My 15 Minutes
Glory came, and then it went
By Bill Fields
During a boyhood in which sports attracted and held my attention like nothing else, I was not the best or the worst, neither star nor scrub. Girls did not give me Valentines because I was the strongest or the fastest, but I wasn’t the last one picked when shirts met skins either.
Like most kids, I was athletic filler, my standard of play seldom matching my passion for anything that involved a ball.
Once, I won.
In the fall of 1967 I was 8 years old, a third-grader learning to write cursive when a bully named Billy wasn’t giving me a hard time. I liked school but loved football — playing touch or tackle in the neighborhood or watching the East Southern Pines Blue Knights on Friday nights and the Washington Redskins on Sunday afternoons.
Participating in Punt, Pass & Kick, now that I was of minimum age, was as natural as eating grits for breakfast.
Ford sponsored the skills competition, so that meant a visit to the local dealer, Jackson Motors, to sign up. Entrants received a comics-styled booklet with rules, inspiration and pointers. National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle and Chicago Bears owner/coach George Halas offered introductions, the latter holding the large spoils for a grand prize.
“How’s THIS for a trophy?” Halas said in his strip. “It’s one of six national PP&K Champion Awards that SOME youngster will cart away from the Playoff Bowl in Miami January 7th. Look close — it might have YOUR NAME on it!”
It would be a long and difficult road from the Sandhills to South Florida. Local, Zone, District, Area and Division contests preceded the big day in the Orange Bowl, where six finalists would be sporting uniforms like the pros. We had help, though, from reading the life stories of, and tips from, three NFL standouts: punter Dave Lee of the Baltimore Colts, quarterback Bart Starr of the Green Bay Packers, and kicker Bruce Gossett of the Los Angeles Rams.
“Ankle should be stiff as ball hits instep slightly back of ball’s center,” Lee wrote. “Don’t curl toes . . . stretch them forward.”
“Wrist action!” urged Starr. “Don’t ‘push’ the ball! A good wrist snap and finger action will provide needed spiral.”
“Stand relaxed 8 or 9 yards behind ball with shoulders square to intended line of flight,” Gossett said. “ . . . Your kicking toe should point directly downfield.”
The Gogolak brothers were having sidewinding success by this point, but touting soccer-style kicking must have been too revolutionary an idea for the NFL. Gossett’s biography noted that his father was a weekend soccer player but discouraged his son from following suit. “All you’ll do is ruin your legs for other sports!”
Leading up to the Saturday afternoon of the Local competition at Memorial Field, I tried to apply the expert instruction. (Starr’s wisdom was harder to take because I was a Sonny Jurgensen guy.) I punted over our clothesline, passed to buddies and kicked through barked goal posts, imagining a crossbar. When the time came, there was no room for error: one punt, one pass and one kick, with the amount off-line subtracted from how far the ball went in each skill.
I’d like to believe there is a typo in the yellowed clipping from The Pilot about that day, because the story says my total distance was only 106 1/2 feet. But the paper reported my puny number because it was tops among the 8-year-olds, and I left the ballpark with, as the literature had promised, a “distinctively designed, handsomely crafted PP&K metal trophy.”
If the Ford folks didn’t loosely model the prize after an Oscar statuette, then there’s no sand in Southern Pines. The figure is holding a ball, not a sword, and standing on a football-shaped pedestal instead of a film reel. It is gold paint, not 24-carat and sure doesn’t weigh 8 1/2 pounds like an Academy Award. But it has some heft and a regal look.
I would not make it to Miami until I was grown man. The next round was in Asheboro, and despite new confidence and a new white sweatshirt, I flubbed my punt and finished near the bottom. My PP&K glory was fleeting. The gold man, though, has survived the decades, a shiny reminder of my win. PS
Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.
