Sunday, December 24, 2000

Basketball season will at least be warmer
By Bill Whitaker

At long last, the tortuous nightmare is over. Victory is assured and the defeated must content themselves with a race well run.

No, I’m not talking about presidential politics. I’m talking about something far more important to folks in our parts — the high school football season just ended.

More than most towns, Abilene had plenty to crow about near season’s end with five teams in the playoffs — Hardin-Simmons University and all four local high schools.

Cooper High went down fighting in a furious quarterfinal game that went into double overtime.

Last weekend’s game between Wylie and Gatesville was just as hard-fought.

In the end, Wylie got so close to claiming, and for the first time, the Class 3A Division 1 state football championship. Only in the final seconds did Gatesville grab an interception, halting Wylie’s march down the field and ensuring the Hornets’ 14-10 victory.

The playoffs took their toll not only on the teams but also on those in the stands.

For instance, former Wylie High footballer Justin Scott, 20, whose brother Jeremy is on the team, woke up with a heck of a headache last Sunday, thanks to head-butting helmeted Wylie players with his bare, clean-shaven skull.

By game’s end he had a bruised knot you could see from the top of the stands.

“He’d been doing that head-butting thing all year when the team came out, but he got a little too fired-up that night,” his dad, Randolph Scott, told me. “At least he didn’t feel anything. I think he was numb from the cold.

“But he sure felt it the next day.”

Still, that was better than another Bulldog fan who passed out in the men’s restroom during halftime and had to be hauled off by medics.

The game was also tough on reporters. Temperatures dropped into the freezing range during the Wylie-Gatesville game, causing the ink in my pen to coagulate.

During an earlier playoff game, Reporter-News veteran Ken Ellsworth, 56, had to type his game story onto a laptop computer while on his knees because there was no room in the press box.

Even fans watching the championship game on KTAB-TV experienced frustration when the key interception sealing Wylie’s fate happened during a commercial break.

Ironically, one commercial told how Reporter-News readers had picked KTAB sports anchor David Bacon as the best in the Big Country.

“We were going crazy,” KTAB sports co-anchor David Robinett told me. “We had trouble all night with the officials, who were supposed to stop the game for commercial breaks. They were supposed to, but they didn’t.”

And it’s best we not even discuss the KTAB pre-game show that pre-empted the exciting end of the Seattle-Oakland game — one decided in the final three minutes.

Robinett’s weary post-game analysis: “We were going to make somebody upset.”

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. His column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.