Pigskin Pyrotechnics

The longest and noisiest of all U.S. football seasons is the high school football season in Texas. From the Pecos to the Panhandle, 740 Texas Interscholastic League teams slug it out with everything but blackjacks. They usually get more newspaper space than college games, often draw bigger crowds. Fans (who include about everybody in Texas) get in there and cheer as if they were defending the Alamo with Davy Crockett.

This year's pyrotechnics topped them all. At Tahoka, disagreement over football policy ended in a tizzy when the school superintendent got his head bashed, the principal quit, the coach resigned, excited parents staged a mass meeting, 19 members of the football squad turned in their books and left school. At Pampa, one of the state's oldest and best referees made a game-end dash for it, flanked by protecting police, beat it out of town with a hooting mob panting at his heels.

In Sundown (pop. 1,500) rabid football citizens dug deep for $3,000 to pay a good coach; Brownsville anted a fat $5,000 for its coach. By adding a bumper-to-bumper motorcade to the first (so they claimed) postwar-special football train, practically all of Odessa's inhabitants trekked 170 miles to see their team play Abilene.

Every town had its hero; one of the biggest was Wichita Falls' 248-lb. Tackle Willie Bigham (so beefy were his legs that two football socks were sewn together to fit each calf).

Last week, statewide radio hookups supplied all but 39,000 Texans packed together at the game play-by-play details of the Interscholastic League's semifinal playoffs.

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