Centre Football and Baseball, 1966-67
During my senior year at Watchung Hills Regional High School (WHRHS), I had to choose where to attend college. Or rather the colleges would decide that for me, given my undistinguished academic record. I was not a shoe-in for acceptance at any college held in high regard. Ivy League colleges, where my grandfather and my namesake attended at Cornell and Princeton respectively, were out of the question. My father went to Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, but even admission there was exclusive and would have been problematic. College coaches were not beating down my door to offer me scholarships like they presumably did with Frank Rossi, Norm Hewitt and Ed Nicholas, my teammates at Watchung Hills. I was a shoe-in only for state colleges in New Jersey. Private colleges would be more selective.
i had become enamored of the South I had studied the Civil War in depth for a teenager and was impressed with the character of the Confederate soldiers and their officers in the war. (And yet I came from a Union family. My great-great grandfather was an abolitionist and fought for the Union as a captain in the US Colored Troops, which were comprised mainly of runaway slaves. He was seriously wounded twice.) The Southern rebels were often outmanned and outgunned but they persevered and had many successes in the early years of the war. I also revered the founders of the country and many of them were Southerners including Washington, Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, Gorege Mason and James Madison. George Washington was an important part of the history of Watchung, New Jersey. In my town there is Washington Rock Park on the summit on the first ridge of the Watchung Mountains, one of several locations where Washington viewed the movements of British troops on the plains of New Jersey below. There was the Washington House Restaurant on Somerset Street where the General reportedly stayed during the period the Continental Army was encamped in central New Jersey after being driven out of New York. Unfortunately that colonial building burned down in 1963.
My fascination with the South inspired me to apply to the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee and the University of Richmond, where a close friend of mine had enrolled.
My grandfather Dr. Potter had a neighbor named Edward Stover, a lawyer who lived in Washington, N.J., had graduated from Washington and Lee and whose son was at that time a senior there. My grades and SAT scores (around 1100) were, as Garrison Keillor said, "above average" like most everyone else applying, but W&L had a lot of applicants and was very exclusive. It was also true that because of the baby boom, there were far more applicants than spaces available in those days. The University of Virginia was equally exclusive. The U of Richmond, being less exclusive, was my ace in the hole.
I was interested in playing sports so I thought Washington and Lee, as a small college (what is now called a Division 3 college) might be perfect for me. I looked at their schedule to see who they played. Among other schools, they played the University of the South at Sewanee, Hampden-Sydney, Washington University in St. Louis, Southwestern at Memphis, (which changed its name to Rhodes College in 1984), Centre College of Kentucky and Randolph-Macon College.
As it turned out, I got rejected for admission at W&L and UVa and accepted at U of Richmond. But then something happened that rescued me from becoming a Spider, which is the mascot of University of Richmond.
In mid-March of 1966 a notice appeared on the bulletin board outside the central office at WHRHS announcing that the Director of Admissions at Centre College of Kentucky, Dr, William Owens, was seeking students and granting interviews at the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark. I remembered that Centre was in the College Athletic Conference with W&L and three other colleges. The conference had been formed in 1962 to provide a level playing field for small academic-minded colleges that didn't want to grant athletic scholarships. This was to facilitate student athletes who played for the love of the game. It also gave athletes like me who had no scholarship offers the chance to continue playing athletics at a higher level. As a three-sport athlete in high school, I couldn't imagine life without chasing a ball of some kind.
I made an appointment with Dr. Owens and met him in his hotel room. He spoke glowingly of Centre College and explained that they were looking to recruit students from out of state; that the goal was to create a student body that was roughly 55% from Kentucky and 45% from out of state. They felt that would be a good mix and make the college more diverse. I later found they were correct in that assessment. It made the college more cosmopolitan, even though it was located in a small city in central Kentucky. Dr. Owen pretty much guaranteed I'd be accepted if I applied and that eventually happened. I had been rejected by W&L by that time. I was very disappointed, but now realized I could take it out on them on the athletic field. Or so I hoped.
While I was waiting to see if I would be accepted at Centre, I heard from their first-year football coach, a man named Steele Harmon, as good a football name as any. He said he hoped I would attend and asked if he could see a film of a game I played in at WHRHS. I spoke to Coach Don Schneider and he agreed to send the film of the Thanksgiving Day game in which we had upset undefeated Manville. I suspect that film paved the way for the immediate success I had on the football field upon arriving at Centre.
A problem arose that was typical of those times. My 18th birthday was on March 30th that year. In 1966 you had to register for the draft within 5 days of that birthday. Due to a combination of the fact that I didn't take the issue seriously and we were beginning our championship run in baseball and my ignorance of the law or the consequences (a violation was a felony) I registered a few weeks after the required date. I didn't think anything about it, but in late July I got a letter classifying me I-A and demanding I take the draft physical exam. They were hot to draft me. This was a few weeks before I was scheduled to depart for Centre College in late August. Panic-stricken, I called the draft board and told them I was scheduled to leave for college in a few weeks. They told me to have the college send them notice that i had enrolled and that would make me eligible for a II-S student deferment. That took care of the draft until the Lottery in my senior year at Centre.
In late August I took the Greyhound bus down to Danville, Kentucky with my steamer trunk and a large suitcase stowed in the bowels of the bus. I'd never taken a trip anywhere longer than eight hours. This trip took a grueling 17 hours. The bus eventually arrived in Danville and I was dropped off at the college gym parking lot by the bus driver who diverted from his usual route to help me out. As I disembarked from the bus I saw a tall young man walking by. "Looks like a football player," I thought to myself. I asked him for directions to the women's dorms where I knew the football team was quartered for practice a week before the student body arrived. In a deep Appalachian Mountain accent he said he was going there himself and would help me.
His name was Marty Takacs and that was the first day of a friendship that has lasted for sixty years. He and I would be the only ones in our class who ended up starting in every football game Centre played for the next four seasons.
I made it to the dorm and unpacked. Then began a whirlwind of activity that was so concentrated I don't recall most of it. i was just trying to keep up, survive and fight off exhaustion. We began two-a-day practices alternating every other day with one per day. I was given a play book to study and memorize when we were not practicing. The coaches used the first few days to evaluate the freshman talent and allow the veterans to work themselves back in shape.
During the summer I had been informed by Coach's letter that there was an initial endurance test in the form of a mile run and that backs and ends were supposed to be able to run it under 7 minutes and interior linemen under 7 minutes and 30 seconds. I had never practiced long distance running before, but I dutifully did in Watchung for a couple of weeks before I left. I found that I liked it, that a runner's high was a real phenomenon. I barely completed the run in under 7 minutes, but the next year I did it in 6:12.
