When listening to the last Brownwood Lion football game of the season, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the story line was about the weather. It was cold, it was raining, kind of a miserable night, but if you follow football, most of the time, most of the teams, most of the seasons are going to involve at least one or two miserable weather games. I’ve seen a lot of them, but very few I would describe as freaky weather.
One of those was in Stephenville, it was either 1978 or 1977. Stephenville was bad. We were really good, and it was about 35-0 Brownwood at halftime. The game was at Memorial Stadium in Stephenville and it was really over at half time. It was a cold night but that’s about it. All of a sudden, as the teams left the field for half time, it started POURING snow.
It was the latter part of October, first of November, somewhere in there. It looked from the press box like someone up above had unzipped a huge bag of giant snowflakes and shook it over the stadium. It literally dumped snow. Huge flakes poured down on Stephenville, Texas that night.
Turned out it had poured a lot of other places, too. It was unbelievable! Huge flakes coming down heavy, and it wouldn’t stop! Both of the bands were prepared to play at half time and they were already on the field. But, from the time the teams left until the Brownwood band could get out in its formation, it was already a field covered with snow. So, the powers that be cancelled both halftime performances.
By the end of halftime, they finally got the field marked again by taking shovels and other tools and moving the snow as best they could. It was mostly for naught though. The field was covered with what looked like a foot of snow. That was pretty accurate because officially Stephenville got 10 inches and we got 8. Neither team scored in the second half and nobody really cared. We were too busy watching the snow.
But, the real adventure started when we started back home. I will never forget the image of the Brownwood football team bus pulling off to the side of the road, and kids getting out helping push cars back up on the highway because so many of them had run off the road in the snow storm. We finally got back to Brownwood and the normal one hour trip had taken 3 or 4 hours for most people.
Then, we started looking at the next day because we were supposed to leave and head for Kingsville for a football game between Howard Payne and Texas A&I. We stayed up all night so we could start checking the roads first thing on Saturday morning.
We went step by step to Brady, (snow) to San Antonio, (snow) then down to Corpus Christi, which is pretty close to where A&I was and even they had snow. To make a long story short, we finally had to turn the ballgame over to the announcers from Texas A&I. We just took a feed of their broadcast of the game because it was too dangerous for us to try to drive down there.
Anyway, the game was played. Howard Payne lost it, but everyone got back safe from there and Stephenville as well. That’s probably the freakiest weather weekend I’ve ever been involved in.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].