Hendersonville Standard
HENDERSONVILLE WEATHER

Friday Night Fights




Dubin

Dubin

Recently, my old high school, McGavock, will play Dickson County on the football field. Now is the perfect time to revisit a story I wrote a few years ago about a wild Friday night when we played Dickson County in a game for the ages.

It was a big game on a chilly October night in front of about 10,000 people and is something I will never forget.

McGavock was ranked in the top 10 in the state and so was Dickson County. It was, if I recall correctly, the only match-up in the state that Friday night that featured two ranked teams in Class 3A, which at that time was the largest division in high school football.

We had been warned before we got there that the Dickson County crowd likes to get a little rowdy and say a few things. The team laughed it off because we were more worried about the football game than the crowd.

They were ready for this big bad school from the big city. We pulled in and immediately got the one finger salute from the tailgaters. We just laughed.

The game itself was amazing. Late in the fourth quarter we were down by three points but Dickson was driving to put it away. I was able to bust through the line and hit the quarterback as he was handing off the ball. It bounced once and we picked it up and ran it for the touchdown to take the lead.

Unfortunately, Dickson County came right back down and scored with 15 seconds to go to win the game.

We were just stunned. We had this game and let it slip away.

You would expect that after a tough loss on the road the home crowd would be elated and we could get on the bus with no problem.

Wrong.

The cursing and verbal abuse from their fans was intense.

Let me put it this way — Redd Foxx would have been embarrassed at some of the things being yelled at us.

We had players taking off after people and coaches chasing them. It was chaos everywhere and the swear words were flying like X-wing fighters defending the Rebel base. Then, I made eye contact with this one guy, about 25 years old. I had just turned 16.

“You wanna fight me, boy?” he asked.

I paused, then said, “What?”

“You heard me, you wanna fight me, boy?!”

I just laughed, as did others who were around me. I remember my mom walking up at the same time. and then cooler heads prevailed. I talked to her at the bus, where all the parents had now gathered and we just laughed.

At this point, I was just giddy. Granted, we were not happy losing but it was an amazing football game. I’m pretty sure no one on our team had heard that kind of language before and we really couldn’t believe what was going on, but we were soaking all of it in.

All of it. The cussing. The screaming. The yelling. I am not sure in my life if my teammates and I felt as powerful as we did in that moment. Funny, cause at no time did we fear for our lives or feel we were in danger. It was all very surreal.

So, when I hear about a pro athlete getting upset over a fan yelling at him, I always think back to that chilly night in Dickson, Tennessee, when my vocabulary gained a dozen new words.

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