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The Battle of West Knoxville, 2000 Edition

This one lived up to its billing. A few days after speaking with Metro Pulse, Farragut coach Eddie Courtney saw his Admirals go down in disappointing but in no way dishonorable defeat last Friday night, losing at home to Bearden's Bulldogs, 28-20.

Bearden, coached by Bill Young, rode to victory on the sturdy back of the KFL's leading rusher Kris Ernst, who trampled Farragut defenders for 198 yards on 41 carries. Had Farragut won (and the Admirals were a missed PAT shy of tying the game early in the fourth quarter), Courtney might have credited the heroism of any number of players, but perhaps Sean Sanderson deserves top billing.

A bull-shouldered 261-pound University of Michigan commitment, Sanderson enabled the would-be tying touchdown with a 39-yard ramble inside the Bearden 10 from his fullback slot, and shadowed Ernst all night from his linebacking outpost on defense.

It was a memorable contest, one which Courtney predicted earlier in game week when he observed: "This is a class rivalry; the game will be tough. We'll have kids who probably won't be able to play the next week. When they go out there for Bearden, they lay it all on the field."

And it captures the hearts and souls of high schools here

by Mike Gibson

The game of football is possessed of a certain savage beauty, a brutal grace that's particularly manifest in a well-executed offensive maneuver. Perhaps it's a pitch to the tailback for a deft charge upfield, between the tackles; the center and offensive guards chopping down defensive linemen like so many felled trees; the fullback barreling through the resultant gap and planting his helmet between the numbers on the linebacker's jersey, like a sub torpedo striking the square center of a ship's hull; the trailing back knifing through the hole with determined precision, eyes reading the field ahead in much the same fashion of a hawk swooping over a busy woodland.

Or perhaps it's an air strike, the supple arc of a lofted pass; the ball folding into the pliant web of the wide receiver's hands; that moment of quiet grace before the violent and inevitable collision with a defensive back. And it is inevitable; the noise, the explosive plastic pop of pad on pad, punctuated by grunts of exertion, and, finally, the shrill of a referee's whistle.

Charlie Harmon has witnessed many such moments, sitting as he usually does in the plait of sun and shade formed by the pillars and cross-beams in back of the Farragut High School football stadium, the vertical supports growing long in the muted heat of a late-afternoon autumnal sun. He has done so every practice for nearly 40 years, ever since he moved to Farragut from his boyhood home in South Knoxville and was recruited to work on the "chain gang," the crew that totes the links used to measure the feet and inches needed for each successive first down. "I knew the coach, Bill Clabo, and I stopped by practice one day," Harmon muses. "Next thing I know, he put me to work."

Though he grew up south of the river and played end on the old Young High School football team, Harmon became a died-in-the-wool Farragut fan. He worked on the chain gang for some 30 years before retiring in the early '90's, and his son Rocky played quarterback and safety for the school until his graduation in 1976. A former cable repairman for Southern Bell, Harmon usually took his annual two-week vacation during summer two-a-day practices, "just so I could be around the team, watch 'em scrimmage."

To the people who live in many regions of the United States, the fervor and furor that attends high school football in places like East Tennessee may be something of a curiosity. To folks in some parts of the country, it's an inexplicable preoccupation that sees entire half-hour local news programs devoted to game coverage on Friday nights; that sees daily newspapers even in smaller cities like Greeneville, Tenn., devote three and four pages of Saturday morning editions to prep reports.

"The state of Tennessee definitely places a lot of emphasis on football," says Webb High School head coach David Meske, a transplanted Wisconsiner. "Where I come from, you can't have spring practice. You can't work with the kids in summer. If you look at our school's enrollment (about 420), nearly one out of every three boys is on the football team."

The reasons relate variously to regional distinctions, community rivalries, school traditions, and family ties. Unlike the comparatively detached affiliation of the professional or even the college game, high school football is personal, like a familial blood-feud. It's a social, as well as physical, battleground, a construct that often sets neighbor against neighbor; it's a locus of community pride.

Its popularity also hearkens to the simple, bucolic history of the rural South. "A lot of it goes back to a time when nothing was going on, especially in some of these little towns," says Central High School football coach Joel Helton. "The local football game was Friday night. If you look at some old school annuals from around the area, you see how involved people were with their schools."

