High School Football Drama; Marine Yells
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Saturday, December 14, 2002 at 05:25 PM [GMT-6]

There's little I can write about the just-concluded Texas 5A Division 1 state championship football game that many other correspondents won't say more eloquently. I don't recall a more emotionally exhausting contest, as the Midland High Bulldogs pulled themselves out of a deep hole to take a five point lead with just 22 seconds remaining in the game...only to see it turn to dust as a Hail Mary pass by Converse Judson gave them the winning score with 7 seconds to go. I wasn't at the game in San Antonio, but the impact was perhaps magnified by the Fox Sports TV cameras showing tears of joy on the sideline turn to tears of anguish in a matter of seconds.

I just hope the players, coaches, support folks and fans will allow the reality of the wonder of this season eclipse the intense pain of the moment. They accomplished something no other MHS team in history had done, and they did it with class, determination and teamwork that no scoreboard can ever reflect. I'm proud of the Bulldogs...the city is proud of them...and after the way they landed a haymaker on the largest high school in Texas, I suspect the whole darn state is proud of them.

I'll end this post with a correction. In a recent edition, I put a parenthetical "hoo wah" immediately following a reference to the US Marine Corps. Yesterday morning I found that I have it all wrong. According to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal (sorry, no link...it's subscription-only), the proper Marine exclamation is "ooh-rah." This article summarizes the USAF's search for its own distinctive battle-cry; apparently the fly-guys have been making do with the Army's generic "hooah" (which phonetically sounds like what I tried to saddle the Marines with), and someone feels they need something to call their own. I wish them all the best, given that most of the best rallying vocalizations are already, um, spoken for. [For example, the Aggies already have "whoop," so don't even think about it.]