They Went Around My End
I replayed the scoreless quarters, the touchdowns, the fights, the game’s sudden end. It may have been Friday night, but I didn’t link anti-Semitism to the fray. Shabbat shalom, my ass. In our Ashkenazi cocoon, Beverly High Jews, including my family, were so assimilated we gave scant thought to the Fourth Commandment. One searched the campus in vain for a yarmulke. I never wore one, nor did Steve, nor did Ted. Despite Culver City’s effort to make it so, the school’s taxonomy never divided along religious lines. But, scratch the town’s surface, and you’d find Holocaust survivors. Or liberators who’d never forget.
*
I obeyed Mr. Miletich. I didn’t write anything about the fight. But Tom did. I fed him the facts, not on account of Miletich’s warning, but because Tom could tell a better story. As sports editor, he had the chops. I lacked the confidence and, yes, the courage to defy Miletich.
Tom’s column ran the following week. He titled it, “They Went Around My End.” In the first paragraph, he wrote that our team had initially “played their hearts out in a scoreless duel.” But, soon after Culver’s first TD, “hot tempers sparked a wild melee.”
We set his next paragraph in bold type: “The game went into the record books with Culver City the victor 14-0, on a bitter Friday night, November 20, 1964. The record books, however, didn’t tell the whole story—the story of a game in which the Beverly gridders tackled, blocked, and played the game of their lives.”
Tom acknowledged the fans in the bleachers, who “screamed their lungs out.” As one of them, the next morning my throat felt raspy.
“The players, however, took the heartbreaking defeat the hardest. As halfback Ken Adlam observed, ‘Every guy had tears in his eyes as he left the bus.’ Larry Stone murmured, ‘The coaches were as proud as any coach who had a winning team.’ One of the most touching pictures was Warren Tetley, sobbing on the bus. ‘They went around my end, they went around my end, they went …’”
Tom ended his column with another sentence in bold type: “It was one of those games you’ll never forget.”
Tom was right. I never forgot. Nor has Steve. Despite a fifty-year interlude, he’s told me that, on occasion, at three a.m., unable to sleep, he replays each down. Yet, until the reunion, we were remembering two versions of the same game. Me, a simple crosstown rivalry; Steve, a volley of nonstop hate.
Mr. Miletich didn’t chastise me for allowing Tom to mention the melee in the paper. I still wonder if he knew what had happened and was pleased that we’d almost gone the distance with the bigots. He never said. Nor did Dr. Robinson, our principal, who visited the Highlights office a few mornings later because several of our editorials had bothered him, along with Tom’s “Halloween” remarks about the football team.
Dr. Robinson was an avuncular man, soon to become an evangelical Christian. He stood before the twenty of us staff members, each at our places at long tables with sixteen black manual typewriters allocated among the page editors. Stacks of brown B1-size copy paper lay nearby. In a talk punctuated with smiles, all he focused on was “responsible journalism,” using platitudes I couldn’t disagree with, such as “Stick to the facts” and “Be objective.” I thought of asking him about the Victory Flag, whether it actually existed. If so, and if Dr. Robinson knew the facts, the school should have let it fly all week, our team’s answer to the bigots. I would have made sure Ted looked—and understood.