Little Boy, Don't Use Your Head

I asked a friend of ours who had some EHHS experience with this game and here's his reply: 

"Gus, you’ve posed an interesting question.  I haven’t paid much attention to football for many years.  The game I played hasn’t been around for a long time. 

"Max had better hands than mine so he got a lot more opportunities to carry the ball than I did.  However, one of the coaches gave me this picture shortly after our game with North Side and it looks like I was a practitioner of lowering my head into a defender.  Coach Graves often yelled, “Crunch their sternum,” and Coach Willingham always bellowed, “Where their head goes, their body has to follow.’  So, to the best of our ability, we crunched their sternums and moved their heads out of the way.

 "The second picture came to me by some means that I’ve forgotten, but it sure shows the traffic we had to contend with.  By the time we got to this age, our moves were pretty instinctive which meant we used our heads.  I suspect the newly proposed rule has come by way of some T-ball coach or maybe a Soccer Mom.  My own opinion is: Leave the game alone.

"The next picture is one that I always viewed with mixed emotions.  It shows Max and I at the end of the season, in peak shape, and looking forward to taking on the Dallas champions.  But the headline kind of bugged me.  It reads as if Coach Mitcham is having trouble getting his thoughts through our skulls, but it really referred to the next being his 100^th game as a coach.  

"And one more from my personal collection.  It’s a wonderful publicity photo taken, I think, just after the great Paschal win and we were flying high.  That’s a pile of fine kids and standing behind them, a great coach--my favorite."

Two of these guys were Juniors, Class of 1964.  They were Ray Avery and Steve Rose, both of whom were All-District players the next year and both of them, outstanding kids.  We had a superb line.

Adios