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Scoreless
Omaha Central, Creighton Prep, and Nebraska's Greatest High School Football Game
By John Dechant UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 John Dechant
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9510-0
CHAPTER 1
Frank Smagacz knew better. So did a few of his upperclassmen. What seemed like 130 young men, each with aspirations of joining Omaha Central's football program, had turned up for the squad's first formal practice at seven o'clock that sultry August morning in 1960. The sight of that many teenaged boys on the cocklebur-infested practice field must have been eyepopping, at least to the untrained eye. Not so for Smagacz, nor his assistant, Jim Karabatsos.
The numbers wouldn't last, and they knew it.
The coaches had seen this sort of first-day turnout before. Central's two previous squads each numbered thirty-three players, and both underwent attrition during the first week of practice. To say attrition was the coaches' goal would have been an overstatement; it was simply a natural outcome of sweat and fatigue, the realities of high school football practice.
"By tomorrow afternoon," Smagacz assured Karabatsos, "we'll have our team."
Half of the estimated 130 wouldn't even make it to the three o'clock practice that first day. A few more stragglers brave enough to show up the next morning would find any number of reasons not to come out again for the second afternoon session: no water breaks, for one; heat exhaustion; too much running; cold showers; no grass on the practice field; even a mouth full of dirt-covered teeth. These were valid excuses in the minds of those who'd had enough of Omaha Central football. They would have to find another activity for the fall.
As third-year cornerback and backup running back Gayle Carey put it, "They cut themselves."
In 1960, Principal J. Arthur Nelson was responsible for "piloting Central High School's missile of knowledge," according to the school's annual O-Book, its yearbook. By the O-Book's account, Nelson was a proficient administrator who had "manned the controls for 16 prosperous years" at Central High. His rise to Central's top administrative office included stops at nearby Midland College, where he earned a bachelor's degree; the University of Nebraska, where he earned a master's degree; Monroe School, where he served as principal; and Omaha North High School, where he served as assistant principal. His genuine dealings kept him on good terms with the student body, and caring for his prize-winning irises kept his disposition amiable away from the job.
The space race theme was sprinkled throughout the 1961 O-Book's 156 pages. The yearbook's slogan, "Launching pad to the future," was as aptly coined as the following student-written epiphany: "There is a sadness in leaving Central behind. It is the same sadness you always feel in relinquishing any part of your life to which you can never return. But this is not the end; you are about to be launched on another phase of your flight."
As for the actual space race, America's seven Mercury astronauts, not yet household names, played the waiting game until the day when one of them would be the first man launched into space. Astronaut Scott Carpenter suspected that moment would come in early 1961. Others — with last names such as Grissom, Glenn, Shepard, and Slayton — projected confidence and dedication to the mission of their newfound profession. In 1961, Carpenter's prediction was proven prophetic when Alan Shepard became the first American in space.
Located at 124 North 20th Street in Omaha, Central High School seemed as far away from Cape Canaveral as any student cared to imagine. Perched atop a hill on the north side of Dodge Street, Omaha's main east-west artery, Central's façade stood stalwart against even its most notable neighbors, the Joslyn Art Museum and Creighton University. If the stately building on the hilltop seemed to passersby more like a house of justice and government affairs than a high school, it's probably because the Nebraska Territory's capitol once sat there in the days before Nebraska became a state. That structure was eventually removed so Central High could be constructed on the prime piece of property. Inside Central, separate stairways surrounded the school's courtyard and segregated the sexes. Boys used one stairway, girls the other, since separate bathrooms were located on the landings between floors. The 1960 ninth-grade class, numbering 370 students, promised to be the "last large freshman class" to enter Central, due to the opening of Lewis and Clark Junior High, which the following year would start accepting ninth-graders.
Students could choose from a host of activities and clubs to pursue their extracurricular interests, including theater, choir, orchestra, concert band, journalism, debate, student council, math team, National Honor Society, Junior Classical League, Inter-American club, Latin club, German club, Russian club, French club, science club, library club, audio-visual club, Red Cross, cheerleading, Road Show (a two-act variety show that celebrated its forty-seventh year in the spring of 1961), Future Teachers of America, Future Nurses of America, homemaking club, chess club, outdoorsmen, Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), and the Greenwich Villagers, a group dedicated to exploring art mediums and vocations.
And, of course, Central offered athletics.
Academically, Central had earned a reputation as one of the city's finest schools. Some even considered it the finest. That fall, the Central High Register dubbed it "the Harvard of high schools." In 1955, Central began an experimental Advanced Placement program, offering students college-style classes in subjects such as English literature, physics, and Latin. Principal Nelson was hopeful that foreign languages, including French and Spanish, would soon join the AP offerings. The school even invested $8,500 in new equipment for the language laboratory, mostly special soundproof recording booths that allowed eleven different languages to be taught at once. (Not to the same student, of course.) In 1957, Newsweek named Central one of the top thirty-eight high schools in the country.
