Varsity Kansas - The Blog

            I’ve tried to make my blog entries thoughtful and thought-provoking.

            Until now.

            This one is strictly gratuitous.  It is about my favorite team of all-time, the 1978 Douglass Bulldog 3A championship football team, which will be honored at halftime of Friday’s game in Douglass.

            Like a team or two that you see each year in high school football, the ’78 Bulldogs were dominant.  On offense, they ran the wishbone, but could still throw.  They had good athletes at all skilled positions and wrestlers for linemen.

            The Bulldogs had an outstanding coaching staff, led by Steve Savarese, a young coach who related well to his players and also taught them biology.  Savarese would eventually gravitate back to his home state of Alabama, where he won other state championships and coached future NFL players Cornelius Bennett and Terrell Owens (yes, T.O.).

            Now before I get the computer too soggy with nostalgia, don’t think that I was a part of this team.  I wasn’t.  I was a junior who such an accomplished as a bad athlete that I turned to newspaper writing.

            I became an ink-stained wretch the pervious year when I attended an after school meeting in the library to organize the staff for the school newspaper, a few mimeographed pages stapled together called The Bulldog Reporter.

            There were a half-dozen of us at this meeting.  Five of them were cheerleaders, who assigned themselves editorships.  I was the only one who had no assignment.  That was on Wednesday.

            On Friday, the sports editor stopped me in the hall to ask if I would write a story about the game that night.  She was too busy.

            I couldn’t believe my good fortune.  I was becoming a writer and a cheerleader was talking to me in the hall.  Man!

            So I took notes at the game, talked to Coach Savarese afterward and wrote about a Douglass victory over Rose Hill.  Savarese liked the article and contacted Jeff Valentine’s mom, Margie, who was the editor of the town’s newspaper.  The following week I was published in the Douglass Tribune, a weekly paper that is now defunct.

            A month later, we had a new advisor for the Bulldog Reporter, whose husband wrote for the Augusta Gazette.  He recommended me to the Gazette and I found myself writing articles them.

            This was quite a meteoric rise for a high school sophomore, who could barely write.  The rise wasn’t due to the writer, but due to the subject.  There was an appetite for Douglass sports news, especially about football.

When the 1978 season rolled around, Douglass was ranked second in the Wichita Eagle’s 3A poll.  League rival Belle Plaine was ranked #1.  Douglass became #1 with a win at Belle Plaine, then beat the Dragons a second time in the playoffs.

A perfect season was completed with a state championship win over Hoxie on a rain-soaked Saturday afternoon in Augusta.

On Monday, the front page of the Gazette was devoted to Douglass’s win.  To see my name on that byline is a thrill my career has never matched.

            Since then, I’ve covered dozens of state championships.  I’ve personally covered a World Series, two Final Fours and a half-dozen bowl games.  They were all exciting and are all great memories, but nothing like the 1978 Bulldogs.

Yet I will not be there to cover them this Friday night.  Duty calls.

So I’ll think about them.  I see them in my mind’s eye, young and victorious in purple jerseys, holding the trophy over their heads.  A part of me just wants to preserve that image.

But the bigger part of me wishes I was there to see the guys and Coach Savarese, to catch up with them and tell them thanks.

Thanks for my career.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 10:38 a.m. and is filed under Football, The Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.