Gordon Forgey

He won the 1963 Heisman trophy.

He played in five Super Bowls and won two. He has one of the most successful post-NFL careers in business, or otherwise.

Still, Roger Staubach, the Dallas Cowboys and Naval Academy legend, has said that the games he remembers most distinctly were played in a small stadium as a teenager in Cincinnati.

While high school football begins another season in Whitman County, Staubach’s experience will likely be shared by a few hundred other 16, 17 and 18-year-olds right here in our 1B and 2B districts. No matter what these kids go on to do in their lives, for many these games will stick in their minds like few other endeavors.

Is it because it’s their first experience under the lights? Or with a big crowd? Or is it something else?

Maybe it’s that high school football games have more identifiable meaning than college or pro.

One town vs. another just means more than one college’s grab bag of national recruits vs. another college’s. Or, in the NFL, one city’s random group of free agents vs. another city’s. Sure, in some high schools there may be some recruiting or underhanded maneuvers made, but for the vast majority, a high school team is just a bunch of boys growing up blocks from each other in one town playing a bunch of boys growing up blocks from each other in another -- kids entwined with the place that their helmet insignia represents. In the end, for this reason, maybe the games of high school simply mean more to those playing them.

Not in a “Sportscenter” way but in a human way.

And, as in any endeavor, that’s the best way.

Garth Meyer

Gazette Reporter