Central is steeped in more football history than perhaps any existing school in the Knoxville area. Its program dates to 1906, and among its alumni are college and professional stand-outs such as former UT back-up signal-caller turned baseball star Todd Helton (the coach's nephew), former UT and Tampa Bay running back Reggie Cobb, legendary UT lineman

Bob Suffrage, and former University of Tennessee and Alabama defensive coordinator Ken Donahue, not to mention one famous former player better-known for his guitar than his football cleats, country music godfather Roy Acuff. A Central half-back in the single-wing days of the early 1920's, Acuff was a big-eared kid with a sandy mound of hair. Today, the fieldhouse that is home to the team locker room, coach's offices, and weight-room facilities is hung with not a few of his pictures, and the sign on the door outside bears his name.

The fieldhouse, a concrete bunker off Broadway that always smells of rubber and sweat and dirty laundry, has many such reminders of the school's rich football tradition. The halls are lined with photos, many of them action poses of latter-day stand-outs, and many of them the kind of classic black and white team shots that always depict a handful of skinny white kids, all buzzcuts and bones, knickers and knee socks, lined up on a hard mud field littered with brush.

Helton points to one such moldering shot, a 1910 relic with a handsome, square-chinned youth standing in the middle of the ranks. A member of the local Owens clan, the boy in the picture was the first player in a family that has since seen four more generations lace cleats in the service of Central High; his great-great grandson Brad ended his career in 1994. "There's been a bunch of 'em down through the years," says Helton. "Big sports families; the daddy plays, then his sons play, and maybe the grandchildren after them."

Another photo, dating to the middle of the century, freezes a moment from a clash with the school's late, great rival, the old Knoxville High. The two largest schools in the area, Knoxville and Central transplanted several of their annual skirmishes to Neyland Stadium. The game sometimes drew in excess of 30,000, says Helton, and neither high school field could accommodate it.

Today, however, Central's biggest rivalry is with Halls High School a few miles up Broadway. It's an annual contest dubbed the Battle of Black Oak Ridge.

During a mid-afternoon class break, a few Central players are sitting on the brown leather sofa in Helton's office watching videotape in preparation for the Sept. 6 game. Among them is the team's brightest star, senior wideout/tailback D.J. Bowman, whose right forearm, now cruelly bent and striped with heavy gray medical tape, was snapped in only the second game of the season. The Halls game bears even more weight as a result of his injury. The regional match-up is key to Central's playoff hopes, and Bowman bravely holds to his belief that the injury will have healed sufficiently for him to play in the post-season.

"They (the team) love D.J.; the seniors came in after that game and said 'We want to keep it alive for D.J.'" Helton admits later. The players successfully lobbied the coach to bend a long-standing team rule to allow the return of flashy running back and receiver Demarcus Dixson, a star as a junior who opted out of summer practice to concentrate on basketball his senior year.

Bowman, an endearing African-American kid with a snippet of a goatee and a shy, easy smile, rewinds tape of last year's Central-Halls playoff showdown, a contest in which Central prevailed and Bowman was selected as player of the game. After a chuckling discourse on the art of on-the-field trash-talking ("I tell 'em what I'm gonna do, then I tell 'em 'Here it comes! Here it comes!'"), his eyes fade into sadness as he surveys his badly broken limb. In addition to the gruesome curvature at the point of the break, the arm has visibly atrophied, as even the upper portion of it has been reduced to very ordinary dimensions as compared to the knotty biceps and triceps configuration of the other limb. In all honesty, the prospect of his return for the play-offs appears bleak.

"I miss hearin' my crowd," he says, a confession delivered almost absent-mindedly, with palpable sadness, but not so much as a trace of arrogance. "I miss everything about it; the players, the crowd, the news, the game, bein' down there with the guys hurtin'..."

Up the Road

It's Friday, Sept. 6, and the air is cool, the sky starless at Halls High School football stadium a few miles up Broadway. The field is haloed by the towering sentinels of the field lights. It's a lively fluorescent-and-indigo spectacle, with probably 5,000 fans peopling the bleachers and lining from end zone to end zone the fence that encloses the field. In short, it's a near-perfect setting for the biggest game of the season.

