I grew up in Northeastern Ohio, in one of those pockets of country where high-school football and God compete for first place in the hearts of the people that live there. Like they do in Midland, TX and Southwestern PA, my people spend their Friday nights at high school stadiums, huddled on rickety steel bleachers while teams of wildly varying talent grind out a life-and-death drama for their benefit.
Sometimes football is all you have. I'm risking getting my ass sued for this, but we are the Ministry of Minor Perfidy after all, so there you have it. Below the fold is an article from a November issue of the Washington Post about the thriving tradition of six-man high school football in Montana. Apart from being a great sports story, the piece rises above the game-- as good sports writing should-- to encompass the re-fronterization of the West, the decline of the family farm, and the unintended effects of federal farm policy. Found via a dam site, and he's right. This should win some award, and make it into "The Best Sports Writing of 2003."
Montana Town's Boys Are Its Last Gasp of Hope
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 17, 2003; Page A01
GERALDINE, Mont., Nov. 16 -- A cold, nerve-rattling wind, the kind that can make a passer sick to his stomach. That's what the coaches from Geraldine High, whose boys had won 11 straight by keeping the football on the ground, were praying for in the state championship game.
As football prayers go, it was reasonable enough. The November wind in north-central Montana often knocks railroad cars off their tracks. But the wind did not blow here on Saturday afternoon, and the boys from Geraldine, halfway through the third quarter, seemed helpless to do anything but lose.
They could not stop a strong-armed senior named Tyler Stookey. With eight touchdown passes, Stookey had put Custer-Melstone High ahead by the soul-crushing score of 64 to 32. To rub it in, the visiting band played taps.
Wrapped in blankets against the windless cold and sitting in lawn chairs along the sidelines, most of the 3,315 people in attendance were too stunned to cheer, too heartsick for the boys from Geraldine to boo. Lila Armstrong, who has taught English at Geraldine High for 34 years and whose son Alan is on the team, whispered to a friend, "It's all over but the crying."
The English teacher, though, was wrong. The blowout turned into a cliffhanger. When it was over, the coaches of both teams agreed that Montana's Class C state championship was one of the best -- and most improbable -- high school football games they had ever seen.
"Oh, my God," Rod Tweet, the normally stolid coach of Geraldine, said as he walked off the field. "I am going to have a heart attack."
Six-man football is what they play in towns as small as Geraldine, population 284. From Montana to the Dakotas and south to Texas, six-man football is a socially sanctioned intoxicant. On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, it numbs the pain of demographic decline across the Great Plains.
For a few delicious hours every autumn, the game provides families with the illusion that farm country is not emptying out, that farm culture is not drying up.
"If we don't have these boys playing football, we don't have anything to get together for," said Scott Stone, 28, who played six-man for Geraldine High and who on Saturday was standing along the sidelines, worrying the score and screaming himself hoarse.
Geraldine is a power in six-man football. It has been to the state championship game eight times in the past 10 years. Usually, though, its prayers go unanswered. Six times, including last year, Geraldine has lost in the finals.
Coach Tweet called his team together after practice last Thursday and prepared them for the pain that might again be in store on Saturday afternoon.
"Don't let one game ruin your entire season," he said.
A more subtle kind of heartbreak in Geraldine occurs every school day when teachers count heads. Like thousands of small towns on the plains, Geraldine is bleeding young people.
The town has lost 23 percent of its population since 1970. But the high school has shrunk even more: By 53 percent since 1970, from 103 students to 48. There are 11 students in this school year's graduating class. In 2007, there will be six.
Six-man football was invented in Nebraska in the 1930s as an antidote for the declining populations and empty wallets that came with the Great Depression. It blossomed on the plains until the mid-1950s, but wilted with the Baby Boom and good crop prices.
Geraldine played six-man football until 1960. That's when it felt prosperous and populous enough to step up to the eight-man game. (The town is named after the wife of William G. Rockefeller, a major investor in the Milwaukee Railroad, which created Geraldine in 1913 as a grain depot.)
By 1989, with most of the boomers grown and gone away, Geraldine High began running low on boys. Coach Tweet decided he had no choice but to step back down to six-man.
It was a decision that is becoming increasingly necessary across central and eastern Montana, where the 2000 Census showed 23 counties either losing population or stagnating. Only five Montana high schools were playing six-man when Geraldine rejoined their ranks. There are now 20 six-man teams, with 20 more schools expected to sign up in the next five years.
Worked Off the Land
Like a sick canary in a coal mine, healthy six-man football suggests that something is amiss on the Plains.
Stagnant farm prices are part of it, as is the declining birth rate, the trend toward larger farms and the increasing sophistication of farm equipment. Modern tractors, equipped with global positioning devices and autopilots, allow a single operator to farm several thousand acres without a hired hand. Five years of drought have also forced families off the land.
But perhaps the most important reason for the depopulation of Geraldine and eastern Montana is a 15-year-old federal subsidy that pays farmers to grow native grasses on their land, rather than grain.
