1972
As I mentioned earlier I am a huge sports fan. Like most guys I love to park my big butt in front of the TV and watch countless hours of sports. All kinds of sports. Football, especially NFL football is by far my favorite but depending on the time of year you can find me watching some kind of game on the tube. And thankfully my wife has the same love of sports so it is something we can do together.
Next to football I love to watch golf, tennis, basketball, all the Olympic sports both summer and winter and even fishing shows. OK, I hear you. “Fishing shows?” Yes I love to watch fishing shows on TV. I will give you the fact that maybe fishermen are not actually athletes so it isn’t a real sport but still most Saturday mornings you can find me glued to the Bassmaster Fishing show. The draw could be the beautiful scenery or the chance to learn the latest fishing techniques from the world’s best but most likely it is the riveting dialogue. Where else can you hear such delicate use of the English language with great phrases like, “Ooooh baby, ooooh baby, whoooo baby, come to daddy, stay on there, stay on there, she’s a beauty, oooooh baby!!! If you have heard talk like this before you are either watching fishing shows or you have the porn channel.
Over the years sports on TV as evolved to not only sports on the weekend but now includes several 24 hour sport channels like the Golf Channel and the Tennis Channel. Throw in countless ESPN channels you can watch sports nonstop. Of course the most popular 24 hour sports channel is probably the NFL Channel.
This is really amazing when you think about it. The football season is the shortest season among the major sports with four weeks of pre-season games, sixteen weeks of the regular season, followed by four weeks of the playoffs including the Super Bowl. From start to finish the season is only twenty-four weeks long and even when they are playing the games they are basically only on two days a week with games all day Sunday and then one on Monday night.
But still, the NFL Channel runs 24-7 for fifty-two weeks a year. Is this a great country or what? No wonder we have so many people trying to cross our borders.
With coverage for fifty-two weeks and more than half of those weeks being in the off season they can come up with some amazing things to fill the air time. As soon as the Super Bowl winning quarterback smiles at the camera and says, “I’m going to Disney World” the commentators start talking about the next season. And boy can they talk.
They talk about which coaches are getting fired and which ones will be hired. Which players are changing teams? Who’s retiring? Who’s getting drafted? Who’s having surgery? Who’s having sex with Tiger Woods? Oops, sorry that is on the Golf Channel.
For the last two or three years it seemed like all they talked about in the off season was Brett Favre. “Is Brett Favre retiring? Is he coming back? Who will he play for? What kind of jeans does he really wear? This is the kind of stuff they have on there and that is the kind of stuff I am sitting there watching. I need to get a life.
But it was while I was watching the beloved NFL Channel that got me started on the journey I alluded to earlier.
Thirteen weeks into the 2009 NFL season two teams found themselves undefeated. The Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints both had identical records, both were 13-0. It is very rare that any team finds themselves with a 13-0 mark but to have two teams in the same year is really bizarre. So as it happens in any NFL football season that has a team that is undefeated this late in the year the sport commentators can’t keep themselves from bringing up the only team in NFL history to go through the entire season, playoffs, and Super Bowl without losing a game. You know who it is. Let’s say it all together. The 1972 Miami Dolphins.
There have been other undefeated teams. Both the 1934 and 1942 Chicago Bears didn’t lose a game all year. But at that time there wasn’t a playoff system in place so they only had the regular season followed by the Championship Game between the Eastern Division and Western Division leaders. And Chicago ended up losing both the Championship games in 1934 and 1942.
A couple years ago the 2007 New England Patriots had a great season and it looked like they would join the 1972 Miami Dolphins as the only teams to win all their games during the regular season, playoffs, and Super Bowl. But it was not to be.
The Patriots were a perfect 18-0 going into the Super Bowl game against the New York Giants. But at the end of the day the Patriots found themselves at 18-1 for the year and it found the members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins once again popping the corks on the champagne bottles as they celebrated being the ONLY truly undefeated team.
But in 2009 with two teams at 13-0 it got everyone thinking and talking about, “Could this be the year?”
Late one night I found myself watching the NFL Channel when a story on “the perfect season” came on. I had heard it before and I am sure I will hear it again but I decided to stay on the channel rather than surfing any of the other 432 channels I have.
They showed clips from the 1972 season and highlights of some of the great plays and replayed interviews from the season. They talked to Coach Don Shula and had him relive some of his memories of the season. Players like quarterback Bob Griese, running backs Larry Csonka and Mercury Morris and receiver Paul Warfield all pitched in with their comments of the season and what it meant to them to have sole ownership of the “perfect season.”
Speaking of those interviews from 1972, wow guys, nice leisure suits and I really dig those groovy side burns. I loved the ‘70’s for the great music that came from that time but boy oh boy the Fashion Police must have been busy handing out tickets during that decade.
Like I said I had heard the story of the 1972 Miami Dolphins several times before but there was something different about this night that caught my attention. It wasn’t anything Coach Shula or any of the players said in the interviews or even anything said by the guy doing the story. The great plays from the season or from the Super Bowl game really didn’t stand out. Strangely enough it was simply the year that it happened that caught my eye. Or actually my mind.