The team had lost all it's ends to graduation, retirement or, in one case, a flunk out. Most of the rest of the team were returning starters except for two defensive backs. Several freshman including Marty Takacs, Stan Peskoe and I were in the running for the three open end positions. Stan turned out to be the best athlete in the class. They tried both Stan and me out at defensive end and wide receiver. I was an experienced wide receiver but not at defensive end. Stan was better at both positions than I was. He was 6'-2" and 190 lbs with broad shoulders and strong arms. He ran the 40 yd dash in 4.7 seconds. I ran it in 4.9, but only on a good day. I was smaller, at 5'-11' and 170 lbs. In defensive end drills, Stan took on the returning junior fullback Ted Stafford coming out of the backfield and convincingly shed him aside. When I tried to do the same thing, Stafford, ran me over.
This earned Stan a starting position at defensive end and sent me over to drill with the offense which was quarterbacked by Joe LaMonica, another perfect football name (there was a starting NFL quarterback named Daryl Lamonica at the time.) I started practicing at split end with other freshman, Stan included, and it was determined by the coaches that although Stan was also better at that position, it would help the team more if he played defensive end and I played on offense at split end where I was reasonably proficient. Marty Takacs, who was 6'-3" and weighed 195 lbs was selected to play tight end, a position for which he was perfectly suited because he had size and good hands. A fourth freshman named Sid Trivette from Pikeville in Eastern Kentucky and who had known Marty there, won a starting position in the defensive backfield.
I had one disadvantage. I was having trouble understanding the southern dialect. Most of the players were from Kentucky or other southern states and even those from cities like Louisville and Lexington were difficult to understand at first. I remember one time in the huddle on offense LaMonica (from Louisville) called a play that sounded like "54 Par." I had studied the playbook and could not recall a play with that name. So I ran out to my position at split end and pretended I knew what I was doing. The offense then ran a play I recognized as "54 Power."
It was blazing hot most days in the late-August Kentucky sun. Two-a-day practices were torturous. I often found that after a few days of early workouts, my stomach muscles were so sore I would have to roll myself out of bed to my knees on the floor because it was too painful to sit up straight in bed, turn and drop my feet to the floor.
The practice field bordered on a livestock yard which perfumed the air with the intense odor of accumulated cow and pig dung. It was also elevated above the street which meant it had a steep hill running parallel to the street. The hill was used to run short wind sprints. On certain days when the wind blew in our direction, you breathed the odiferous air while you ran wind sprints.
Tough I was not, although somewhat adept at faking it. I think that because you couldn't mess much up in a position that was often distant from the meaningful action of aggressive line play, they decided I would be acceptable at split end because i could at least catch the ball. The position wasn't as demanding as tight end where Marty Takacs was to play. He had his work cut out for him blocking upper class defensive lineman. At wide receiver it seemed you often didn't have the chance to hit someone or have them hit you if the play went toward the strong side where Marty anchored the end of the line. But Harmon went to work right away disabusing me of that notion. He noticed I was lackadaisical about the task of downfield blocking and in scrimmages would chase me down the field screaming, "THROW, DOUG!! THROW!!" by which he meant he wanted me to throw cross body blocks or any other kind of block at defensive players. I still hear those words in my sleep at times.
Transitioning from high school football to college football, even small college football, was a humbling experience. Most of the players at Centre were a cut below Southeastern Conference or Big Ten scholarship athletes in size, but many were still very good and had received honors like all-City in Louisville, Cincinnati or Lexington or all County out in the Kentucky countryside. Size matters in football and many of our skilled players were relatively small. Small player, small college seemed to be the rule. But often their athletic ability was the same as larger players who got scholarship offers. Several of our players could have played at any major university in the country. Stan Peskoe was one of them. That year, Stan would earn the distinction of being named All-Conference defensive end as a freshman. Stan was from Louisville. He came to Centre because he knew he would get a better education, one that would give him a leg up in getting into medical school, and because he would be closer to his widowed mother.
Others who could have played at major colleges were junior offensive tackle Jack Smith, the largest player on the team at 6'-2" and 225 lbs, and Jerry Schenz, a sophomore who would win Little All-American honors in his senior year at Centre. Schenz was the son of Hank Schenz who played major league baseball for the Chicago Cubs and New York Giants.
In the previous season, 1965, Centre College had four wins, three losses and a tie. It was the first winning season in several years. Briscoe Inman, a former player on the team in the late 40s, had been the coach of that team. As he had been named Athletic Director during the off season, his assistant Steele Harmon, a senior lineman on the undefeated 1955 Centre team (also coached by Inman), was named head coach and another assistant Herb McGuire, also on the 1955 team as a sophomore quarterback, was retained as Harmon's assistant. Coach Harmon was all fire. Coach McGuire, who we called Herbie, was cool water. They complemented each other. We often played teams with four to six assistant coaches. Harmon and McGuire only had one assistant: the basketball coach Lew Philips who drilled and organized teams of second and third string players to scrimmage against the starting teams. In 1968, Tom Bryant replaced Lew Philips as head basketball coach and assumed the same role as assistant coach in football.
I remember later in the season playing against Washington University in St. Louis in my freshman year. There was a photo of their coaching staff in the game program or perhaps the newspaper. They had seven coaches. They even had a part-time receiver coach named Sonny Randle who was playing at that time for the St. Louis Cardinals as a wide receiver and was one of the top pass catchers in the NFL for a couple of years.
The 1966 team at Centre only had five seniors. The junior class was much larger numbering 13 players, but the sophomore class was also small with only seven. Based on the pre-season team picture, our freshman class numbered 21 players (although on day one there were 23, according to one source)-- proof of the enthusiastic Harmon's ability to recruit players in his first year as head coach. Of the 21 freshman, 11 would win varsity letters that year.
Our football team's freshman class had five players who had played quarterback in high school: Marty Takacs, Gary Kleine, Mike Easley, Paul Ethridge (who would become the starting quarterback in our junior and senior year), and me. Quarterbacks are often the best athletes on their high school teams. The class of 1970 had a slew of good other good athletes like Stan Peskoe, John Henshaw, Preston Miles, Jay Van Arsdale, Raoul Baxter, Cable Francis and Gordon Benning, all of whom played for four years. There were others like Jerry Ingram, Don Dean, Art Maclean, Sid Trivette, and Gary Hall who contributed much as underclassmen, but didn't play the full four years.
The five seniors in 1966 (the class of '67) all had their open-stall locker on a short wall near the exit from the locker room to the field. For some reason I was put in the middle of them because there were not enough seniors to fill up each stall. Either that or they were supposed to look out for me or perhaps imbue me with their maturity. I was right next to senior co-captain and center Gary Faulkner while co-captain and defensive tackle Van Young was close by. This was their fourth year playing college football. Their calm and confidence were contagious. Because I had an overly fancy demeanor on the field they nicknamed me "Hot Dog." It was their good-natured way of telling me, "It's not all about you." Or, "you don't have to showboat to do your job." It was embarrassing but I deserved it. It stayed with me for a year or two when it was mercifully shortened to "Dog" which I actually liked. By that time I had matured as a player. It was all about the team. The only heroes in football are the ones recognized by their teammates.
