Thanksgiving feels like America’s last remaining Norman Rockwell interlude, where those of every lurking political antagonism gather around dinner tables attempting to engage in family harmony and record-breaking acts of gluttony.
For me, it’s also about a football game precisely 35 Thanksgivings ago, and a father watching a son come of age.
In the great long-ago, Baltimore City College and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute collided each Thanksgiving Day at Memorial Stadium. Theirs is the oldest schoolboy rivalry in America, going back 133 years now.
In the late afternoon gloom of that Thanksgiving in 1987, a City kid named Paul Williams wove some impossible magic out on the field. Strictly by chance, I sat next to his beaming father, Mike.
And there were old friends there that day — Joel Kruh, Steve Miller and Lee Raskin — who came not because we had sons on the field but we still connected emotionally with our old high school, and with its newest sons and daughters.
To announce his City connection, Raskin found his old varsity track letter and safety-pinned it to his sweater. Miller wore his old City ring. Kruh brought his seven-year-old daughter, Suzy, so she could sense a tradition that still touched her father.
With less than two minutes to play, the teams were struggling for the lead. City hadn’t beaten Poly in more than a decade. Now, Paul Williams, City’s halfback, took a pitch and swept right.
I sat there in Section 33 of the lower deck, watching and scribbling notes. Mike Williams jumped to his feet, hollering, “Go Paul! Go Paul!”
But Paul wasn’t going anywhere. Near midfield, he saw a wall of Poly defenders closing in. And then came a play, strictly ad-libbed, that City’s kids later called “the triple option with the Three Stooges.”
Paul began running in the wrong direction. Poly’s defenders rumbled after him. Williams kept giving ground, far behind midfield, ever deeper into his own territory. He scrambled from one wave of Poly kids, but here came a new one. So he gave more ground, now deeper into his own territory, zigging and zagging breathlessly.
Mike Williams held his face in his hands and said, “Oh, no, oh, no.”
Paul was 25 yards deep into his own backfield now, all alone and vulnerable in front of the big, roaring, hooting crowd. But then he stopped — in exhaustion or desperation, who knows?
Downfield, he somehow spotted City quarterback Chris Smith, who’d initially handed him the football, and now Paul was flinging it as far as he could. Utterly stunned, Smith hauled it in and raced 60 yards down the sidelines for a touchdown. The last-minute score cinched City’s victory over Poly.
And yet …
What stays with me, even more than the spectacular play, was the reaction of Mike Williams and my friends, all of us hugging and hollering and transported for the moment back to our own school days. We were 16 again.
And there were other long-familiar alumni celebrating nearby, like Dr. Eddie Shavitz and Del. Curt Anderson, each of them former City football standouts, and former state senator Nat McFadden.
Each of us had been brought back to watch a football game, but only partly. We’d come back because we were part of a century-old tradition that stays in your blood, like DNA: the generations find ways to connect. Here were two excellent public schools and its student athletes giving it their best shot. And here were a father and son who would never in their lives forget this moment.
So 35 years after that game, what stays with me isn’t just the miracle of Paul Williams’ mad scramble, but Mike Williams in near-collapse as thousands of fans swarmed onto the field at game’s end. It looked like Times Square on V-E Day.
“I’m gonna take him out tonight,” Williams shouted. “I’m gonna show my boy to the world!”
Yeah, that’s it. Give thanks for your own good fortune and share your Thanksgiving with the whole wide world.
Michael Olesker’s latest book, “Boogie: Life on A Merry-Go-Round,” was recently published by Apprentice House. Olesker was a member of the Baltimore City College class of June 1963.
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