Please indulge me if I take a week off from controversy and anger to reminisce and praise.
Forty-odd years ago my Northeast Ohio high school football team was graced by the presence of an extraordinary youngster named Bob Gladieux. Week after week he’d do something amazing and crowds came to watch him that exceeded Louisville’s 5,000-plus population.
As Gladieux’s exploits grew, the Canton Repository nicknamed him the “Flying Frenchman” and its coverage of the Louisville Leopards expanded. Legend has it, a man in our town who worked on the railroad took those press clippings from the Repository and dropped them off at newspapers around the state. Pretty soon Gladieux was on every college coach’s radar screen.
Woody Hayes spoke at our football banquet and pitched Gladieux to sign at Ohio State. But Bob was a good Catholic lad, and chose Notre Dame, where he became a star. If he hadn’t gone there, and later to the NFL, Gladieux might have been elected mayor of Louisville; probably still could be.
Other schoolboy stars who played in Northeast Ohio during that era included Larry Csonka, Alan Page and Dan Dierdorf, all members of pro football’s Hall of Fame, and Mark Stier, also from Louisville, who captained the 1968 Ohio State team that finished No. 1 in the country.
I write all that, as an expert witness might testify in court, to prove my bona fide as a longtime observer and fan of high school football. To me, it’s the best ticket in town.
After I moved to San Antonio, then-Express-News sports editor Barry Robinson paid me to cover high school football games in 1973 and ’74, a relationship that helped me land a job here later. For years after I became a full-time employee, I worked Friday nights. It’s a great scene: a boiler room of jangling telephones and chattering keyboards as correspondents from all over South Texas call in reports from dozens of games to a platoon of statisticians, writers and editors.
Indeed, it’s journalism in its rawest form: taking information and churning out copy under maddening conditions against an unforgiving deadline. I’ve always said: If you can cover high school football, you can do just about anything in this business.
High school football fans are unforgiving. If we misspell Junior’s name or misidentify the center who snapped the ball over the punter’s head and we hear about it usually with the twist that we’re biased. Fans like to measure stories too, and will let us have it if they think we’re underreporting their team.
But week in, week out, our sports staff and photojournalists do a magnificent job of covering high school football.
For decades the “face” of our coverage, albeit a modest one, was John Hines, who set impossibly high standards that no single sportswriter could match. Hines retired before last season and now the face of schoolboy football here is David Flores, whose photographic mind and strong writing make him invaluable. And he has a solid supporting cast.
The Express-News staffed nine games Friday night, which makes sense. Tens of thousands of fans attended those games and, yes, our coverage does sell papers. In fact, I like to think that many of the men who now play, or formerly played, in the NFL and at big-time universities have bulging scrapbooks whose first pages are graced by time-yellowed clippings and photos from the Express-News.
And unlike in the ’60s, when Gladieux’s heroics were cast across Ohio by a railroader, the Express-News puts stories on an Internet site SAGametime.com where anyone, anywhere can read them, even if you’re a former local gridder who’s now battling a more complex opponent in Iraq. Isn’t that amazing?
As Steve Quintana, the newspaper’s assistant managing editor for sports, said last week: “It has everything you need from schedules to final scores and will include insight and analysis from our very knowledgeable reporters and editors.”
Anyway, that’s it. Let us know what you think. And thanks for allowing me a one-week respite from the real world.
