By DAVID EPPS
Pastor

I love this time of the year! Some love the spring season, others the winter season, still others the summer season. Me, I love the football season.

If you drive around on Friday nights, if you listen, you can hear the "thump-thump-parraumph" of the drums as high school bands play wildly while their team takes the field. I love the colors, the hot dogs, the cheerleaders, all of it!

Football season even has a smell to it. Not too long ago, I walked on a track around a local high school football field and the familiar aromas filled my nostrils: fresh mown grass, dirt, newly plowed from hundreds of cleats, and that subtle smell that comes with autumn. I can't explain it. I just know when I smell it. Football is in the air.

It was August of 1965 when I first tried out for the football team at Ross N. Robinson Junior High School in Kingsport, Tenn. I was a short, fat kid who had never played sports (other than riding a bicycle up Busbee Street in front of our house) and had nary an aggressive bone in my pudgy little body. There were about 50 kids that tried out for the team and only 33 would make it. I was one of the very few who had never played Boy's Club football. In fact, I didn't even know the rules.

My chances were dim.

Our school included grades seven through nine, with high school starting with the tenth grade. We were the Robinson Redskins. Our archrivals and hated nemesis across town were the Warriors of John Sevier Junior High School. The best of the best would eventually play for the Indians of Dobyns-Bennett High School. We were not a politically correct town.

In 1964, I attended my very first football game and watched in youthful awe as fearsome Dobyns-Bennett pounded Jellico High by a score of 89-0. The Indians would go 10-0 in 1964 and be Tennessee state champions. From that moment on, I wanted to play football at Dobyns-Bennett.

By the way, Coach Bobby Dodd, for whom the stadium at Georgia Tech is named, was a graduate of old DBHS back when there were no face guards. His picture still hangs in the massive trophy room outside the gym. And, lest you think we were a hick-stuck-back-in-the-mountains school system, Kingsport Dobyns-Bennett, at that time, had won more Tennessee state football championships, and had more undefeated teams, than any other school in the state where Davy Crockett is revered and where Al Gore claims to be from (and where I hope he permanently returns to in January).

But high school would come later. For four hot, sticky, sweaty, smelly weeks, I struggled to do the exercises and keep up. When the cut came, I was not one of the 33 who got the brand new, deep royal blue jerseys with the white rubberized numbers on it.

I was despondent. Yet, within a few moments, Head Coach Cecil Puckett, one of the most influential men in my life, came out of the locker room with two faded, worn, light blue jerseys with stitched cotton numbers sewn on. He handed a kid named Ricky one of the jerseys. I got the other one. I had made the team as an alternate fourth-string tackle with a faded old jersey with the number "8" on it. You would have thought it was the Heisman.

When my dad came to pick me up after practice, I pulled the jersey out of my gym bag and waved it around. I held it up and across my chest so that he could see what it might look like when I wore it. If he noticed that it wasn't the same color as the 33 other jerseys, he never let on. If he saw the wetness around my eyes, he never let on about that either. The way he beamed, you would have thought that he thought it was the Heisman, too.

For four home games that season (and two away games), my parents came to J. Fred Johnson Memorial Stadium on Thursday nights and watched their oldest son sit on the bench. Once in a great while, when the Redskins were ahead eleventy-zillion to zip, the alternate fourth-string tackle with the faded blue jersey would make a brief appearance.

At the end of the season, they even bought me a Robinson football letter jacket, 100 percent wool, that Dad really couldn't afford, even though it wouldn't have the coveted "R" on the left chest until the following season, when I would earn a new dark blue jersey with the number "50" in those rubber letters, and occupy a starting berth as offensive center.

By the end of the season, I wasn't nearly as pudgy and I could actually chew gum and walk at the same time without falling down.

Coach Puckett gave me a jersey that no one else wanted to wear. He gave me a chance. He gave me hope. He made me believe that maybe just maybe, if I worked really, really hard I could play for the mighty Indians of Dobyns-Bennett someday.
So, to me, autumn is the season, not of falling leaves, but of grass, and dirt, and pain, and sweat, and something more.

It is the season of hope. I love football season.

[David Epps is pastor of Christ the King Church in the south metro Atlanta area. He can be contacted at FatherDavidEpps@aol.com or at www.ChristTheKingCEC.com.]

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