches said....Well, my second cervical fusion was done by Phillip Bechtal....We briefly talked about our game together, and that maybe my tackles of him lead to the need for surgery....I certainly didn't rub in the fact that we won, as he was about to put me under the knife....He went on to the Air Force Academy...
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