Fifty years ago, I had a life-altering experience.
My nose and lungs were filled with the smell of grass. I listened intently as that siren sound of summer, August’s crickets and cicadas, filled their air with their distinctive chirp.
Unfortunately, I was not in upstate New York, enjoying three days of peace, love and music.
I was face down in a field next to Oxford Area High School, wondering what in God’s name I had gotten myself into.
Woodstock might have defined a generation, but for a small group of guys in a tiny southern Chester County town, a similar bond was about to take place.
In a world seemingly coming apart at the seams, they would come together and attempt to do something that had never been done before.
Welcome to the first football team in the history of Oxford High.
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Sometime in the winter or early spring of 1969, Fred Green got a novel idea.
The school where he taught phys ed, Oxford High, the school I was about to enter, was missing something.
That something was football.
Green was a proud native of Delaware County, a graduate of Upper Chichester High who played football for legendary coach Tony Apichella.
We weren’t alone. None of the teams in what was then the Southern Chester County League featured football teams.
Fifty years ago, we were the first. I’m not sure any of us were prepared for what was coming.
Green put together a staff, assistants Scott Gold and Hank Stenta. If Gold’s name is familiar, it is not by accident. He went on to become one of the greatest high school wrestling coaches in Pennsylvania history.
It didn’t take long for them to face their first obstacle. Because we would not be able to field a varsity team for two years, juniors and seniors were ineligible to play for the team. That rubbed a lot of people – and a lot of juniors and seniors – the wrong way. Eventually, about three dozen of us put on the uniforms for the first time.
It was not my first experience with a uniform, albeit not one with pads. And thus not my greatest concern. I was facing another mini-crisis: What do you wear to school? I was preparing to enter Oxford High after spending eight years under the firm tutelage of the good sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at Assumption BVM School in West Grove. I never had to worry about what I was wearing to school. I put on blue slacks, a white shirt and blue ABVM clip-on tie (most likely with yesterday’s lunch splattered all over it) every day.
This was a new world.
So was football. I had played lots of sandlot football, and considered myself an athlete. Little did I know. I think that goes for most of us.
We were smaller on average. Our linemen, guys like Steve Purcell and Howard McDowell, would have been running backs on established programs. We had one legitimate star. Chuck Peterson could have played for anybody. He teamed with rugged fullback Billy Daniels. The rest of us? Describing us as inexperienced would be kind.
Green was undaunted.
His young charges – one in particular – probably less so. The truth is I was 100 pounds soaking wet – and with all my equipment on. And I soon found out sandlot heroics were not exactly the same thing as contact football. We basically beat the hell out of each other.
What none of us realized at the time was the ability of that team to unite a town.
We were a year out from seeing MLK cut down by an assassin’s bullet. That was followed by RFK's assassination two months later.
The nation was pulsing with divisions; so was our little town. In the summer of ’69, we watched a man land on the moon, then witnessed something equally staggering: A small group of guys served as a beacon to bring a town together.
Mothers who were diametrically opposed politically formed a Boosters group and stood side by side painting the bleachers before our first game.
The truth is I don’t remember all that much about those first couple of years.
But before we could become a team, we had to endure a specific right of passage. It was called camp.
We would travel by bus to an old YMCA camp on a hill outside Downingtown. What happened during that week is still hard to believe. We practiced four times a day: a pre-breakfast run and calisthenics; breakfast; a full-pads morning session; lunch; a full-pads afternoon session; dinner; one final no-pads workout. You would think after that we would simply collapse in our non-air-conditioned cabins. Wrong. We somehow managed to raise hell and get into enough hijinks that at one point the coaches convened another session that included a full-contact tackling session. A lot of the guys – many of whom I suspect just liked hitting people – loved it. My scrawny behind was aching.
Those first two years, Coach Green would take a game or scrimmage any place he could find them in those early years.
Two years later, in our maiden varsity season, Green decided to return to his old stomping grounds and challenge his mentor, Apichella, and a very good Chichester High team. A couple of years before he had taken a busload of us to see the Chi program and their star running back. Maybe you’ve heard of him. His name was Billy Johnson. He would become “White Shoes,” star at Widener University and is perhaps the greatest kick returner in NFL History.
He was replaced by a guy named Joe Miller. He took the opening kickoff and wasn’t touched. It was the start of a long morning.
We lost, 72-3. That’s not a typo. I was part of that 3 points. I held the ball for a Chuck Peterson field goal. We actually had to do it twice. The first kick was nullified by a penalty.
We learned a lot about life that morning, things I still think about 50 years later. Eventually, we would record our first varsity win vs. Clifton Heights.
For me, my career was doomed. After getting pounded one Saturday morning, Coach Green took a bunch of us to Coatesville Monday afternoon for another scrimmage. I went to tackle a running back who was about twice my size. We all went down in a heap – all on my right shoulder. When I tried to get up, it stayed on the ground. Spent one of the most miserable nights of my life in Coatesville Hospital, along with another injured player, Gary Testerman. Again the whole town rallied around us.
The next year, our starting quarterback, Chally Hassard, and his family, moved back South. Guess who became the starter? That’s right. After rehabbing my shoulder, I got the starting nod. That should give you some idea of how good we were. Not very. We went 0-10. I blew out a collarbone in Week 4 or 5 vs. North Harford in Maryland.
I would never put on a football uniform again.
I tell people all the time that I believe I learned more from those guys – and playing on that team – than I ever learned in any classroom.
We were black and white. Country kids and preppies. From staunchly Democrat and Republican families. We mirrored the fractured country, only to unite when we put on those uniforms.
It was the summer of '69.
Fifty years later, we remain - and always will be – blood brothers.
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