My Mother Made Me Play Football
My Mother Made Me Play Football
Copyright 2006, Harris B. McKee
I learned to play football when I was five. Rather I learned to count by sixes since we didn’t have a goal post. We also didn’t have yard markers so we had four downs to traverse the whole field. As I’ve documented elsewhere, by the time I graduated from the eighth grade and left Mt. Olive school, we didn’t play much football any more; the number of boys was too small. I did have a football at home, one of the fat designs that fell out of favor shortly before mine appeared as a gift; (it may have been heavily discounted!) [1]
When I arrived at Indianola High School in the fall of 1953, I stood 5’11” and weighed 160 pounds. This was an attractive combination for the Jr High football coach, Dave Englund who immediately tried to recruit me for the team. Being so pursued was pretty neat and I immediately began to lobby my parents to let me try out. My father was reluctant because, in his one football episode in an Iowa State intramural game, he had jammed a finger that remained permanently distorted. He was also concerned that I had grown so rapidly in the past year that my joints might not be able to stand the stress of football.
I was allowed to participate, however, and began to practice with the team. I quickly discovered that my experience at Mt. Olive nine years earlier was of little help. It didn’t take long to be discouraged as well when I didn’t get to dress, let alone play, in the freshman-sophomore games. At the end of the first week in October, I was invited to represent our county on the four-man cattle 4-H judging team at the Waterloo (Iowa) Dairy Cattle Congress. We performed respectably but the chance away from football practice gave me enough respite to propose to my mother that I quit football. She insisted that I stay on the team until the end of the year.
A few weeks later, we had an inter-squad game of the eighth and ninth graders. In that scrimmage, I picked up a fumble and ran it into the end zone for a touchdown. It was the only touchdown that I ever scored from that day forward but it did whet my appetite for more football.
In my sophomore year, I was one of four sophomores to letter with the varsity. In my junior year, I missed one minute of playing time during the entire season. In our senior year, we were conference champions of the South Central Conference.[2] These successes led directly to an interest in me by the Dartmouth College Football Coach, Bob Blackman and his freshman coach, Earl Hamilton. The decision to attend Dartmouth changed the rest of my life and all because my mother made me play football.
[1] It was nearly impossible to throw. I do remember my mother’s cousin Walter Selvy kicking it higher than the horse barn in street shoes on an occasion when he and Larry had been hunting on our farm.
[2] The conference included Albia, Centerville, Chariton, Knoxville, Pella, Valley Junction (now Valley of West Des Moines) and Winterset, in addition to Indianola. We played two traditional non-conference games against Ankeny and Osceola.