The seniors and juniors stewarded the freshman in their first year in the lions' den of college football. They were another level of coaching who guided us on and off the field. When we were in Memphis to play Southwestern a few weeks later, Gary Faulkner took Marty Takacs and me out to his favorite soul food restaurant there. Gary's nickname was "Butt" because he had a large one. (I would also play with Gary on the Centre baseball team in the spring of 1967.) Soul music was the rage at the time and Butt loved it. He knew every word to great songs by the Temptation, The Four Tops and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. During that fall Little Anthony and the Imperials did a show at the college. Butt could dance like the Temptations.
At a concert the following winter on campus featuring the Four Tops, Butt, who came for a visit after graduating, and I were standing in front of the stage. The concert had almost been cancelled because of the snowy weather and the failure of a back-up band to appear. The Tops were sitting in their bus because there was no back up band. The president of Centre College, Thomas Spragens, intervened and somehow got the Tops to the stage where they performed an a capella set. At one point, Butt shouted to lead singer Levi Stubbs, "Levi, sing Bernadette!" Stubbs said, "You wanna hear Bernadette?" Butt said, "Yeah!!" In an instant, Stubbs broke into song:
BERNADETTE!! people are searching for (ah) The kind of love that we possessed (Bernadette!)
Captain Gary "Butt" Faulkner
Van Young, probably the best-known personality and natural comic on Centre's campus insisted in the spring of my freshman year that I go to a performance by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. I was a fan of Elvis, the Everly Brothers and the Beatles and knew very little about what we in New Jersey called hillbilly music, but I went and was impressed.
After two weeks of brutal early practice the 1966 season began.
In our first game against Kenyon College under the lights at home, I caught a touchdown pass from Joe LaMonica which was captured in a photo in the Advocate-Messenger, the local newspaper and was later published in the 1967 yearbook. I had been on campus for three weeks and here I was showing up in the newspapers. It was the only one I caught that season and I will always remember it. Coach Harmon, lest that touchdown went to my head, criticized me during the viewing of the game film for taking my eyes off the ball because the photo appeared to show that. "You didn't look that ball in!" As a former star lineman for Centre on their undefeated 1955 team, he didn't understand that once the ball hits your hands, you have to look for someone who is going to hit you.
We beat Kenyon that night, 20-6. The game was rather easy. Our defense, which was potent all year, held them to negative 31 yards rushing. Freshman Jerry Ingram, a bruising fullback who looked and was built like Bluto in the Popeye cartoons, scored the first touchdown. I scored the second on a fake run in which I pretended to block down and then ran toward the sideline for the catch in the end zone. A little later LaMonica scored on a rollout. We were ahead 20 to nothing at the half and held on to win convincingly.
But it was, after all, college football and the degree of difficulty and physical pain increased commensurately. In our second game at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) we were beaten by what appeared to be an inferior team 14-8. We got 17 first downs to their 5 and held them to 25 yards rushing and 84 yards total offense. We had 179 yards rushing. But we flubbed two punts, one that was blocked and one on a bad pass from center. Opportunistic Southwestern turned them both into touchdowns. Junior Ben Boone, our all-conference wingback who was both a receiving and running threat, missed the game with a broken hand.
For me it was a physically painful day. On one play I ran a deep down-and-out pattern to the sidelines. LaMonica overthrew me and I, seeing that the ball was five yards over my head, started to slow down to return back to the huddle. A second after the ball had passed out of bounds the defensive back guarding me knocked my legs out from under me. With my feet high in the air, I hit the ground hard with my right hand. When I got up I noticed that my pinky finger was broken off at its base and perpendicular to the back of my hand. Ben Boone's father, a doctor from Louisville, set it back in place and taped it to my ring finger as a splint. I was lucky that our running game was so effective that day, Joe only completed four passes. After my injury, no passes came my way. Without Boone and with two freshman ends, I suppose he and the coaches were reluctant to pass.
The following week we played Washington and Lee at our Homecoming. We didn't give the alumni much to cheer for in winning the game 3 to 0. It was a very boring game. Mixed with the boredom was frustration. Our offense got inside W&L's five yard line four times and couldn't score a touchdown. Jerry Schenz who will figure prominently in future accounts, played excellent defense in recovering a fumble and intercepting a pass. The coaches had also started using him as a running back, which proved to be fortuitous in the future.
What was not boring but painful was the trouble I got myself in by shooting off my mouth. It was W&L after all and they had rejected my application to their august and historic university. (The university is on land once owned by George Washington and Robert E. Lee was president of the university after the Civil War.) As we were going to the line for one of three field goal attempts, I started trash talking their defense, not noticing that across the line from me was their biggest and nastiest defensive player, a senior who was several inches taller than me and probably outweighed me by forty pounds. Most of the time as a wide receiver I was positioned ten yards from the heavy hitting. But on extra points and field goals I had to come in close and block like a real offensive lineman. As the ball was hiked, he charged and he hit me with a forearm that slammed my jaw shut and broke off little shards of my molar teeth which I soon felt swimming around in my mouth. That was the end of trash talking. Only hot dogs trash talk.
While the game was boring for the fans, there was some brief excitement in the 4th quarter when W&L missed a field goal from the 30 that almost tied the game. Then with three minutes left in the game, Stan Peskoe with W&L threatening on our 35 yard line intercepted a pass that preserved the win.
If the W&L game was boring, in the next game against Hanover our finger nails were grasping the cliff. Our home field, Farris Stadium, was a mud bowl from the rain, which always was to our disadvantage. Captain Van Young would describe our team in most games as "the little quick guys against the big fat guys." We were frequently smaller on average than the teams we played. In the mud, our quickness would quickly become mired. Hanover, with a talented freshman quarterback named Phil Winning, knocked us around in the first half with one 78 yard drive and a recovered fumble, leading to two touchdowns (and two missed extra points, which proved fatal in the end.) We went into halftime losing 12 to 0.
In the locker room, Coach Harmon expressed his displeasure with our performance without the benefit of profanity as he was a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but it was angry and noisy nonetheless. I distinctly remember him on his hands and knees barking at defensive lineman Bill Blackburn who was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor in his muddy uniform. Harmon's spittle-flecked outburst worked. In the fourth quarter, Blackburn blocked a punt which was recovered by lineman Joedy Sharpe in the end zone. Gary Faulkner kicked the extra point and it was 12-7. We got the ball back after a short punt on Hanover's 26. Lamonica ran it down to the 12, but on the next play got sacked for an 11 yard loss. Then we were hit with a delay of game penalty, which made it 4th and 28 at the 30. We were going the wrong way. With 5:40 left in the game it was do or die and LaMonica did. He lofted a long pass to the end zone where Boone leaping high wrestled for the ball with a defensive back for a long moment and came down with it for six points. Our two point try failed but our fired-up defense held them and we won 13-12.
Boone was clutch. He was listed at 5'-10" but my sense is that he was shorter than that. It was the same with LaMonica who was listed at 5'-11." i was listed at 5'-11" in my freshman year, (later to be increased to 6') and I was taller than both of them. But size in Boone's case didn't mattter. Like several of our best players, he was small but lethal. He was muscular, rugged and fast. He must have been a gymnast in high school. I once saw him sit in an armchair at the DKE house, grab the arms of the chair and raise himself into a handstand.