That same year, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. The launch accelerated the United States' space race with the Soviets and triggered a trickle-down effect in education, to Central's benefit. Sputnik was the first perceived threat to the sense of invincibility that Americans had enjoyed since the end of World War II, and it signaled to educators the need to up the ante. At Central, that meant physics teachers were granted more funding and access to better materials, and students could learn Russian so as to be better equipped to handle the Cold War. Admission to a first-rate college, even an Ivy League school, was attainable with a Central diploma. "The kids were very aggressive academically," said assistant football coach Jim Karabatsos. "Athletically, we were kind of limited."
Those limitations occasionally allowed for a talented ballplayer every few years, but the coaches felt that Central lacked the athleticism and depth to compete with rival public high schools such as Omaha South, Omaha North, and Omaha Technical High, whose hallways seemed to be full of more well-built young men. "We just never had the numbers," said Karabatsos. "In a given year we might have twelve or thirteen good football players and then it really fell off. Whenever we had any injuries, we suffered through makeshift patches."
The blame for the talent drop-off could hardly fall on the coaches. Smagacz coached the track team and developed a good rapport with his spring athletes, recruiting some of them to come out for football. Karabatsos coached baseball, and many of his players also went out for football. Lack of recruiting wasn't the problem.
Facilities were even more limited than the supply of athletic young men. The football team practiced on a fenced-in patch of earth on the west side of the school that Omaha World-Herald sports columnist Wally Provost once deemed "the skimpiest football practice facility of any large school in the state." Measuring 60 yards long and 45 yards wide, the surface was mostly clay, full of broken glass and brick fragments that poked out of the ground and waited to catch exposed shins and forearms as players were taken to the ground. The only green the players ever saw was the cocklebur patches that grew around the field's outer edges. They were so prickly that players feared landing on them more than getting tackled. During stretches of particularly dry Omaha weather, two-a-day practices turned into dust cloud skirmishes only a Laundromat owner would have enjoyed.
Sometimes during two-a-days, the team would practice at Kellom Elementary, north of 24th and Cuming Streets. The team would rent a flatbed truck from a rental center close to Central, pile players into the back, and drive up to Kellom, their steel football cleats sliding on the slick surface of the flatbed the whole way there. Sometimes they went even farther north, to Adams Park. During the season, they would take a truck on Tuesday nights all the way out to Boys Town, located at 144th Street and West Dodge Road, to scrimmage "Skip" Palrang's team. The players loved it because it was the best field they practiced on, but the switch from hardpan to soft grass became the cause of frequent leg cramps.
In the cold winter months, Central coaches would sometimes take their athletes up to the school's third floor and run laps on the old wooden floorboards to build endurance. Smagacz would have a student manager or an assistant hold open the doors so the athletes could keep running without breaking stride.
The hardscrabble practice environment fostered a blue-collar sense of toughness in Central's football teams, but even the most workmanlike of attitudes can only take a team so far. Eventually it needs athleticism and talent to achieve a higher level of performance.
That's just what Central got when speedy Roger Sayers burst onto its sports scene by winning Nebraska state championships in the 100-yard and 220-yard dashes in 1958. Sayers also played football, and his blazing speed earned him the nickname "Rocket," along with all-city and all-state honors. As one former teammate remembered, "Roger's uniform and pads didn't slow him down at all." It seemed the only thing he did slowly was talk, but it didn't reflect a lack of intelligence. He was a fine student who appreciated the value of a well-constructed, well-spoken sentence. Roger Sayers represented the potential of Central High athletics. He was just one player, but suddenly it seemed that Central was capable of producing the type of athletes necessary to compete with its inner-city rivals.
The Rocket had a younger brother coming up through the ranks who had just as much talent. As a tenth-grader, he was slotted on the 1958 varsity roster as a running back. One '58 game day program transposed the letters of his surname, which may have caused readers to wonder whether the "Sayres" kid was related to the speedy Sayers boy. He put on fifteen pounds the following year, and a few people around the city started taking notice. By 1960, it seemed that everybody had heard of him.
His name was Gale.
The Omaha Central football program was "miserable" before Frank Smagacz arrived, according to one former coach. The team managed just 2 wins combined in the falls of 1948 and 1949, the two seasons before Smagacz's arrival. A 2-4-1 record in the '48 season helped claim a fourth-place finish in the Omaha Intercity League, Central's highest finish in four years. The team's best effort in the winless 1949 campaign was a hard-fought 14–12 loss to Omaha North, where, as the school's annual O-Book stated, the kids "played their hearts out." During one twelve-season stretch, Central failed to score even a single point against Lincoln High School, a key rival.
Victories over Benson, Omaha Tech, and Abraham Lincoln High Schools in the 1950 season, Smagacz's first at Central, quickly injected life into the football program and the student body. As Assistant Coach Jim Karabatsos remembered, "Frank came in and won a few games and they were ready to crown him king of Omaha."
Nail-biting 2-point defeats to crosstown rivals, no matter how hard-played, would no longer be the standard that Omaha Central would use to measure football success.
