Dog pile

The World Series was sort of anticlimactic for many sports viewers this year. One great thing, was the "dog pile" of Philly players after they won the game.

Seeing these grown, albeit still young men jumping on each other in a fantastic "dog pile," brought back many memories for me.

It is pure nostalgia on my part I admit, but here is something so appealing about looking back to our carefree youthful days. The last real "dog pile" I was in was in high school.

The game was against Neosho during my senior year. We were expected to win the Big 10 Title that year, and we were pretty full of ourselves. Most of our games had been blowouts, then Neosho came to town.

Neosho was always a tough physical game. Still, we were expected to roll over them as we had so many teams before.

It was a cold blustery night in late October. As the game wound its way, we had the lead for most of the night. We just could not seem to put the Wildcats away, however.

Then with not much time remaining in the game, we held 8 point lead. Neosho ran a play similar to the old Tom Osborne "fumblerooskie." The trick play went for a touchdown and brought Neosho within a 2 point conversion of tying the game.

The conversion failed, and we all knew that they would try an onside kick on the ensuing kickoff. Coach Shelton put what we called our "hands" team on the field. None of us lineman who would normally be on the field for blocking on the kickoff were on the "hands" team.

One rather small and as yet undeveloped sophomore, Bruce Rice was on the hands team. I can still see that play in my mind all these 40 plus years later. The ball was kicked right to Bruce. It sort of bounced off his hands, then he fell on it cradling it to his body for the recovery.

Our entire team it seemed to me, jumped on Bruce in a gigantic "dog pile." I can only imagine how he felt at the bottom of all that mass of players. When you are young, you just don't give much thought to the guys at the bottom of a pile like that.

Yes our youthful days were filled with daring and sometimes shall we say nefarious acts. I was recently reminded of another such act, when my old childhood friend Wade Mitchell was in town for Coach Testman's Wall of Fame induction.

Wade was so proud to be here for that ceremony. He, like many of us, felt that Coach T was as much of a father as a coach.

As we watched the game against Carl Junction, we reminisced about some of our more colorful past exploits. One of those involved the famous M-80 night.

Our now deceased best friend, Randy Emery, was riding around with us in Wade's mother's car one Friday night not long after we had all received our drivers license.

Randy had this one M-80 firecracker left over from the 4th of July period. Now an M-80 in those days was truly a powerful thing to behold. In fact it was downright dangerous.

Randy wanted to throw it out of the car all night, and finally we agreed. I was sitting the back of the Mitchell 1960 four door Chevy. All the windows were open in the summer night. As Wade slowed, Randy lit the M-80 and threw it out the window. That's when the trouble began.

All I could see was the sparks from the fuse as the wind caught the M-80 and propelled it back in the car right in front of my face. Without one thought for my safety, I jumped out of the car. An M-80 was nothing to mess with.

Luckily the car was only going maybe 10 or 15 mph at the time, but still I fell and rolled over a few times. Just as I regained myself enough to stand, the M-80 went off and it looked like the entire car exploded. Both of my friends had managed to jump out of the car before the explosion, and they now ran for the still rolling car as did I.

Just as I was getting close to my open back door to jump back in the car, I heard a scream. Randy had tried to jump in the front seat and reach the break pedal with his hand.

At the same moment, Wade had slammed Randy's hand and the pedal stopping the car and causing the resulting scream from Randy.

To make matters even worse, I was running full speed just as Wade hit the break. I crashed into the open door full tilt. Not pausing I jumped in the back and we took off before anyone hopefully had seen us. When I tried to close the door it would not budge.

So here we were with a huge blast mark in the back area of the padding behind the back seat, a door jammed, and sure we will be arrested for setting off an M-80 in the city limits.

Wade explained as we visited, how he had to work all summer to pay for the damage to his mother's car. It was a story of youthful stupidity, but it did go down as sort of a legend for us.

We all learned a lesson from that night. That is sort of the way it is when you are young. You do things like "dog pile" or throw an M-80 without much thought to the consequences. Later you learn from the mistakes. Still, don't you wish for those days now and then? Times when you still felt like jumping into a good old fashioned "dog pile?"