Looking back at the statistics, I was surprised to find that Ben was our best and most consistent runner that season. We had four good running backs but as a multi-purpose back, he always seemed to gain the most yards running. LaMonica was just as good as a roll-out quarterback and a scrambler. The play Boone had the most success with was called the "181" in which LaMonica would start a roll out but then hand off the ball on an inside reverse to Boone who came from the wingback position outside the tight end. The defense was always moving with LaMonica and the offensive line on that play and Boone would often break free cutting back in the opposite direction
The following week we traveled to Sewanee, Tennessee to play the University of the South. We had not beaten them since 1957. This time we beat them like a dusty carpet, 27 to 0. For those who had played against Sewanee in the past, the game was surprisingly easy. The headline in the Louisville Courier-Journal proclaimed, CENTRE ROMPS 27-0 AS OFFENSE EXPLODES. And explode it did: we ran for 322 yards and had over 400 total yards in offense. LaMonica scored 3 of our 4 touchdowns from close to the goal line and junior tailback Tom Ehrhard rushed for 137 yards on 15 carries. Ben Boone had 50 yards on 8 carries. Sewanee ran an old single-wing offense, which seemed archaic and did not do well against our stingy defense in 1966, but in the following year proved effective once again. They were coached by a legend named Shirley Majors who was the father of two sons who made a career coaching Division i football. The father coached The University of the South from 1957-77. In 1963 they were undefeated and he was named National Small College Coach of the Year.
In practice the week before the Sewanee game I was knocked unconscious by one of my fellow teammates, an incident that I still mystifies me. It was the day before we left for Sewanee. We were practicing light without pads and wearing only shorts, t-shirts and our helmets. The offense was running plays to be used that week against Sewanee. There was no defense in front of us, we were just going over the game plan. Harmon, however, was still pushing me to improve my downfield blocking. He had been an interior lineman for Centre on our undefeated 1955 team and like most interior lineman I suspect he was dismissive of those of us who didn't have to mix it up with a big defensive player on most plays, so he pushed me to contribute on every play. "Throw, Doug!! Throw!!"
On this day he had placed a blocking dummy down field that he wanted me to block on every play. All the other players would just jog through the play easily, familiarize themselves with it and were done and so on to the next play. I had to work harder. At one point as I approached the dummy I was knocked through the air, landing on my back and smashing the back of my head against the sun-baked ground. They told me I was unconscious for maybe 20 seconds. When I came to, there was Harmon looking at me with concern.
It seems that a senior guard named Benny Watkins had decided he wanted to hit the same dummy I was approaching and had collided with me. To this day I do not know whether Bennie hit me on purpose to reinforce the message Harmon was constantly yelling, or whether it was just an accident. I never saw him coming, and I suspect that he did see me and knew what I was assigned to do. If I ever see him again, I am going to ask him. Benny was only 5'-8" but he weighed 185 lbs, which earned him the sobriquet "Washing Machine" because he was shaped like one. Maybe he was just indulging in a little vigorous freshman hazing.
The next day, the morning of the bus trip to the University of the South at Sewanee, I got up to use the toilet and stubbed and split the top of my little toe on a door stop, which hurt. As I went into the toilet stall, I fainted and fell down next to the toilet. One of my dorm mates walked by and found me there as I began to recover. He probably thought I was drunk. I attribute that blackout to the concussion I must have suffered the day before. I'd never fainted in my life, nor have I since. I spent most of the bus ride to Sewanee sleeping and played the next day with no ill effects except, perhaps unrelated, I don't remember anything about the game and have relied on the archives to describe it.
Our next game was at home against Maryville College. We were 3 and 1. It was mid-way through the season and I was the leading pass receiver with 7 catches for 70 yards. That's not a lot, but we were a running team with a running quarterback. Most of my catches were short or medium out-patterns or hook-ins that would pick up 7 to 15 yards. Boone had 5 catches for 85 yards, but he had missed the first two games. By season's end, he would end up the leading receiver with many more yards than I had. He was an explosive player. When he got his hands on the ball good things happened.
In one game that I believe might have been the Maryville game, Boone took on a defender helmet to helmet at full speed. The defender was likely one of those Van Young would describe in his Southern accent as "agile, mobile and hostile"-- spoken slowly, each word emphasized with a very long "i." Boone came back to the huddle unsteady with his eyes a little bit crossed. Our helmets were made of a very hard plastic, but Boone's had a deep dent just above the front edge. I had seen helmets crack before, but I never saw one dent. LaMonica saw there was a problem and ordered Boone to go get another helmet and clear his head.
We excelled on both sides of the ball against Maryville and won 21-17. We rushed for 243 yards against their 59 yards. Joedy Sharpe blocked a kick. LaMonica, Stafford and Boone all scored from a few yards out. LaMonica completed only four of six passes for 78 yards which meant the ground game was working. The game was not as close as the score indicated. In the fourth quarter we drove down to the 1 yard line and didn't score in three tries. They scored late in the game on a long pass. It felt like we dominated them.
But domination doesn't always produce the sought after result. Our next game against Washington University in St Louis proved it. Washington U was the largest institution in the College Athletic Conference. The football team played home games at the old Francis Olympic Field which was built for the 1904 Olympics, the first Olympics held in the Western Hemisphere. They had a record of 4-2 and we were 5-1.
The game was a disaster from the start. A freshman who had never thrown a pass in a college game threw a pass for a touchdown on a trick play that put us behind 7-0 in the first few seconds of the game. Disaster followed disaster. LaMonica had two passes intercepted that led to touchdowns. We fumbled the ball away three times. We were behind 27-8 at the half. In the game, we held them to 11 yards rushing and 157 passing (67 of which were recorded on the first play) for 168 total yards. We had 128 yards rushing and 175 passing for 303 yards. But that didn't matter. As is often said, "Statistics are for losers." We got ambushed.
Boone ran for 90 yards in ten carries. I remember one of them because I finally threw a picture-perfect block that sprang him for fifty yards. He saw the block coming and cut perfectly off it. After the play he congratulated me on it.
The game was a nightmare. The St Louis Dispatch described it as the "most staggering defeat the Colonels have absorbed this season." We finally scored a second touchdown in the fourth quarter when Marty Takacs caught a 46-yard touchdown pass from LaMonica but by then the game was over. The final score was 37-14, which made Washington U 2-0 in the conference while were were 2-2. As the headline in the Louisville Courier Journal put it, "Washington Sidetracks Centre's Title Train." They would finish as conference champion at 4-0 in the conference and 7-2 overall, which would also be our overall record. We were a better team, but they were better that day.
In the newspapers before our next game, Coach Harmon said he was worried that we might let the disaster in St. Louis impact in the upcoming game against Hampden-Sydney from Farmville, Virginia. They had beat us 14-7 the previous year at Centre and had a winning record. Whereas we had beat W&L 3-0 in the current season, they had tied them 3-3 so we knew they could give us trouble.
