Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

The Pit was hands down the biggest home-field advantage I've ever seen in sports. Both the fact you might as well be playing beach football and the smell. And that's before you account for the fact they only had one league opponent who had to drive less than an hour and a half to get there didn't hurt either.

 

Had to doublecheck to make sure you were talking about Trona … or Troma.

 

The High Desert to Thousand Oaks was the furthest I ever went to cover a game. I'm trying to think if there was a game that was further I skipped on, but I can't immediately think of it. I just remember living in the desert meant covering road games automatically meant I was driving an hour and a half one way.

 

Covered some Los Padres League games with Paso Robles, Atascadero, SLO, Santa Ynez ... very good football in the early '90s.

 

Artesia (in '90 or '91) had a QB named Aaron Flowers and a high-end offense.

They should have rolled to the CIF title. Then then went up to Righetti in Santa Maria ... and that was that.

That was also about the time, give or take, that Napoleon Kaufman went to Lompoc.

 

I do not envy high school reporters in places like Wyoming, west Texas and Alaska. Even Down East (North Carolina) gave us some really long conference and playoff travel because of the scarcity of large high schools.

Rocky Mount to Elizabeth City was 108 miles each way. New Bern was 87 miles. Kinston was 57. Every playoff game against a Wilmington school was a good 140 miles of one-way driving (especially the time they called off a baseball playoff game and the school didn't notify me). I probably racked up 2,500 miles each summer just covering American Legion, and none of it was freeway mileage.

 

They could go to Arizona just as easily. Either way, some long roadies.

 

Ha! I forgot about that story. Nothing about that shocked me.

That town loved their football and The Pit was as important as anything. When they had to go from 11-man to 8-man football, it was as big of a scandal as you ever heard. It was still talked about in hushed tones when I started writing about them.

 

St. Monica of Santa Monica had a playoff football game at Big Bear one year (phone call, we didn't go). Most of its players had never seen snow before. That was the game which produced one of my legendary newspaper moments (suitable for the dimwit on the phone). I contacted the coach beforehand to get him to have someone call in the stats.
At about the right time that night, phone rang, kid says, "Coach asked me to call in the St. Monica stats."
"Great, thanks. Go ahead."
"(Quarterback) passed for 158 yards. (Running back) gained 82 yards."
"Wait a sec. What was the final score?"
"I don't know, coach just wanted me to call in the stats."
"You don't know what the score was?"
"No sir, I just have the stats."
...........................

 

Oh my God, that's amazing.