The action on the field, however, is less than superb. Neither team is crisp; a pair of early Central drives result in missed field goals, while the Halls offense is a muddle of impotent off-tackle running plays and infrequently completed passes. Even so, it's evident that the plodding, corn-fed Halls players lack the explosive athleticism of their Central counterparts, and it's doubtful that either their heavy-footed defense or the prevailing sloppiness of play will keep the Bobcats out of the end zone for an entire game.

The scoring drought ends with three minutes and 12 seconds left in the first half when a Central drive culminates in a touchdown pass, a neat 15-yard half-moon that finds its target, with little room to spare, in the upper left-hand corner of the end zone.

Bowman, in black warm-ups and a red pull-over, roams the sideline like a coach, pulling players to the side when they exit the field of play, giving the other coaches a heads-up when he notes tendencies or mismatches. His face etched with concern, his demeanor far removed from the one he displays off the field, the transformation in his bearing and his maturity is almost startling.

His replacement Demarcus Dixson, meanwhile, is faring well, despite the team's offensive misfires. Playing in the defensive backfield, he seemingly participates in every other tackle. And close to half of the team's ball movement on offense occurs when it is Dixson's number that is called in the huddle. Unlike the rugged Bowman, he's a sharpened sliver, a razor blade slicing through the defense.

Then, in the third quarter, with the ball at midfield, Dixson absorbs a short sideline hitch pass and takes off down the Central side of the field. At the Halls 35-yard line, he stops on a fine point and breaks for the far sideline, like a water strider darting across the surface of a pond. On reaching the far boundary, he rapidly pulls away from any remaining pursuers and sails into the end zone. The restless crowd finally has more grist for its pent-up energy, and the thunder of stomping feet rolls off the bleachers.

Central coasts to a somewhat anti-climactic 14 to 2 victory (after a Halls safety late in the game), a reminder that even heated rivalries can sometimes make for less than stimulating contests.

Private Wars

Lackluster games have not been the rule—at least not lately—for another of the city's oldest ongoing football wars, the annual season-ending summit of Knoxville's private prep academies, Catholic and Webb.

On a breezy, sunny Wednesday afternoon, players at the pristine new Catholic High School campus just off Cedar Bluff Road line up for the grinding series of wind sprints that always commence practice. Head coach Mark Chait, a youngish 40-something with a sly grin that belies a rugged football face, notes that "Most teams just run after practice. We run before and after. We're not like Oak Ridge; we don't have 90 players. Most of our kids play offense and defense, and they have to be in shape."

Less than four miles away, just above the sprawling post-modern architecture of Webb High School, coach David Meske's Spartans have split into two factions on opposite ends of their practice field. The campus is lovely, the surrounding greenery lush and engulfing, but the players don't have much time to enjoy scenery. In front of one goal line, a group of starters run through a hard-hitting and continuous cycle of scenarios, offense vs. defense. Some 80 yards away, another, smaller group runs pass routes, the players sprinting upfield and snagging throws from an assistant coach.

The showdown is still two weeks away, and both teams have two games to play on the Fridays in between. But the yearly match-up, with its playoff implications (the winner will finish second in the district, and enjoy the luxury of a home playoff date) and its history, looms large.

Perhaps even moreso for the Catholic squad, who had an otherwise perfect regular season marred in 1999 by a wooly 55-29 loss to Webb that was closer than the 26-point margin of victory would suggest. And though many of the games have been hotly contested, Catholic has only won seven of the 32 Webb match-ups since '63.

"We have parents of our kids who played against parents of the Webb kids," says Chait, ticking off 12 players from the current 40-man roster whose dads and uncles and even grandfathers played on Catholic teams past. The list of ancestral ties includes local public figures such as UT Vice President John Sheridan, an all-KFL performer in the 1960's whose sons Austin and Daniel are included on the current squad; Charley Ericson of Charley Peppers Restaurant, a Catholic alum whose son, Phillip, is now a senior linebacker; and State Representative Bill Dunn, whose brothers played, and whose son Daniel is now a sophomore back-up QB.

"A lot of these kids [from the two schools] grew up together, live in the same subdivisions, went to the same neighborhood pool," Chait continues. "People measure our success, more often than not, on the outcome of that game."