In this game the breaks we didn't get in the Washington U. game went our way. Our defensive tackle Dick "Bull" Edwards recovered an early Hampden-Sydney fumble on their two yard line and Ted Stafford punched it in. Tom Ehrhard scored on a 43 yard dash and Boone snared a 58-yard touchdown pass from LaMonica. We missed all three extra points and were up 18-0 at half time.
In the 1966 season we seemed to have problems with long-snapping for punts, field goals and extra points although it could have been the inaccuracy or inability of our kickers. We didn't punt as much as other teams because of our superior ground game in which at season end we out-gained all our opponents by a whopping 1766 yard to 473. (Passing was more equal: 817-812.) But their punters always averaged more yards than our Ted Stafford In the Hampden-Sydney game, our inferior kicking game almost cost us.
In the second half, Hampden-Sydney scored on an 80 yard pass, the one mistake our defense made all day. Subtracting that play, the defense held Hampden-Sydney to 45 yards rushing and 44 passing. It was the offense that got us in trouble in the second half when LaMonica threw an interception the defender returned for a 35 yard touchdown. With the score 18-14 with four minutes left Hampden-Sydney attempted an onside kick which we recovered. We survived. Our record was 6-2.
Our last game ranked up there with the Hanover game as the most exciting of the season. Rose Polytechnical from Indiana came in and held us scoreless in the first half while scoring once on a 56 yard drive. In the third quarter we marched 53 yards with Jerry Ingram, who the veterans early on had named "Bowling Ball" for his ability to knock down defenders like bowling pins, going over from the two. But Rose Poly marched 71 yards to make it 14-7. Late in the third quarter we marched down to the one, were thrown back to the nine and failed to score. Then the magic began.
With four minutes left in the game and deep in our own territory, LaMonica passed to Jerrry Schenz for 51 yards and on the next play Boone broke loose on what the Advocate-Messenger called "a beautifully executed reverse" (the 181 play) for a 38 yard touchdown. What to do when down 14-13 with a few minutes left? Go for the two-pointer, of course! (We didn't have benefit of overtime in those days.) Again from the Danville Advocate Messenger: "Centre tried for two points after touchdown and Ben Boone was in the endzone by inches with the ball as the Colonels closed their exceptionally good season." Boone was clutch when the situation demanded it.
We had a great team that year. According to the Courier-Journal:
"In team statistics, Centre yielded 90.2 yards a game in passes, and 142.6 in total yardage. For small colleges, the Colonels are seventh in the nation in rushing defense and eighth in the the nation in total defense."
That was quite an accomplishment given that there were several hundred small colleges in the US with football teams.
Saturday night after the final game, the Dekes traditionally scheduled one of two major party weekends of the academic year, fittingly named "Training Breaker." Of course most of us regularly broke traditional training rules every weekend during the season, but on Training Breaker you got to go farther. I drank two six packs of beer that night and the following day, my roommate,Jim Freeman, had to nurse me back to health. I could also commiserate with Kleine next door and Peskoe two doors down who were in similar condition.
Honors
When All-College Athletic Conference selections were announced in January of 1967, Centre placed ten players out of 26 on the list. Jack Smith, Lowell Thompson, Joe LaMonica, Ben Boone made it on the offense. Stan Peskoe, John Murphy, Van Young, Dick Edwards, Joedy Sharpe, and Jerry Schenz made it on defense.
And yet despite our 7-2 record, the season was a disappointment and we felt it viscerally. We were so much better than everyone else and yet only 2-2 in the College Athletic Conference. Those were the games that counted the most.
There was one other event that year that of historical significance. After we returned from the Christmas holidays, I remember watching the first Super Bowl on January 15th, 1967 in the Deke basement on a 19-inch TV.
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As freshman football players our first year was a magical one. There may have been other years in my life that I became more worldly having change thrust upon me, but nothing could match that year as a wondrous experience. You leave the place where you grew up knowing hundreds of familiar people all your life and you confront an entirely new and unique situation in a distant place with hundreds of people you don't know, many of who talk funny. The saving grace is that you have hundreds of other young people as companions going through same. You bond enthusiastically with some of them as you go through hard times and good. You adapt, improvise and overcome. You make lifelong friends. Many met their lifelong partner.
Good luck came to me again as it related to freshman dormitory room assignments. My assigned room was on the 3rd floor (of three) at Breckenridge Hall, the venerable building that had housed by that time many generations of students. Built in 1892, it was turned into a residence hall by Centre in 1901 and renovated to it's current condition in 1945 (and again in 1999.) From the CentreCyclopedia:
Robert McMullen, who graduated from Centre in 1905 and would become the college's president in 1944, recalled living in Breck as a student when there was no central heating, but fireplaces, no bathrooms, but washstands with bowls and pitchers, and those who desired a bath would go to the gym.
Although I had to endure climbing two flights of stairs every time I returned to my room, two of my football teammates were in close proximity. Gary Kleine lived in the room next to mine and Stan Peskoe lived in the room past Gary's. We each had a roommate who was not a football player. Gary did not letter in his freshman year in football, but would become a starting defensive back our sophomore year and then inherit Ben Boone's wingback position as a junior and senior. He was the only player who frequently played both ways as a junior and senior, although Scotty Hunt as a junior did it in our senior year. He also turned out to be the best pole-vaulter on campus and broke the school record as a freshman by vaulting 12 feet.
Centre had a very competitive intramural sports program. Shortly after the Christmas break, the intramural basketball schedule began. There were two divisions: a six-team Fraternity Division designated "A" and the six-team Freshman/Non-aligned Division designated "B." The six national fraternities were Delta Kappa Epsilon, Phi Delta Theta, Beta Theta Pi, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Phi Kappa Tau, and Sigma Chi. The freshman/non-aligned division had teams named Wiseman Hall, the Independents and three teams named Breck 1st Floor, 2nd Floor and 3rd Floor respectively And then there were the Renegades comprised mostly of non-aligned upperclassmen.
There are only four entries in the Centre College Cento reporting on the the schedule and the action in the 1967 Intramural season. But I will attempt to piece together what happened. Playing on the 3rd floor Breck basketball team with Stan and Gary turned out to be one of the most enjoyable experiences in my sporting life, which goes to prove that it doesn't matter what level you are playing at if the competition is stiff and you play well.
As the second semester began after the Christmas holiday break, rushing for pledges among the fraternities had started in earnest. Because we had become so close to upper class Dekes on the football team, Stan Peskoe, Marty Takacs (Wiseman Hall), Gary Kleine, Jay Van Arsdale (1st floor Breck), Mike Easley (second floor Breck), Raoul Baxter (1st Floor Breck) and I had become enamored of the Dekes. The Deke seniors in particular were unique and talented individuals. For example, while the winning football team was heavily laden with Dekes including LaMonica, Boone, Young, Faulkner, Sharpe, Silvey, Rogers, and others, their intramural football team was even better and more dominant with several seniors including John Hubbard, George Allen, Bob Guthrie, Tony Haynes, and John Harrod contributing to an undefeated record. Nearly all of the seniors were also competent scholars who would go on to become lawyers, doctors and professionals in other fields. John Harrod, for example, won a Rhodes Scholarship.
