Sales convention spurred a love of classic football

It started back in the 1960s, if memory serves me right.

My father, a salesman, was in Green Bay, Wis., for a convention. As fate would have it, his name was drawn for a door prize: A brand new, still-in-the box, Wilson NFL football.

Dad -- though not a sports fan at all, let alone a football fan -- nonetheless made one of the more astute decisions he ever made in his life, somewhere between selling the family farm and marrying my mom.

He managed to get the keynote speaker for the event, Paul Hornung, to autograph the football.

And he gave it to me.

Paul Hornung. Notre Dame's "Golden Boy." Star running back for the Green Bay Packers and a future Hall of Famer.

I'd have run screaming for joy into the night if I hadn't been sound asleep in my crib.

Little did he or I know, it was the start of something special. Something that would shape my life from young adolescent to adult and beyond.

As I grew older, every once in awhile I would reach up to the top shelf in my closet and pull down the box that held my precious gift. Slowly I would open it and carefully remove the contents, painstakingly refraining from touching the part where permanent black magic marker met rawhide so as not to smudge what was written in classic cursive:

"To Scott, good luck, Paul Hornung."

From that day on, I was smitten -- drawn compulsively to anything and everything related to football. I spent countless hours reading articles and books about the game, through elementary school, high school and college. I particularly enjoyed learning about the players who helped found the game as it is known today: Knute Rockne, the great Notre Dame coach whose backfield shifts confounded opponents and helped make the Irish a college football power; Red Grange, "The Galloping Ghost," whose speed and agility turned heads nationwide first as a collegiate star at the University of Illinois, then as a barnstorming phenom with the Chicago Bears; and Bill Carpenter, Army's "Lonesome End" of the late 1950s.

While my contemporaries were reading "The Hardy Boys," my nose was buried in scholastic paperbacks like "Greatest College Football Players" or "Pro Football Heroes of 1966."

One of my favorites was "Bart Starr, Professional Quarterback." Growing up in Wisconsin in the sixties and seventies, everyone was a Bart Starr fan.

In 1975, a family vacation brought us through Canton, Ohio, and we toured the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I was like a kid in a candy store, scurrying from wall to wall, bust to bust, drinking in as much knowledge and trivia my 14-year-old brain could devour.

Oh, and the pictures. Countless old photographs of football's pioneers, prominantly positioned on walls and displays throughout the cavernous building.

And today, after more than 25 years of writing and editing sports for a number of newspapers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and Missouri, I'm still drawn to those classic photos showing football players of the past, those black-and-white stills of the stars of yesteryear, back when football was just a game and not the overblown, glitzy business it is today.

That's what made putting together this high school football preview, the one you're reading now, so much fun.

It was a chance to, hopefully, bring a historical perspective of the game of football to the young men who play the game today. A chance to tell Chaffee senior Charlie Montgomery about Gale Sayers, the "Kansas Comet" who starred oh-so-briefly for the Chicago Bears; or introduce Scott City's Austin Miller to Art Donovan, the jovial defensive end for the Baltimore Colts who left this world earlier this month, which was much, much too soon.

I'll wager St. Vincent's Alex Winkler had never heard of Bennie Oosterbein before last week.

So much to tell, so little time.

Over the next nine weeks and beyond, we'll watch today's youth play a game that traces its roots back to the mid-1800s ... earlier still, if some legends are believed. The game of football has been modified, modernized and, yes, marginalized over the years, but it still remains just that -- a game, played most often on the most fertile field of all: a young person's imagination.

So take a few moments, travel back in time, and picture the youth of today in some of the classic football settings of the past.

Running along the top of each page is a timeline marking important years -- both local and national -- throughout the history of the game that we call football.

We hope you enjoy reading this football preview as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you.

Oh, and Dad, thanks for the memories.