"It's personal with Webb," says dark-maned senior Catholic linebacker Greg Ambrosia, the KFL's leading tackler after seven games with a scarcely plausible total of 131 hits. "I know most of the players. I usually know who I'm lined up against, and I'm really tired of hearing, 'We beat you in football every year.'"

Like Ambrosia, senior quarterback John Michael Rowland, a lean, mild-mannered six-footer, is also a KFL leader, with 1,398 yards passing after seven games. A knowing, half-sheepish grin seeps across his face when he's asked about the Webb rivalry. "It's intense. I wouldn't say hate, but we hate losing to them. When we get on the field, we're enemies."

(Another Catholic student observes, less diplomatically, "They [Webb] have a lot of shit-talkers.")

At Webb, coach Meske is more guarded, preferring that his players not address the Catholic match with two other opponents standing between his team and the season-ending rivalry. "That game is already big enough," says Meske, noting that the contest will probably draw 4,000 to 5,000 fans.

Meske's team won a state championship in 1996, and was runner-up in its class in 1997; he acknowledges that the volatile mix of recent success combined with decades-old tradition exerts unique pressures on players and coaches at the school. "We have lots of former students with sons here; there's a tradition that pushes the program along," says Meske. "There's an expectation that we'll be in the playoffs every year, and that we'll be a contending team. Our players sense it. They expect to win every game."

Where the West Is Won

Eddie Courtney's Farragut High School Admirals are running their paces this afternoon in anticipation of the weekend's game with Bearden—the so-called Battle of West Knoxville, another local prep classic. Like Central, Webb, and Catholic, Farragut can also boast of far-reaching football tradition. This is the team's 53rd year on the gridiron, and Courtney says a reunion of the school's inaugural squad three years ago drew a surprising 20 former players. "Some of the men flew in from California," Courtney says. "I was shocked."

That founding unit was honored during the halftime show of a game with Karns High School, the Farragutians' biggest rival in the 1950s. The Bearden game is now the undisputed highlight of the Admirals' season, however, a pairing that will draw 5,000 people, many of whom won't attend another game this year. It's also the students' favorite, and each year brings a new, ever more inventive round of pranks and gestures of one-upsmanship. "They came down and sprayed a big 'B' in the middle of our field one year," Courtney remembers. "Another time, they sent us a bouquet of black flowers before the game."

In the earliest days of the rivalry, says Courtney, Bearden fans brought bundles of straw into the bleachers, a taunt directed at the community's former status as a farming stronghold. "They called them the 'Farragut farmers,'" Courtney chuckles.

But the Farragut-Bearden game is also indicative of the changing face of high school football, of the inevitable severing of family ties and eroding of tradition through the force of municipal expansion, by the chaos of options presented by modern life. "I'd really like to see more community involvement," confides one member of the school's football boosters club. "Sometimes, it seems like 90 percent of our support comes from parents of band members and players."

"We don't have as many families who have invested in the program over two or three generations like some schools do," admits Courtney. "Farragut and Bearden were the areas everybody moved into in the '60s and '70s. We have a lot of kids whose parents just moved here 20 years ago.

"There are a lot more options on Friday night, too. Kids today have jobs, cars...Football isn't the only game in town anymore."

But Courtney, a pigskin optimist, believes that's changing, even with the continued migration to points west by folks with long-standing ties to other communities. With each passing year, he says, more familiar surnames are materializing on the Farragut High roster of incoming players. And the area's farm league, the Cedar Bluff-Farragut Optimist pee-wee league football program, is expanding, offering an annual harvest of hard-nosed kids brought up together in the tough-love camaraderie of the sacred sport, new generations of gridiron rivals and friends.

Courtney also points to 67-year-old Charlie Harmon, who, though retired from the chains, still offers his services to the team free of charge, pruning and mowing the field—"pretty much anything that needs doing."

His chief contribution to the program, however, is spiritual, a gift of unwavering devotion the old gentleman bestows every time he sits in his fold-out chair, in the mingled sun and shade beneath the Farragut bleachers, watching birds alight on the field as ranks of hale young men in blue and gray jerseys strive for those elusive moments of gridiron grace, amid a percussive symphony of popping pads.
 

October 19, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 42
© 2000 Metro Pulse