Each fraternity had a distinct character. If I may loosely stereotype them: the SAEs were nice guys without many dominant personalities--a bit dull. A couple of them were folk singers; Sigma Chi was the same; the Phi Kappa Taus were a little more lively but a bit weird. Beta Theta Phi had hip, sophisticated, well-dressed guys. I genuinely liked them and so did the Dekes.
Then there was Phi Delta Theta. They were the straighter, proper fraternity, more officious than the Dekes and almost as athletic. Future starting quarterback Paul Ethridge pledged with them and so did Buddy Baker, who went on to become the high scorer on the college basketball team. In intramural sports the Phi Delts competed with the Dekes for supremacy and often won.
Delta Kappa Epsilon was Centre's version of the "Animal House" when the term was very much in use but before the famous movie was released in 1978. The movie accurately portrayed the utterly Rabelaisian culture of fraternal animal houses across the country, although it didn't associate it with sports which was the reality of jock animal houses at the time. Jock houses were always the wildest and Delta Kappa Epsilon was no exception. The movie depicts how the fictional Delta Tau Chi house has their charter revoked and is expelled from the campus of Faber college. This is precisely what happened to the Dekes at Centre in 2003 after years of debauchery when they were banned from campus for an unauthorized pledging event off-campus-- no doubt a triggering event after years of all manner of violations. They were allowed to return in 2010. I returned to Centre for the first time in decades that year when the re-instatement was underway. The movie was written by Harold Ramis (and two others) and based on his fraternity experience at Washington University in St Louis as a member of Zeta Beta Tau and the class of 1966.
More of the best athletes in each class usually pledged Deke. Stan, Gary and I in our spartan rooms on the 3rd floor knew within a few weeks of playing on the football team that we would pledge Deke. So did Marty, Mike Easley, Jay Van Arsdale, and Raoul Baxter. The Dekes had an advantage that way. They could start rushing pledges before the semester even started.
But the Betas, who were more friendly to the Dekes than any other fraternity and tolerant of their wild ways, were also interested in pledging freshman football players, inlcuding Stan and me. One night, before pledging, Stan and I were steambathing up on 3rd floor Breck. This activity required going into the shower room and turning on all the showers to hot, full-stream. Then we would plug up the shower drains with towels and let the water build up to the top of the curb, maybe six inches in height. After a hard day of football practice, it was soothing swimming around in that less than sanitary body of water. On Sundays after a hard game Peskoe, Kleine, Easley, Takacs and I would steambathe in the shower of the football locker room which was always empty on that day.
One evening during fraternity rush, Peskoe and I were steambathing in the Breck third floor shower. Beta Walter Davenport came looking for Stan and me in a last ditch effort to persuade us to pledge Beta. Walter was from Connecticut and I suppose the Betas thought that might give him East Coast sway with me. He found us steambathing in the shower. Walter was a dapper guy and the closest thing to a polished stand-up comedian on campus. Previous to that night, he had been rushing Stan and me hard whenever he got the chance. On this night he came looking for us half-drunk and elegantly attired in coat and tie. After inquiring, he found us in the shower room, walked in, and sat down in six inches of water fully clothed under the flowing shower heads and said, "I want to talk to you guys." He proceeded to regale us with compelling reasons why we should pledge Beta and not Deke. It was not enough to cause us to switch loyalty. The football social fraternity is stronger than the Greek social fraternity. We became blood brothers with the Dekes before we knew the names of the other fraternities. During the previous season, there had been only one Beta on the football team, Lowell Thompson, the all-conference center. There had been 16 Dekes.
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Intramural basketball had started. Kleine, Peskoe and I would pledge Deke on February 10th of Rush Weekend. We combined with two Beta pledges, Charlie Hendricks and Bill Turner to form the 3rd floor Breck team. I do not recall if we even had one substitute player, but I doubt it. If we had, it might have been John Ashcraft, Kleine's roommate, who had never played organized basketball.
middle row: John Ashcraft Gary Kleine
kneeling: Mike Easley the Blogger Stan Peskoe
From the Deke pledge photo, 1967
The standings published later in the season in the Cento on pledge day February 10th, 1967 show we had a 1-1 record in the B division while Wiseman had finished their season at 4-1. Our one loss was one of their four victories. They beat us by two points as the column mentions. Why we had played only two games and they had finished their season having played five is a mystery to me. I wasn't among them at the time, but note that six of the 11 leading scorers in the B League were Dekes or Deke pledges and four of 12 in the A League were Dekes.
The Cento didn't cover it, but we must have finished up with a record identical to Wiseman's at 4-1. Because they had beat us they had a preferred place in the playoffs which were awarded to the two best teams in the A League and the B League as well. The Phi Delts had beat the Dekes so they ended up 5-0 to the Dekes 4-1. Wiseman therefore would play the Dekes and we, 3rd Floor Breck, would play the undefeated Phi Delts.
The playoffs were originally slated for February 11th and 13th, but must have been delayed because all the scheduled games had not been played. The finals were played on February 18th, so the semifinals must have been a couple of days earlier.
The semi-finals were not covered in the Cento. The Dekes, as to be expected, blew out Wiseman, but we on 3rd Floor Breck upset the Phi Delts in a victory that astonished everyone involved including us. It was a proud moment for us and especially for Stan, Gary and me because all the Dekes and their girlfriends were in the gym cheering on we three pledges who always did the bulk of the scoring in our games. Our Beta pledges, Charlie and Bill, were also happy because the Betas didn't like the Phi Delts much either. Beating the Deke's bitter rivals made us instant heroes in the beer-soaked hallways of Dekedom, not to mention on the 3rd floor where we were celebrated, except among the Phi Delt pledges of who there were at least three. The victory even earned us cancellation of our next Deke pledge meeting which was always an occasion in which the pledges were abused by the upperclassmen.
Our victory, however, presented a new problem. We had to play the Dekes in the finals.
There was a lot of hinting around by Deke upperclassmen that we should refrain from playing our best in the championship. That things would not go well for us at pledge meetings and during Hell Week if we won. Of course, things never went well for pledges at pledge meetings and during Hell Week anyway, so we soldiered on. The hinting was all in good fun, but for some Dekes maybe not. LaMonica and Boone were high-scoring guards on that team and we knew they would want us to play our best. And we did.
I'll let the Cento column describe the game:
i remember little about the game except that guarding Joe LaMonica was difficult and Kleine was on fire. I'm guessing one of our Betas was guarding John Hubbard. I don't know who on the Dekes led their comeback, but I suspect that because we were essentially a five man team and the Dekes had at least three competent substitutes we likely ran out of gas in the 4th quarter.