Called the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), it was intended to remove fragile, easily eroded land from production and stabilize crop prices by reducing the amount of grain that farmers grow. Thanks to the CRP, 40 million acres of farmland are out of production across the United States, including 3 million acres in Montana. The program guarantees farmers in this area about $39 an acre per year. That is slightly less than what they could get for growing grain, but it is guaranteed and they do not have to fertilize, spray with herbicides or harvest the wild grass.
The program has had a salutary effect on wildlife in the plains. Farmers say they have never seen so many pheasants, deer and antelope. Geraldine's football field is on the edge of town, and during practice last week, pheasants chortled in the nearby grass and deer wandered to within reach of a long punt.
The CRP, however, has also had the unintended consequence in Montana of emptying small-town schools, according to farmers, bankers and local federal officials. In a perverse way, they say, the CRP is a major booster of six-man football. Geraldine reverted to six-man just three years after local farmers began signing up for the program.
"The CRP obviously hurt," said Bill Evans, the executive director of the federal Farm Service Agency for Chouteau County, which includes Geraldine. "It means farmers buy less chemicals, fuel, seeds and equipment."
Since the program locked up about 20 percent of county farmland, scores of business owners that cater to farmers have closed up shop across Chouteau County. Most moved away, taking their children with them. The county has better soil and usually gets more rain than most of central and eastern Montana. It is far and away the largest wheat-producing county in the state.
Thanks to the CRP, it no longer has a single dealer that sells farm implements. To buy a tractor or get parts, farmers have to drive 70 miles to Great Falls.
"The CRP is killing us because there are no new families coming in to farm," said Armstrong, the English teacher who gave up on the football team midway through the third quarter.
Young farmers with children are disappearing because the CRP makes it possible for elderly farmers to stay on their land. Normally, the cost of paying their land taxes would force retired farmers to sell farmland or lease it, usually to up-and-coming young farmers. With CRP money rolling in risk-free, they have no financial reason to do so.
"It has turned into a great retirement plan," said Bill Larsen, vice president of the Geraldine branch of Heritage Bank. "They don't have to farm, and they don't have to buy equipment."
Geraldine, as a result, is withering, and it looks it. Streets are potholed. Up and down Main Street, buildings are boarded up. There is one grocery store and one place to eat, a bar called Rusty's. There are also persistent rumors in town that the school might have to close, with students having to ride the bus 26 miles north to Fort Benton, the closest town.
"It's going to happen," said Stone, the former six-man player at Geraldine High who now runs a carpentry business. He said it's just a matter of time.
A Way to Escape
As dreary as Geraldine looks, it is a wonderful place to grow up. That's according to Joey Boso, 17, a senior place-kicker on the Geraldine football team. He ought to know. He and his mother moved here from Las Vegas seven years ago, after an older boy stole Joey's bicycle at knife-point.
"I knew that if I raised him in Vegas, he wouldn't be the boy he has turned out to be," said his mother, Michelle Marino-Boso.
She said she found Geraldine by throwing a dart at a map of Montana. She ran a bar and restaurant on Main Street here until last year, when it caught fire and burned to the ground. Still, Joey is glad they got out of Vegas.
"It is sheltered here," he said. "The kids don't know what drive-bys are. You can build friendships. In Vegas, you had to watch your back. In Geraldine, you can actually be a kid."
With four minutes left in the third quarter on Saturday afternoon, Geraldine High seemed bound for yet another championship loss. Prowling the sidelines, the team's assistant coach, Andy Whiteman, mumbled, "I just want this game to be over."
Then, out on the field, Stookey, the passing phenomenon from Custer-Melstone High, began to play like a mortal. He missed a couple of receivers. He dropped the ball and had to fall on it for a big loss. He threw an interception.
The boys from Geraldine, down by 32 points, abandoned the comfort of the running game. They faked a punt and threw for a touchdown. They tormented Stookey with a two-man rush. They scored 40 unanswered points, as farmers on the sidelines leapt out of their lawn chairs and threw off their blankets. They danced around in their work boots, whooping and laughing, until they were red in the face.
Geraldine led the game 72-64 with only 1 minute and 13 seconds to go. It was getting close to 4 p.m., and dusk was closing in on the prairie that borders the field.
Stookey, though, recovered his senses. He threw his 10th touchdown pass and kicked the point-after conversion, which counts for 2 points under six-man rules. The game went into overtime, tied 72-72. The farmers, again, began to fret.
Custer-Melstone won the coin toss and quickly scored an overtime touchdown. Stookey, though, missed the point-after kick.
Geraldine High had one last chance. They made the most of it, running the ball for a touchdown and tying the game at 78-78. There was no time left. Joey Boso, the boy from Vegas and the place-kicker, was ready to attempt the point-after.
On the sidelines, though, Coach Tweet suggested that his boys run for it, rather than risk a kick. Several seniors on the team objected. They told the coach that Joey, who was already nine-for-nine in point-after attempts, had earned his shot.
They were right. His kick was perfect and he won the state championship, setting a 10-for-10 state kicking record in the process.
Geraldine had chased away its second-place demons. Farmers stormed the field. Coach Tweet wept. Armstrong, the English teacher, said she was ashamed of herself for having said all was lost. On into Saturday night, beer ran like water at Rusty's bar on Main Street.
The state championship allowed the people of Geraldine to forget, at least for a while, that they were running out of young people.
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