“They can never take this from you, Mark. Never. You’ll always be a champion.”
It’s true what they say about time. Twenty years comes and goes in the blink of an eye. I could barely believe it when I got an invitation to return to my old high school for the twentieth anniversary of my state championship-winning football team. In the above picture, you’ll see nearly all of the young men and women who were seniors on that team and cheerleading squad, all of whom have gone on to have successful careers and families. Twenty years? How is that even possible?
Once I received the invitation, though, I never once doubted whether or not I would go. I wasn’t a star player, by any means. Just look at me, for God’s sake (I’m third from the right in the above picture—green shirt, green shoes). I’m not a large man. In fact, one of my colleagues at work told me that she didn’t really believe I had played high school football until she saw the pictures from the reunion on Facebook.
But there’s a certain bond that’s created when you go through what we went through as a group. Mrs. Bark says it would make a great movie script, and I think it would except that it’s too damned perfect. The collective power of every screenwriter at Disney couldn’t come up a story that was as sappy and saccharine sweet as what actually happened to us. Let me give you the breakdown:
- Rough-and-tumble kids from the wrong side of the track (or in this case, river) are sent to a brand-new high school that the community essentially built to keep the rich families from sending their kids to private school
- We had to practice at the middle school for the entire summer because our locker rooms weren’t finished
- We didn’t even have our own stadium, so we had to play at the rich kids’ stadium—and they wouldn’t even let us use their locker room on gameday—making every single game a road game
- Our starting quarterback was a sophomore who had never taken a snap at the varsity level
- We didn’t even have enough kids for backups at every position, so nearly everybody played both ways
- Everybody, that is, except for me—the 5’8″, 145 lb wide receiver who the coach laughed at and said, “Baruth, who are you gonna tackle?”—and the center, because we literally had nobody else who could play center so we couldn’t risk him getting hurt
- Despite all this, we ended up getting to 8-0, only to lose to the meanest, dirtiest team in Ohio (their coach once gave a seminar on how to talk trash at a coaches’ conference) on a dropped touchdown pass
- But we resiliently bounced back and made it all the way to the state title game at legendary Paul Brown Tiger Stadium, where we played against an inner-city team that didn’t even have matching uniforms for their football team OR their marching band
- But we were down 14-6 until our star player returned a punt eighty yards all the way to the one yard line, and punched it in on the next play
- Then, a freshman wide receiver ran a trick play reverse (he was only 5’3″ so the defense couldn’t see him) on the two-point conversion to tie the game and send it to overtime
- Finally, our star player rumbled in for a touchdown to take the lead in overtime, followed by an interception on the next possession for A DRAMATIC OVERTIME WIN
- We became the first high school in Ohio history to win a large school football title in our first year of existence
Seriously. If you saw that movie, would you believe it? If Disney did it, they’d have to put in some sort of race element, because our team had about three black players and forty white ones, so there’d be some Remember the Titans bullshit about us overcoming our prejudices to become friends. In reality, nobody gave a damn about race. We were all brothers.
If you followed the NFL in the last several years, you might recognize the man in the middle, Nick, as a running back with the Carolina Panthers for the better part of a decade. He basically put our team on his shoulders and rushed for over 2500 yards and 30 touchdowns with an offensive line that averaged around 210 pounds. We grew up as neighbors in Riverside Green in houses that now seem impossibly small. The things we did together…I won’t ever be telling my children those stories. It’s a miracle that we survived.
The other young man in that photo, Rolland, was blisteringly fast. Due to his diminutive size, Rolland didn’t get much interest from college scouts as a junior until he went to OSU Football Camp and ran a 4.31 electronic 40 yard dash. I believe they offered him a scholarship nearly immediately. RoRo now works with young people in Florida, and is the father of a wonderful family.
I haven’t kept in touch with everybody as much as I would have liked over the years. A lot of people still live in the Central Ohio area, but I moved away relatively soon after college. But you would have thought that we had all seen each other every day for the last two decades by the way we immediately reconnected upon seeing each other. Sure, we might be a few pounds heavier and a few steps slower, but we are still brothers.
The photo above shows me with our coach, Bryan Deal, who just retired from coaching football after 32 years. Outside of my own parents, he’s probably most responsible for making me into the man I am today. Coach always talked about character and the importance of believing in ourselves. He somehow tricked me into believing that I was good enough to be the starting wide receiver for a state champion team.
The current coach, who was a position coach when I was a player twenty years ago, invited all of the former players into the locker room before the game. He then asked Coach Deal to speak to the current team before kickoff, and he said something that stuck out to me. “Every single one of the men you see around you in this room (meaning the former players) would give anything to play just one more snap. Just one more. The bond they formed twenty years ago is something that can never be broken. When you work and fight together like these men did, you’ll create something that’s lifelong just like they did.” Then he smiled. “Now go kick their asses!”
Which brings me back to the quote at the top of this page. There was one man who couldn’t make it to the reunion, a man who was my position coach that year, Jim Caldwell. Coach Caldwell is now retired from his real job as a finance guy. He used to show up to practice from a long day of work in a suit and tie, and quickly change into coaching clothes. He didn’t get paid a dime as a volunteer coach, but he was deeply invested in us as young men.
I was a wide receiver on a team that ran the Wing-T offense. If you know anything about football, you know that meant that I didn’t touch the ball very often. My main responsibility was to run down the field and block the safeties so that our running backs could spring those long touchdown runs. But Coach Caldwell never let me forget how important I was to the team’s success, even though I only caught one touchdown pass all year. He always stopped the game film to celebrate a key block that I made. Even if nobody else in the stadium noticed, he made sure to let me know that he did.
So it was on December 1st, 1995, at the fifty-yard-line of Paul Brown Tiger Stadium in Massillon, Ohio, after the celebration was nearly over, when Coach Caldwell found me and embraced me. He whispered to me the following words:
“They can never take this from you, Mark. Never. You’ll always be a champion.”
Twenty years later, among a group of lifelong friends—wait, strike that, family—I found out that he was right.