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This Guy will Never Be a Football Player
He taught algebra and was the assistant football coach for the Gloucester
High School Fisherman. Winslow Parkhurst. He knelt on one knee, his paralyzed
arm dangling over a prone junior varsity football player. A sophomore,
slight of build and stature who was forced by idiot head coaches—then,
as now—to serve as a tackling dummy for the older, and much larger,
varsity players. |
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Forty years later, my algebra teacher Winslow Parkhurst recounted the story to me. "It was his eyes, Mark. He turned his head to me and to the varsity players and he just burnt a hole in us. That kid was so intense that they all went to quiet, turned their heads and slowly walked away. I never saw a look like that," the old algebra teacher said to me gently, turning, banging his paralyzed arm off my shoulder for emphasis as he was prone to do. "He didn't just have a fire in him. He was a raging inferno, a veritable volcano," the old math teacher recalled. Full-contact soccer is a good description of the game he played on Portagee Hill in Gloucester. He missed the season after his broken collar bone but went out for the team when Fall rolled around again. It wasn't that he was now just shy of six feet tall and about 180 pounds of muscle from working at a fish plant in Gloucester that got the coach's attention. Or the fact that he could run 100 yards in ten seconds flat. It was the fact that he could do this in full football gear at the time the world record was a few tenths of a second less. In today's computer age every major college in the country would have had a scout on a plane to Gloucester in a matter of minutes. It took a little longer in the Thirties. But within a week major colleges were sending someone to time him. Without ever having played in a varsity high school game, he was being watched. It was the full-contact soccer that did it. He had moves for avoiding a tackler then that I see now in the N.F.L. At full speed in an open field he could shift his hips so far in one direction while running in the other that tacklers would totally miss him and fall down. "If you can't get by one tackler in the open field untouched, you have no business playing football in the first place," he quipped on more than one occasion. He could deck a would-be tackler with a vicious forearm shot just like the one Corey Dillon does today. Just like Corey, he used it just as the tackler leaves his feet. Bang. Out goes the old forearm right to the guy's forehead and down goes the tackler. Of course, in the old days the face mask was unknown and a nose was an inviting target. "Football is a contact sport," he used to say, smiling, thinking of all the crooked noses he was the cause of. He had ungodly acceleration with a forty yard time better than most corner backs, receivers, and running backs in the N.F.L. today —in the low fours. I came to understand his biggest asset as a running back later while listening to one of today's greatest running backs talk. He was so confident of eluding the nearest two tacklers that he was watching the ones after them. When finally forced to power into a tackler, he always hit twisting one way or the other for extra yards, or breaking free and never caught from behind. He could take a hit. He was tough, explosive, with a capacity to seem running at top speed and then speeding up even faster. |
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I'll
always remember a picture of him running just inside the sidelines at
a gallop both feet in the air—and a tackler stiff armed to the ground.
That look, that stare of intensity, that focus on his face as though to
say, "You want to knock me down? Take that." |
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_____________________________________________________________ ©
Copyright 2005-06 Parlez-Moi Press and Mark
S. Williams • All rights reserved.
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