Column: A wish to write about hometown team in victory

Saturday, October 20, 2007

My only wish when I returned to what was my beat for 28 seasons, my fondest wish, went unfilfilled. That wish was for a Nevada victory.

There, I said it. I'm biased, regardless of what anybody thinks. They say writers are supposed to be neutral. I don't know who they are, or what rule book neutral is written in.

You see, I was born on Dec. 8, 1946, at Nevada City Hospital. It didn't have a fancy name like Nevada Regional Medical Center in those days. You can still see the old building where it opened on South Adams instead of Ash.

I graduated from Nevada High School in 1964. Except for the years I attended college and another year when I thought Atlanta's climate might be more to my liking, Nevada has been home. Sure, I spent a lot of time covering the Kansas City Royals and grew up watching the Kansas City A's. I immediately took to the Kansas City Chiefs when they moved here from Dallas in 1963. So, I had the best of two worlds, covering the teams I loved.

I'd go to Kansas City but would always return to Nevada. Living in the city was just too hectic for me. I never liked all that traffic zipping all over the place.

As far as football is concerned, I got spoiled real quick. In my high school years, the Tigers weren't all that strong until they got the good sense to hire John McKinley after a particularly strong team got off to a highly unexpected 1-3 start my senior year. McKinley finished 4-2 and got cheated out of a touchdown in a 21-13 loss at Carthage when the officials mistakenly threw a flag on a legal play, then didn't have enough courage to pick it up and count the touchdown.

Probably the worst thing about my junior and senior year was the loss of the Silver Tiger. In those days, the Silver Tiger had its own home at NHS in that front trophy case just west of the principal's office. That's what it was built for, although that's just another tradition that disappeared when administrations changed over the years. I walked past the Silver Tiger every day my freshman and sophomore years and it looked pretty lonely after that as the only things in there were two photos of the old school. One showed it standing in all its magfificnce and the other showed it as a burned out shell. I suppose former superintendent C.H. Jones took the photos with him when he left.

When I returned to Nevada in 1973, I had no idea what was coming. No one did.

Football was a lot of fun in those days. Just think about it. The Tigers went 10-0, 9-1 and 12-1 in my first three years writing about them. That would spoil the best of them.

After that, the Tigers went into a period of decline and I had to learn how to write about losses. Years in which they were were over .500 were few and far between. There were a few, but very few.

The last year I covered in full was 2001. The Tigers were 2-8. Ouch!

Last year, I covered one game for Joe Warren. It was a loss.

When I knew I'd be doing a couple games this year, I figured my chances for at least one win were pretty good. After all, Ronnie Herda was a whale of a quarterback. The only real problem I saw was an acute lack of size in that for some unknown reason, the bigger guys at good old NHS decided they didn't want to play football. However, it's not that way at places like Webb City, where size is in abundance.

Then, down at Carthage, Herda suffered a season-ending injury and sophomore Austin Baldwin was called on to grow up in a hurry and play varsity ball when he was supposed to have been gaining that valuable experience at the JV level.

The Tigers did well against Webb City. No one really expected Nevada to win. Oh, I hoped they would as did several thousand fans who polulated the north grandsand at Logan Field. Webb City was bigger. Webb City was faster. Webb City was undefeated and remained that way.

Neosho was another story. They came in at 2-2 and the Tigers felt they had a realistic chance of winning. For some reason, though, the Tigers seldom play very good football against Neosho these days. The Tigers have beaten Neosho exactly once since 1998. In fact, the Tigers failed to score even a touchdown against the Wildcats from 2000 through 2003. In those four games, the Tigers were outscored 120-3.

This game really bothered me from the beginning as the Tigers looked sluggish. Actually, Neosho pushed them all over the field. Still, Nevada's defense did a credible job as the offense had a penchant for turning the ball over. That has been the bane of the Tigers' existence this season. Those eight turnovers against Butler were not as phenomenal as the fact the Tigers overcame them and won anyway.

This time, they were not so fortunate and I realized as the game wore on that my chances for writing about a Tiger victory were slipping away just as surely as the ball kept slipping away into Neosho's hands.

You know, the more I think about it I realize if I was neutral these losses would be so much easier to write. But, I can't change where I was born and have chosen to live. But I do hope that someday I'll get a chance to write about a Tiger victory. They are so much more fun than thoise nasty losses any day. There, I said it. Go Tigers.

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