Seems like every time I heard someone say 1972 my brain seemed to flash back in time. For some reason I didn’t immediately pick up on how old I would have been in 1972 so various thoughts or flashes of events seemed to randomly dance through my mind. Thoughts of grade school friends, favorite teachers and hated principals. First car, first girlfriend, first dance, and first broken heart. My first and last football game, the last F on a report card, and last chance to be cool. A trip to California with two of my High School buddies dominated my memory merry-go-round. All these things made their way in and out of my mind in a matter of seconds. One thought seemed to lead to the next and some seemed to come out of nowhere. Thoughts about people or places or events that I hadn’t had in years were now passing one after another as I sat there watching TV. All because of the year 1972.
But obviously not all of these things could have happened in the same year. You just can’t have that many firsts and last all in the same calendar year.
So I put a halt to the trip down memory lane to figure out exactly how old I was and what I was doing in 1972. I remembered my older brother, Eric graduated in 1971 and the year he graduated I was in the seventh grade. It was one of only two years that we went to the same school. When I was in the first grade and Eric was in the sixth grade we both attended Eugene Field Elementary School. And then when Eric was a senior at Webb City High I had caught up with him again and we attended the same school. Well, not actually the same school but we were on the same campus as he was in the High School and I was in Junior High.
If I was in the seventh grade in 1971 that would obviously mean I was in the eighth grade in 1972. Although with some of the grades I was making back then it was never assumed that as a calendar year passed by that I would automatically be in the next grade. I was never held back in any of my years of schooling but that might have been more because the teachers didn’t want to deal with me for another year. That is one of several regrets I have lived with. I wish I had been a better student. Or maybe I just wish the questions were easier. Either way.
So with my wonderful Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning powers I finally came to the conclusion that I was in the eighth grade and would have been 13 or 14 years old in 1972. Wow, the eighth grade at good old Webb City Junior High.
Stopping to think about it the eighth grade was a pretty good grade to be in. Back in my days of going to school, elementary school was first grade through the sixth grade, Junior High was the seventh and eighth grade and High Schools was the ninth through the twelfth grades. In Webb City there were three elementary schools, the best of course was the one I attended and the one I mentioned earlier, Eugene Field. Mark Twain and Webster where the other two elementary schools in town. Some of the other Benchies would argue which grade school was the best as Benchies came from each of the elementary schools.
The Junior High and the High School were in two separate buildings but they both sat on the same city block located in the heart of town. The High School seemed huge to us back then and it was a big red brick building that had a basement where the lunchroom was and then three stories of classrooms. A new High School was being built out on the edge of town and my class was the first group to go all four years in the new building. The Junior High was a gray brick building and it had two floors for the classrooms and a separate building for the gymnasium.
As I said the eighth grade was a good grade to be in. We had a year of Junior High under our belt and if you didn’t consider the nearby High School we were the big man on campus. The seventh grade year was full of all kinds of adjustments such as dealing with multiple teachers and changing classrooms. It was also an adjustment to having so many kids around you that you didn’t know. All three elementary schools funneled into the Junior High so all of sudden there were tons of new faces in the crowd. Of course a lot of those new faces were girls so that wasn’t all bad. By the time we made it to the eighth grade we had kind of settled into our environment and we were able to fully enjoy all that life had to offer a 13 or 14 year old.
1972. Eighth grade. Wow, suddenly another memory flooded my brain. Our eighth grade basketball team.
With these new memories in mind I walked through the house back to our bedroom to see if my wife, Janice was still awake. Thankfully, because I would have had to wake her if she wasn’t, she was still awake, setting up in bed reading. I said, “Honey do you know where that box with all my old school stuff is?” I get a lot of strange looks from my wife so I was use to seeing the face she was making when she responded with, “I think it is upstairs in the attic.” She didn’t ask and I didn’t say why I was looking for the box but instead I quickly headed to the garage, pulled down the steps to the attic and started my accent.
My first thought was, “Wow, it is freezing up here” and my second thought was, “Rats, I need to get up and here clean the attic out.” But I was on a mission and cleaning the attic was NOT the mission I had in mind. As I scanned the area I noticed box after box for every TV, radio, fan, iron, etc that we owned or seemed to have ever owned in our twenty years of marriage. Bags and bags of my wife’s “seasonal” clothes were up there too. Looking at the piles of clothes I quickly assumed that I must be married to several women since surely not one little wife could have so many clothes. Next to the mound of clothes were all the Christmas decorations. Clark Griswald would be very proud of the heaping stack of goodies I had gathered over time.
But then I saw what I was looking for. Right behind the nativity scene decorations were three boxes stacked on top of each other. The top and the bottom box were unmarked but the middle box was labeled with, “Jon’s Junk.” Junk? How dare they label my treasures as junk?
I pulled the top box off and set it aside and then started sorting through the box holding so many memories of years gone by. I had something in mind that I was looking for but I found a ton of other things as I searched through the box. Old record albums, High School yearbooks, a tennis trophy, and all sorts of pictures were scattered all over the inside of the box. One by one I picked up a photograph and quickly examined it and then went to the next one. Smiles, chuckles, and several “oh my” seemed to follow each viewing of a picture. Grade school class photos, old grade cards, and even a list of Class Prophecies written by my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Conrow was in there. Several newspaper clippings that covered each of our football games during my senior year were tossed about among the other treasures. I even ran across a couple poems I had written way back when. I took a second to read them and then moved onto my search for the Holy Grail.
And then, there it was. Not sure how I could have missed seeing it earlier with its bright red, white, and blue cover. I picked up the book, smiled, and then started to read the front cover;
The Bench
Featuring comments by the 1972 8th Grade Bench Warmers
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