Smagacz's path upward through the coaching ranks to one of the state's largest and most competitive institutions began in his hometown of Columbus, Nebraska. Located about eighty miles west and north of Omaha, Columbus is situated along the north banks of the Platte River and its much smaller tributary, the Loup River. There his love of sports took root. The youngest of ten children, Frank grew up in a house of Polish immigrants, and Polish was often the language of choice around the Smagacz house. His father was a police officer, and at least one of Frank's older brothers joined their father in the profession.
Athletics became part of young Frank's persona during a successful sports career at Columbus Kramer High School in 1929–1933. He was a tremendous all-around athlete, garnering all-state football honors as a tight end and leading the basketball team to the 1933 Class A state championship. He earned three letters in football and basketball and two in track.
His success continued at the college level. After briefly considering Omaha's Creighton University — even enrolling, by at least one report — Smagacz matriculated at Midland College in nearby Fremont in the fall of 1934. Competing in football, basketball, and track, he earned ten varsity letters at Midland and was valuable enough that when he missed a basketball game due to a bout with the flu, as he did in January 1937, his absence was reported in the Omaha World-Herald. He was named a Little All-American tight end and years later became a charter member of Midland's athletic hall of fame.
Smagacz kept busy in the summer by playing catcher on the Fremont baseball team that played in the Elkhorn Valley League. He was no slouch on the baseball diamond, even considering his prowess in other sports. In 1939, after graduating from Midland, he joined the Duluth Dukes ball club of the Northern League in Duluth, Minnesota. The Dukes were affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals organization, and Smagacz again donned a chest protector and facemask to play catcher. Nothing if not self-aware, he decided his thirty-five-dollar-per-game stipend was insufficient compensation for having to squat behind the plate for nine innings covered in protective gear, and Smagacz bolted from professional baseball to become a coach in his native Nebraska. It was a choice that shaped the rest of his life.
Offered a job at tiny Silver Creek High School located along Highway 30 about twenty miles southwest of Columbus, Smagacz decided to accept the offer for a yearly salary of $990. Shortly after taking the job, he received a better offer from the school district in Arlington, Nebraska, also located along Highway 30, nine miles east of Fremont. The Arlington job paid $1,150, and Smagacz could little afford to turn down the money. He presented his case to the Silver Creek school board and politely asked for a release from his contract. The school board granted the release, provided Smagacz serve his first week on the job, presumably to allow the school district time to find a suitable replacement.
The Arlington stint lasted two years before a more lucrative offer came his way from Tekamah, Nebraska. Almost an hour's drive nearly due north of Omaha, the Tekamah school district wanted Frank Smagacz for more than just his coaching talents. The town's baseball team needed a catcher. He was paid a salary of $1,400 per year to coach football, basketball, track, and summer baseball. The $5 bonuses he received for each game he caught for the baseball team were icing on the cake. Competition in the Pioneer Night League was fierce and drew sizeable crowds to small-town ballparks scattered across the Nebraska prairie. Tekamah's town team was used to winning, and their ball club's newest member fit in well. The Tekamah sports fans took a shine to Frank Smagacz, and family members would hear of his baseball exploits from townspeople for years.
Tekamah was an essential stop in Smagacz's life, where in addition to gaining valuable coaching experience he also cut his teeth in the classroom where he taught math and science. He also found a life partner. Shortly into his tenure, he was introduced to Frances Tobin, the daughter of an Irish farmer, by a matchmaking Tekamah sports booster named Gordon Bryant who thought the pair would make a cute couple. It turned out Bryant was right. She went by "Fran" and had grown up on her family's farm, three miles north of town. Fran was a working girl, holding down employment as a secretary at the county courthouse. Frank and Fran were married in 1940.
Just like the job at Arlington, the Tekamah job, at least initially, lasted two years. This stint was interrupted — not by a more lucrative offer, but by World War II. In 1942 Frank Smagacz began a four-year hitch in the U.S. Navy. He and Fran also welcomed their first child, Mike, that same year.
Smagacz completed his basic training at Great Lakes Naval Base north of Chicago before being sent to his duty station at Fort Pierce, Florida. Though his naval service never sent him overseas, he spent considerable time and effort dodging the likes of John Polanski, Hampton Poole, Bill Daley, and other football stars, some of them professionals, who joined him during his two seasons playing tight end and defensive end for Fort Pierce's Famous Amphibs football team. Smagacz liked to joke that nobody knew his identity among the high-profile stars in the Amphibs team picture. Poole, a four-year veteran of the NFL's Chicago Bears, served as the team's player-coach, and Smagacz soaked up as much of the Bears' system as Poole cared to dispense, perhaps knowing it would one day become a staple of his own coaching toolkit. "The competition is plenty keen," Ensign Smagacz wrote to the Omaha World-Herald in 1944. "But it keeps a fellow in good shape."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Scoreless by John Dechant. Copyright © 2016 John Dechant. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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