Tag: sportswriting

Ghosts of Baker Field

Ask a former football player what’s their one wish and often the answer is: One more game. Just give me one more game.

Forty years ago, on a cold November night, I played my final snap of high school football.

            The Bermuda grass at Owensboro’s Rash Stadium had turned a muddy brown and it was a meaningless football game between two .500 teams. There was really nothing memorable for the scattering of fans – mostly family and friends — spread out along the metal bleachers. The game was one of those “three handoffs and a punt” and the final score was 7-0.

            But the memories of that game, and others before it, remain all these years later.

            Tonight, on a cold November night, my alma mater will try to do something that’s never been done in the school’s 60 years of existence: advance to a state championship football game. Not just win a state crown, but to actually make an appearance in the title game.

            That’s pretty heady stuff for a Western Kentucky community of 16,000 mostly made up of farmers and coal miners. Good country folk, you see.

            From afar, I’ve followed the fortunes of the 2024 Union County High School football team as they’ve marched to an 11-2 record and an appearance in the Class 3A state semifinals. Many could argue tonight’s home game at Baker Field vs. 11-2 Belfry is the biggest in school history. You can view and see the game live via local radio station WMSK’s Facebook page.

Baker Field is prepped and ready for the Class 3A state semifinal game between Union County and Belfry high schools on Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. (Photo from Facebook page of UCHS head football coach Derek Johns)

            You ask a former football player what’s their one wish and most will answer quickly: One more game.

            Just give me one more game.

            There’s something about football that sticks with you. Something that makes those hot August practices, that cleat drug across your shin, a dislocated finger, all worth it. Maybe it’s that smell of fresh-cut grass, that rhythmic drum beat from the marching band, the feel of the leather football on a crisp fall night.

            It’s pure adrenaline. The Calloway Special. A pancake block and a hole wide enough to drive a tractor through and 45 open yards to the endzone. It’s an airborne opponent reaching for an errant pass and you poised and ready to deliver the hit.

            It’s a feeling many of us will chase long after we’ve played that final snap.

            Any one of us former players would love to be in that locker room tonight. Fingers and feet tapping in anticipation, stomach in a knot. Forty years later and I can still see my own teammates, waiting, ready. Frenchy. Big Tim. Duck. Barry. Word. Burgoo. Danny. PeeLo. Jarrod. Omaha.

            You see. It’s not just yourself you’re playing for. But it’s also for a community, a school, your teammates and all those ghosts of Baker Field who put on the pads and walked the turf you walk tonight.

            Go, Braves, go!

The author is shown at Union County High School’s Baker Field in the summer of 2015. The school is located midway between Morganfield and Sturgis, Ky.

Editor’s Note: Michael Banks was a member of the 1982, 1983 and 1984 varsity football teams at Union County High School. None of those teams advanced to the state playoffs, but he made some lifelong friends along the way.

They call him Coach

It wasn’t so much about wins as it was life lessons for Gerald Tabor.

It’s been 10 years and I still miss my friend

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published Tuesday, June 4, 2013. It’s being republished here on the 10-year anniversary of the passing of my friend, Gerald Tabor.

I awoke Tuesday morning. Logged into my Facebook account and my spirits instantly fell.

Gerald Tabor had passed away during the night.

Here in North Carolina, Gerald Tabor’s name means nothing.

He was a girls basketball coach and taught history at a medium-sized high school in rural western Kentucky, where coal is king and corn runs a close second. I grew up in this small town, attended his history class and swam at the community pool he helped oversee during the summers. After graduation and landing a job in newspapers, I spent many a nights in the stands watching his teams compete on the hardwood.

One very talented squad won a Kentucky state championship and featured a Miss Basketball. And there were several regional champions in there as well. But there also seemed to be far more teams that finished with records of 8-16 or 13-11 during those years he spent working the sidelines at the Union County High School gym.

In Kentucky, basketball reigns supreme. College basketball, especially the University of Kentucky, can be seen on TVs and heard on radios from Pikeville to Paducah. The University of Louisville numbers a large base of fans, and you also have the grads and small school sympathizers who cheer for the other state schools such as Western Kentucky University and Murray State University.

In Kentucky, you are largely associated with “who you pull for.”

High school boys basketball has a similar draw. The state remains one of the few in the nation who crown just one state champion and, though attendance has lagged in recent years with college games on TV most nights and other entertainment options, the state tournament’s Sweet 16 at Lexington’s Rupp Arena and Louisville’s Freedom Hall were a true spectacle and a “must-have ticket” each spring.

But girls basketball? It ranks a very distant third.

And at a rural school on a cold and wet Monday night in late January where you have a junior varsity/varsity girls doubleheader, the stands are littered with a few hardy souls – mainly family, a couple friends, the team manager, scorekeeper and one unfortunate sportswriter who drew the short stick.

Basically, those who coach girls basketball at this level are not doing it for the money. Nor the fame.

They are simply doing it for the love of the game.

And that was Gerald Tabor.

I was there, off to the side, as Coach Tabor watched the members of his state championship squad cut down the nets in Bowling Green’s Diddle Arena one Saturday night in mid-March in 1996. There was a smile across his face, but you could almost feel a sense of relief and weariness radiating from him.

This had been a long time coming. There were plenty of times when his squads were on the wrong end of a 25-point blowout. A couple of seasons of first-round losses in the district tournament.

Yet, he remained. Teaching the fundamentals. Teaching teamwork. Teaching loyalty and perseverance.

He truly cared for each member of his team, whether they were a state champion or a squad that finished below .500.

On the day I heard the news that Coach Tabor had died, I read that Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino was planning to unveil Maker’s Mark bourbon bottles bearing his face and achievements.

Sure, Connecticut women’s coach Geno Auriemma has won eight Division One national championships and been named Coach of the Year on six occasions. Say the words Pat Summitt, and you instantly recall the victories and national titles won at Tennessee.

Say the name Gerald Tabor.

And the former players and his many friends and family say the life lessons he instilled in them and left them with are far greater than any bourbon bottle or national championship.

They’ll say he was simply Coach.