A month later there was a vote by the teams and the referees on naming the All-Stars of the Intramural season. Out of ten spots, the Dekes had four mentions and the 3rd Floor had three (Gary Kleine's name is misspelled as "Cline"):
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Early in March, Coach Harmon scheduled two weeks of spring football workouts. It may have been more since the NCAA allowed 20 days in what was known as the College Division. According to Google AI, many small college conferences forbid spring football workouts in 1967, but ours was apparently not one of them. We went through the usual drills and on the final day, Friday, March 17th, St. Patrick's Day, the offense and defense scrimmaged. This was something that was not often done during the regular fall season because the two sides, always competitive and prideful, would invariably injure each other. On this occasion, halfway through the scrimmage, i suffered a severe ankle sprain and had to be helped from the field.
In the next hour as I sat on the trainer's table I watch my ankle swell up to the size of a grapefruit. When the scrimmage ended, Coach Harmon came in, looked at it and said, "That's the worst sprained ankle I've ever seen." Then he disappeared. I was given some crutches and told to go to my room and rest, which I did. But it happened that St. Patricks Day, along with Training Breaker, was one of two major party weekends for the Dekes during the academic year. So I dutifully hopped up on my crutches and went to the party later that evening. Paddy's' Day parties were part of the Deke animal house legend and numerous stories of bad behavior were part of our history. If nothing else, the beer would help ease my pain. St Patrick Day parties at the Deke House were often three day affairs that sold out the liquor stores across the county line in Nicholasville, which is where we had to buy the stuff because Centre was located in the dry county of Boyle.
My sprained ankle turn entirely black and blue starting from the bottom of my calf down to cover my entire ankle and foot area with a slight stripe of white skin along the bottom of my toes, which were also black and blue. I was wrapped in ace bandages and on crutches for at least a week when another act of human kindness came my way. Mike Easley, who was voted the most valuable non-letterman on the football team invited me to his family home in Louisville for the Easter weekend which came early in 1967 as Easter was on March 26th. Not only that, he said his father had procured tickets to the NCAA Final Four which were scheduled to be played af Freedom Hall in Louisville and that I could go with him to the semi-finals on Friday while his father and he would go to the finals on Saturday, March 25.
Mike's father, Barry Easley ran a successful insurance business in Louisville and was an avid supporter of our football team. He, Jay Van Arsdale's father Buck, and Will Johnson's father traveled with their wives to virtually every game in which their sons played. They were our boisterous traveling fan club and it was always a delight to see them and hear them root us on.
Mike became one of our best players by the time he was a sophomore. He was our strong safety, then rover back, our punter and our back-up quarterback. Many among us thought he should be the starting quarterback after LaMonica graduated. I didn't want to take a side in that debate. Mike, who broke the Centre track team record in the high and low hurdles year after year at Centre, was a better runner than Paul Ethridge, but I did prefer Ethridge's passes, which were tighter, softer and easier to catch than Mike's. I would have been comfortable either way. Ethridge had pledged Phi Delt but on the football field, that was irrelevant. Coaches Harmon and McGuire, who were themselves Dekes in the 50s, chose Ethridge to be our quarterback when LaMonica graduated after the '67 season. I trusted their judgement.
The semi-final games in the NCAA tournament that year featured Dayton vs North Carolina in the first game and UCLA vs Houston in the second. If anybody was going to beat sophomore Lew Alcindor (before he became Kareem Abdul Jabbar) and UCLA it would be Houston. In warmups Alcindor was doing layups by letting the ball drop from his hand near the top of the backboard down his arm and into the basket. The NCAA abolished what was then called "the stuff shot" (now "the dunk") two days after that Final Four so Alcindor was practicing not dunking.
UCLA beat Houston and "The Big E" Elvin Hayes by 15 points and then beat Dayton in the final by the same amount. They were one of the greatest teams to ever play college basketball.
I will always be grateful to the Easley family for their generosity and hospitality that weekend, my first Easter away from home.
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It was late March and time for baseball, although with my grotesque ankle I was in no condition to be playing anything. I was off crutches by Easter weekend but still hobbling. Baseball practice started right after St. Patrick's Day but i couldn't participate.
Having suffered five major sprained ankles and an actual dislocation of my foot at the ankle joint in my athletic career, this is what I have learned: if the sprain is severe, it will take a week before you can walk, two more weeks before you can jog, and at least a month before you can perform at an acceptable level in a competitive sport. That applies to athletes under the age of 30. As you get older, the times increase.
I was lightly working out with the baseball team (also coached by Steele Harmon) in early April but was not ready to play competitively. As a shortstop trying to make a play on a ground ball up the middle, it was painful to run hard for the ball, catch it, and then attempt stop abruptly and throw it. I couldn't pitch because it was my left ankle, the one you land on in your delivery. This problem stayed with me until at least the middle of April and press accounts describing the team in various newspapers before then make no mention that I was even on the roster. In one interview on the subject of prospects before the season started, Harmon did not mention my name.
Our first game was against the University of Kentucky in Lexington on April 5th and we got bombed, 15-2. We used four pitchers and the Wildcats abused them all. In one account of the game in a newspaper, the pitchers go, mercifully, unnamed. In the Lexington Herald, they were less sympathetic: "A total of 14 walks, four wild pitches and three hit batsman, made the day's work much easier--and possibly more hazardous-- for the Wildcats." That's what you get when you put a Division 1 scholarship program against a non-scholarship small college program. It was Kentucky's 15th game of the season. They were in mid-season form.
I sat on the bench just thrilled to be there. One of my favorite basketball teams of all time, the UK basketball team of 1966, which made it to the NCAA finals that year, had two all-Americans on it: Pat Riley and Louie Dampier. Dampier had been the shortstop for the UK baseball team the previous season.
Next we played Western Kentucky. They were Division II school at the time but in a decade they would move up to Division 1. They were another scholarship team. We lost a doubleheader by the scores of 14-4 and 12-6. Speaking sarcastically, we were improving.
In a column in the Advocate-Messenger before our game with Kentucky Southern in Danville a list of our starters was published and I was not on it because I wasn't quite ready to play. We lost that game on April 14th. We were 0 and 4.
My first game was on April 15th when we played a doubleheader at Transylvania in Lexington. I remember it because there was a white two-story building on a hill behind home plate directly in the line of sight from my shortstop position through the batter at home plate. A batter for Transy hit a pop fly in my direction and I lost it in the white building. Harmon chewed me out for not getting a good jump on the ball. I angrily tried to explain to him that I had lost the ball briefly in the whiteness of the building. In Major League baseball they used to refer to it as the "white-shirt crowd problem." On hot days, fans would wear white shirts which made it difficult to track the ball for hitters and fielders. To remedy the problem, MLB put black backgrounds up in the batters' line of sight where there had been centerfield bleachers.
At Transy, we won the first game by a score of 6-5. We got blown out again in the second game 12-3. The game had to be called after four innings because Transy had been able to bat for so long.
We had squeaked out our first win. We were starting to improve.
The next week we played Transy again in another doubleheader at home. Steve Garrett, who was the starting shortstop when he wasn't pitching duties, was the starter. Here's a description of the game from the Cento:
I was finally be able to perform and pull my weight. We swept the double-header and were starting to play up to our capability.
