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July 28, 2010

Pete Kendall: Scent of football season, tomfoolery in the air

It took a man to play football in the Fort Worth ISD 48 years ago. If the physicality of the contact didn’t get to most lads, the aroma of the gridiron did.

Farrington Field was a desirable place to witness a football game in those days. Scenic, ideal parking, unencumbered sight lines and 20,000 seats close to the action.

But there was a slight minus remembered by every football player who pulled on a jersey and pants and wallowed in Farrington’s legendary mud pit during a rain storm.

To say it smelled was to say the Gulf of Mexico was wet.

It smelled so bad that it made the people who played there smell, too.

It reeked so atrociously that it took all season to launder the stench out of jerseys and pants.

Let’s be blunt about this: On any given Friday night in which moisture fell, Farrington’s 100-yard war smelled of fish. Rotten fish. The kind that horticulturally inclined types would grind up and use as fertilizer to grow more grass that stank just as bad.

The odor still tingles the hairs in Stamm Todd’s nasal passageways. And he’s been removed from the scene for almost half a century.

“You sure didn’t want to go eat fish sticks after a game,” the former Arlington Heights line stalwart said. “The smell would make you sick, especially when it rained, and once it got in your uniform, it was there for the season.”

Heights didn’t play all its home games at Farrington. The alternate venue was as charmingly rustic as Farrington.

“We also played at Trinity Field,” Todd said. “We called it the Dust Bowl. Much of the field was dirt because it was also a baseball field.”

Ah, to be young and spry and a Texas high school football player this time of year. There’s still nothing quite like the smell of freshly mowed grass of a stadium field and imagining what delights the coaches have in store for those reporting for preseason toil.

Once upon a time, in Todd’s day, you only got water after practice, if at all. And trainers believed in supplementing the water with salt tablets, which could turn your mouth as white as chalk.

“Mostly what we did to get ready for two-a-days was run,” said Todd, a Cleburne resident and businessman. “We didn’t have a weight room. That was when most people didn’t lift weights. We’d run the hills at Arlington Heights and run 40-yard sprints. The coaches expected you to be ready to go the first day you put the pads on.

“We’d work out in the morning starting at 7. We’d take a break after a few hours and get water. We’d come back about 4 and work out ’til 6 and get water again. But we didn’t get much of it, and we wore really thick jerseys.

“The heat didn’t affect me my sophomore and junior years. I played at about 210, 215. My senior year, I played at 230, and I had a little more of a conditioning problem. Still, we all had outdoor summer jobs back then. We were used to the heat.”

Todd’s line coach was 300-pound Nick Ruggeri, whose hobby was watching the television show “Wagon Train.” Ruggeri would often stop practice so that he could switch on the TV in the field house.

“He loved dirt drills,” Todd remembered, “and he had a blocking sled with wheels, a chair and two brakes. He could control which way the sled went when you hit the pads. The cart was 900 pounds, and he was over 300 pounds, and if you didn’t stay with your dummy, you had to do it all over again. We hated that thing.”

The motivator of the staff was a frisky former TCU All-American named Merlin Priddy.

“Merlin was a wild man, hyper all the time, all over the place,” Todd said. “He also chewed tobacco and spit everywhere.”

Once, Todd made the mistake of taking off his helmet in practice, a cardinal sin. Priddy placed his chew of tobacco in the helmet. The result, when Todd pulled on the helmet, was slightly squishy.

“But I got him back,” Todd said. “Whenever Merlin got emotional, he’d take his cap off and hold it behind him. I put a little grass snake in his hat. When he put the hat on, the grass snake slithered out the front.”

Priddy had the last word.

“We’d probably still be running if it hadn’t gotten dark,” Todd said.

Heights players were not above playing practical jokes on their teammates in two-a-days, Todd said.

“We had a quarterback who thought he was pretty special. One morning, someone coated his athletic supporter [jockstrap] with this substance [Atomic Balm] that could heat you up pretty fast. That’s what happened. It took awhile for the quarterback to convince his coach he needed to go back to the dressing room.”

Added Todd: “When a bunch of guys were in the shower, we’d flush the toilet so the shower water would turn blazing hot. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of doing that one time when the coaches were in the showers. They lit us up.”

Like teams today, the Heights Yellow Jackets had colorful characters.

“Johnny Langdon was a screamer,” Todd remembered. “He’d come up behind you and scream in your ear like an insane idiot.”

Hotels fell victim to Heights pranks.

“For some reason, we never got to spend the night on the road after word got back about our trip to Amarillo,” Todd said, with a nervous giggle. “Guys were hanging on the flagpole outside the rooms. The superintendent of schools and athletic director were waiting on the bus when we got back to Fort Worth.”

Heights players also turned festive when it came time to face archrival Fort Worth Paschal. A week’s worth of pranks, some rather extreme, preceded the game.

Some players participated. The smartest did not.

“I didn’t take part in any of that,” Todd said. “I was afraid I’d get arrested.”

Text Only
Pete Kendall: Scent of football season, tomfoolery in the air
by Anonymous , , Wed Jul 28, 2010, 04:20 PM CDT
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