Green Eggs and Hamlin: A night in Football Purgatory
Doing play-by-play for football requires a lot of preparation. There’s a lot of names and numbers to memorize. Plenty of facts to pour over and write down. Football tends to draw the biggest listening audience to the website (though there have been baseball and softball games that have drawn more listeners, except for the 2016 Orange-Havelock football game), so no announcer worth their salt wants to sound uneducated to a listener.
When you try to fool the viewer at home, chances are the broadcaster is the one who will get fooled.
If you do enough games, a broadcaster will see some memorable ones, to one degree or another. The 2014 Orange-Chapel Hill football game stands out for me, when Orange came back from a 21-7 deficit to win 38-37. After Bryse Wilson recovered an onside kick, Tay Jones scored on a long touchdown run, then cashed in on a 2-point conversion with 37 seconds remaining.
I was lucky to do seven years of play-by-play for Northern Durham, where all of the teams had a goal to win the state championship every August. None of the squads I covered ever did, but there were some amazing games. The 2001 Northern Nash-Northern game stands out, where Fred Williams scored on a slant from 65-yards with 1:31 remaining to tie the game, only to have Northern Nash run the subsequent kickoff back 91 yards for a touchdown to win.
Every broadcaster will have forgettable games if they do it for a long time.
Then there are the games that are unforgettable for perverse reasons.
For me and some of my friends, that game is the 2006 Cedar Ridge-East Chapel Hill game.
The game was played on Labor Day, which was fitting, because both offenses sure did labor. Cedar Ridge won 3-0 in what was merely the worst football game ever played. How bad? The longest play from scrimmage was 14 yards. Cedar Ridge had 97 yards total offense—and won.
In the 2nd quarter, Cedar Ridge recovered a fumble deep in East territory and proceeded to go minus-three yards on the subsequent three plays.
And this was the game-winning drive.
Cedar Ridge’s kicker a 29-yard field goal and the two teams spent the rest of the night slogging across a muddy field with one punt piled on top of another.
Which leads us to the officiating, not a subject I look to insult because it’s a hard job and high school sports needs as many bodies as they can nowadays.
But they need people who know the rules.
Any casual football viewer understands what happens when a block in the back is called on the receiving team during a punt. It has to happen once a game, at least.
The receiving team is penalized ten years from the spot of the foul, but they keep possession of the ball.
This simple fact eluded the officiating crew on this night, who called the block in the back penalty against East. But instead of correctly switching possession to East, they gave Cedar Ridge the ball back like it was a roughing the kicker penalty.
And the crew did this TWICE.
After the second time, I completely lost it on the air. I ripped the officials, saying if they didn’t know the rules, they didn’t need to be out there. I threw it to a break at one point with the words “We go to the 4th quarter, and not a moment too soon.”
My colorman, Walter Storholt, couldn’t contain his laughter.
Did I mention there was a rain delay at halftime? Play-by-play men HATE rain delays in football because we have to kill time. We’re talking about anything. By the time the delay started in a slog of a game, I felt like I was sitting beside John Matuzak and Woody Hayes in football purgatory (O.J. Simpson’s seat is warm and waiting, by the way)
Ah, but one bright memory remains.
East’s coach was David Thompson, who spoke with a high-pitched lisp that Avery Johnson would have found exaggerated. His tenure at East was, at best, difficult. But it did lead to the greatest halftime interview in recorded broadcasting history, one that has remained in my Dropbox folder for some 13 years.
I’m not sure how my friend Johnny Jones maintained a straight face through this, but it’s a true tribute to his immense talent that he did.
Enjoy.
For my money, on the list of the greatest coaching rants, you can have your Dennis Greens. You can have your Jim Moras. You can have your Mike Singletarys.
“There’s my foot, I’m going to shoot it” lives on forever, as much as airing over a 5,000 watt AM station possibly can. When I see some of my former WCHL friends to this day, we blurt out “there’s my foot” just to crack each other up.
In 1995, Cowboy Junkies released a song called “A Common Disaster,” which is about people growing closer based off of troubling stories from their past.
Cedar Ridge-East from 2006 will always be my Common Disaster. Aside from most of my first dates, of course.