Three days later we played Hanover. The game was close and the outcome was described in the Advocate-Messenger this way:
The following day we played Georgetown at their field in another doubleheader. The Cento describes my pitching effort in the first game:
Three days later we lost another doubleheader to Bellarmine at home by scores of 7-3 and 4-3.
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Off the field, I wasn't dating anyone. In the fall, I had dated "Big Red," the nickname for Martha Buxton, a sophomore who was six feet tall and of course red-headed. The Dekes all like her and they arranged for me to date her a couple of times. When I flew home for Thanksgiving, she put me up in Lexington the night before my flight. I had acquainted myself with one freshman girl over the winter, but nothing came of it.
But I needed a date for Carnival, the big celebration of spring on campus with pageantry and festivities that lasted all night. It was the college version of prom weekend and scheduled for April 26th. One evening at the Student Union cafe I ran into Betty Fowlkes who many considered the most beautiful girl in the freshman class. In the fall she had dated junior John "Buck" Rogers, one of our ferocious linebackers. She was known to the Dekes because her sister Jody had attended Centre the previous year. Jody decided she wanted to remain in their home town of Franklin, Tennessee because she had a sweetheart in law school at Vanderbilt. This broke the heart of a Deke senior named Robert Grady who was an ardent admirer. Buck acted as a protective escort in Betty's first few months at Centre because the Dekes all knew and loved her sister.
I didn't have a date for Carnival and I wasn't sure if Betty did either. She had the kind of beauty that made men shy and prone to stutter. I thought, "why not ask her?" So I called her and she said, no, she did not have a date and yes, she would be glad to go with me. When I told my dorm mates I had a date with her they all were incredulous. "You have a date with Betty Fowlkes? How did you do that?!"
On the Saturday night of Carnival, I picked her up from the women's dorm. The first thing I saw was the dress. My jaw must have dropped. Most of the women were wearing traditional white prom dresses but hers was a sheer, clinging, full length, light-blue, silk print dress that looked Polynesian. It was exotic and daring.
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| Betty Fowlkes at Carnival, 1967 |
That evening we fell in love.
Another kindness was extended to me that spring by Stan Peskoe. Stan grew up in Louisville, went to Waggener High School with Mike Easley and had attended the Kentucky Derby several times. He suggested we stay at his house in Louisville and go together this time. His mother, a widow, loved her boy Stan, the younger of her two sons. Stan and I had become best friends during our confinement on third floor Breck and she treated me accordingly.
On the first Saturday in May we went to Churchill Downs and drank way too much beer. At one point a bunch of thugs tried to relieve us of our cooler but we were rescued by a woman we knew from Centre who sat on top of the cooler and wouldn't' let them have it. She was very stern with them, which was good because Stan and I were probably not in any condition to fight them for the goods. It was a rainy, muddy Derby and lots of students from Centre were there. It was the last Derby in which people were allowed to bring alcoholic beverages into Churchill Downs. There were several Centre students at the track that day. A Beta pledge of our acquaintance named Leland Hulbert was so drunk that when he went to the betting window to place a bet on horse number 11, the clerk thought he said number 7. He ended up winning $50 by mistake on that horse. Proud Clarion, a 30-1 shot, won the race.
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I could find no coverage of the few baseball games we had left before we traveled to Memphis for the College Athletic Conference spring tournament scheduled on May 11th to 13th at Southwestern in Memphis. Before we left we played scheduled games against Eastern Kentucky, Berea and a double header against Union or so it says on the schedule. Eastern Kentucky was a powerhouse that year under legendary coach Charles "Turkey" Hughes and won the Ohio Valley Conference Title. Two of their players ended up on the university's All-Century team in 2011, so it's probably better there is no record of the game against us that I could find. I have a vague recollection that their hitters were the best we faced that year and that they scored a lot of runs. Apparently no one in the newspaper business in Kenucky felt the games were of any importance, even in Eastern Kentucky.
In the College Athletic Conference each year the baseball, track, golf and tennis teams would gather at one of the five colleges in the conference for a spring sports festival.
By my count when we arrived at Southwestern, our record in baseball was 5 and 11. The Commercial Appeal of Memphis said we were 3 and 13 which was nonsense. A column in the Cento claimed we were 6 and 12 at the end of the season. If that was true, our record was actually 5 and 11 when we arrived in Memphis. Whatever the count, it was a dismal season for us.
But it is the nature of baseball to make a bad team good on certain days and a good team bad. We drew a bye in the first round of the single elimination tournament. Washington U., the favorite in the tournament with a record of 16 and 6, destroyed Washington and Lee in the first round by a score of 14-0 thus earning them the opportunity to play us in the semi-finals.
Steve Garrett pitched a masterful game allowing Washington only one run in the first 8 innings while we tallied six. We got three in the second and three more in the 7th to grab the lead. In the ninth, a centerfielder named Donny Greenwell hit a two-run homer for Washington to make the final tally 6-3. (In one of the great coincidences of my life, Donny Greenwell and I would meet again playing slow pitch softball in the mid-70s for the Chatham Squire softball team on Cape Cod.) Our hitting stars for the game were Butt Faulkner with two RBIs and Ziggy Silvey, who had two hits and an RBI. I went one for three with a double. It was the most satisfying win of the season and we were proud. The tournament like the conference was only five years old and Washington U. had won the baseball title and had been undefeated in the conference in the previous four years.
We were feeling pretty good, but then we collapsed in the final against Sewanee. Alex Volz gave up nine runs on ten hits in 5 and 2/3 innings. Both Garrett and I relieved with similar results. Bill Fowler threw a clean inning in the eighth. We were behind 10-2 after three innings. I went three for five with a triple. But I've always carried the memory of that triple because as I was gloating on third base I was picked off by Sewanee's observant catcher-- a cardinal sin in baseball. Gary "Butt" Faulkner in his final at bat as a Centre College player crushed a 425', two-run homer. and drove in three runs in the game. We lost 15-5.
I had a good second half of the season after recovering from my ankle sprain. In the final column on baseball in the Cento that year there was this paragraph summing up the the final game and full season:
It was a bad year for the team but my second half success had me looking forward to the following season with anticipation.
I had four hits in the tournament also. I went four for eight and Ziggy went four for nine. But only one shortstop is selected on such occasions. Three outfielders are selected. Ziggy made it as one of the outfielders and deservedly so.
Steve Garrett because he was so versatile and contributed in every way was our MVP, but Ziggy as I looked back over all the old newspaper columns, delivered in the clutch all season long. Later, in the fall of '67 playing middle linebacker on the football team as a senior, he would have the kind of season linebackers dream about. Ziggy, who was boyishly shy and yet fun, was a pleasure to play with in both sports. I'm still in awe of the season he put together later that year in football.
The semester ended in late May and I headed back to New Jersey to work. I had gotten some financial aid from the college, but our family had nine children so I had to pay what I could for my education.
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