Three football games in four days. In three-plus decades of newspaper sports writing, I don't believe I've ever covered three games within a 96-hour period.
And they were all on the road, too.
Who was the Simon Legree, the heartless scumbag, the fiendish wretch who would make me do such a thing? Uh " it was the son of my father and mother, but not my sister or brother.
The gridiron gauntlet began last Friday evening when I drove to Piper High somewhere in Kansas City for a clash between the Pirates and Perry-Lecompton, a pair of Kaw Valley League unbeatens.
How do you get to Piper High? Well, you ask Perry-Lecompton athletics director Ed Putnam. Thanks for the directions, Ed. Once I arrived at Piper High, it didn't take any brains to find the football field. Lights can't run and they can't hide.
At high school football games, it is my custom to eschew the press box and walk the sidelines. It's easier to spot where the ball is placed that way. And so I walked behind the Kaws' bench -- although not without incident.
Curiously, all the grandstand seats at KC Piper are on the home side. Visiting fans, home fans -- they sit in the same stands. Meanwhile, the visiting team is way across the field -- a distance compounded by the six-lane track around the field -- with no fan support behind them.
Instead, ominous woods lurk behind the visitors. Nothing else. I looked back at those woods a couple of times and thought of the "Blair Witch Project." Naw, not in Piper. Couldn't happen.
Piper officials, I learned, don't want anybody on the visitors sideline except people associated with the team. A couple of policemen approached me and asked what I was doing there. Uh, looking for the Great Pumpkin? No, I told them I was covering the game and they smiled and said that was OK.
Exciting game. A small and thin, but plucky Perry-Lecompton team almost beat the bigger and deeper Pirates. Final score: KC Piper 34, Kaws 23.
Then it was up early the next morning for a drive to KCI and a flight to Denver. Beat writer Andrew Hartsock, photographer Earl Richardson and I arrived in Boulder in plenty of time for the Kansas-Colorado kickoff.
You saw the game on television. Probably not all of it, but some of it. It's hard to watch every second of a 51-17 shellacking unless you have to. We watched it, wrote about it and departed Dodge. Up early on Sunday morning for the return trip to Kansas City. Not a bad flight. Only one screaming baby and it was 10 or 12 rows in front of us.
Back home early Sunday afternoon, I watched some of the Chiefs-Denver game on TV, did some yard work and hung out in preparation for Game Three on Monday afternoon.
Scheduled: Haskell Indian Nations U. against Ottawa U.'s junior varsity. Game time 4 p.m. at Cook Field, a cozy 2,500-seat on-campus stadium located in a pleasant residential area.
Cook Field had no rest rooms, no lights, no concessions and no programs. Other than that, it was a nice place to watch football. Wily veteran that I am, I had both teams' rosters with me. Rosters for JV games. Don't leave the office without them.
Unfortunately, Haskell's offense was as puny as KU's had been on Saturday in Boulder. Is it something in the Lawrence water? Ottawa JV 25, Haskell 15.
All in all, not a bad four days. None of the teams I went to cover won, but I was able to visit two places I'd never seen (Piper High and Ottawa University) and it's always nice to view the Rocky Mountains, even if all the foothills seem to have been replaced by homes, shopping centers, strip malls and roads.
In Kansas, we may not have mountains, but Coloradoans crammed along the Front Range don't have many places like Piper High or Cook Field. Not anymore.
-- Chuck Woodling's phone message number is 832-7147. His e-mail address is cwoodling@ljworld.com.
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