Football coaches today don’t have anything on my high school coach, Joe Tomanchek — he was playing mind games 60 years ago.
When I was a senior at Garinger High School in Charlotte, in 1959, we won the North Carolina AAAA football championship, Tomanchek’s first year as head coach.
Charlotte was the biggest city in North Carolina but in the late 1950’s there weren’t enough high schools there to make up a league, so we played teams from all over the state — Salisbury, Gastonia, Asheville, High Point, and Winston-Salem, plus Rocky Mount and Greensboro in the payoffs.
Our game with High Point was cancelled due to a storm; we were beaten 7-6 by Winston-Salem, and finished with a record of 9-1-2.
Garinger had a heck of a team and we crushed most of our opponents. Eight players earned scholarships to play football in college, including our quarterback, Gary Black, who went on to start for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I was not one of the eight. I was a halfback on offense, a linebacker on defense, and mostly I got to play when the score was lopsided, which, happily, was a lot of the time.
We outscored our opponents 236 to 70 but it seemed like every week Bob Myers, a sports writer for The Charlotte News, quoted Coach Tomanchek singing the blues about
how tough the next opponent would be, how we’d be lucky if they didn’t run us off the field. One afternoon after practice I asked Coach about that. Is that guy making this stuff up or is that what you’re telling him?
Tomanchek replied, “You lull ’em to sleep and then you kick the crap out of ’em.”
Coming Monday: My Husband Is Crazy