The Band Geek: college version

I have in a previous entry explored the degree to which my young life, in ways I didn't see at the time, was governed by the rhythms and schedules of football, at least during the fall, due to my membership in the marching band. Another past blog post explored one early if not quite informed introduction to the spectre of catastrophic injury even at the high school level, again as part of that marching band experience. However, it is needful for me to admit that this was not the full extent of my band-geekery.

I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't). There was good reason for this besides the football team's ineptitude; Wake's basketball team was actually pretty good in those days (and this was pre-Tim Duncan), and had a sort of moment in the spotlight when an upset win over DePaul (they used to be good, too) prematurely ended the career of their longtime coach Ray Meyer, a sentimental favorite to win it all or at least get to the Final Four in his final season. Delaney Rudd, Anthony Teachey, Danny Green (not that one), and the next year Muggsy Bogues showed up. Good times.

The college marching band experience was a little different, mostly because (1) the games were on Saturdays instead of Fridays, which gave the experience a slightly different vibe, and (2) Wake Forest simply wasn’t that good. Dublin High’s teams were not necessarily perennial playoff winners, but they usually won more than they lost. Wake’s teams didn’t. (This was in 1983 and 1984, long before the Demon Deacons’ inexplicable run to the 2006 ACC championship and Orange Bowl appearance on January 2, 2007.) When the most ardently cheered player on the team is the punter, you know the team isn’t that successful. (To be clear, the punter deserved the cheers: Harry Newsome was an All-American in 1983, and went on to an NFL career with, I think, the Steelers and the Vikings.)

The university’s athletic department recognized the general lack of appeal of a poor team with a small alumni base, and during the two seasons I was in the marching band the games tended to be followed by some kind of entertainment show or concert. Because of these I got to see Bob Hope live (clearly Wake’s students were not the intended targets of these shows), as well as the Four Tops and Temptations, so the effort was worthwhile for me at least, and I was not so young and stupid as to be unable to enjoy such legendary acts. Some of the acts were less familiar to me, which got annoying as the band absolutely was not allowed to leave early in those cases. This also provided me an introduction to the mingling of sport and entertainment that would become another piece of the puzzle in these later years, sorting out the ways in which football generates and keeps its hold on its acolytes with spectacle and distraction.

Road trips could be a different affair as well. Back then, some combination of North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Duke was certain to be on the schedule, and those were pretty quick trips. Others could be longer and a bit more involved. As well, sometimes the road trips only involved a pep band, with no time spent on the field (I remember a game at Richmond -- yes, Wake Forest traveled to a game against a 1-AA team -- that was pep band only. Back then they were still playing at the stadium that now houses the Richmond Kickers soccer team.) 

Maybe the most notable road trip was to Georgia Tech, if only because several of my high-school classmates had chosen to attend that school. I snuck off for the third quarter and spent it among them, in a Georgia Tech student section, in my Wake Forest band uniform (this was a real marching trip, no pep band). The other memorable (and much less pleasant) part of that trip was a girl I was interested in making it clear she was dating a rich sophomore instead. As you can note, very few of my marching band memories from my Wake Forest time really involved the actual game of football at all, aside from cheering for the punter. (Wake Forest also hosted a high-school marching band competition, for which we band members were assigned various tasks. That was more fun than any game I ever attended.)

After transferring away from Wake Forest in the middle of my sophomore year (to major in music, ironically), my exposure to live football became much less frequent. My new school didn’t field a football team, and aside from one trip the next fall to see Wake Forest at Georgia Tech and catch up with my old band mates, I saw very few games live, mostly during my time in graduate school at Florida State; my fellow grad students in my degree program generally got together to get tickets for one game per season. Otherwise, I frequently spent football Saturdays across the campus, working in the music library. Most of the time, though, the game was on our television at home.

While there were no major on-field injuries during the games I saw at Wake Forest (at least not that I remember), I did get an early introduction to the signature malady of the current age of CTE: the concussion. In my first semester at the university one of my classmates in an introductory theatre class was a walk-on football player, whose hopes to play for the Deacs had been derailed by a concussion suffered during pre-season training. Or at least it was supposedly a concussion. At least a few folks suggested he had suffered more than one, and you couldn't really be certain that wasn't the case.

He was as nice a guy as you could hope, but clearly not all was right with him. On more than one occasion he would be found in class zoned out, completely having lost track of all going on around him, noticing nothing but the headache. The professor didn't really know what to do with him in those situations. Part of the responsibility for this class was to work as off-stage personnel for the theatre division's fall production (Shakespeare, but I don't remember what). This fellow and I were both assigned to the costume shop. There was enough of a challenge for him and his enormous hands trying to manipulate sewing needles and replace small buttons. On the bad days, it was impossible.  He made it to most of the classes, occasionally missing because, as he would later explain, he just couldn’t get around the pain. By the end of the semester his symptoms had abated somewhat (and I do emphasize somewhat), but while he tried again, to my recollection he never made Wake’s active football roster. But since I was only there for one more year, how would I know? He might just have gotten on the roster later, as messed up as his brain clearly was.

I wish I could say I was enough of a prophet to see from his difficulties that it was all going to end badly, and that football was a sport with a serious head trauma problem even at that time. No, I didn't see that coming, being in a way still too close to it, I guess. Though my direct experience of the game was going to wane in the intervening years, I certainly wasn’t ready to walk away from it yet. That was still years in the future.

If a punter was ever going to look like an All-American, this was it. Harry Newsome at Wake Forest.