by Terry Andereck
THS Class of 1968
Twenty years ago I sat in a theater, transfixed by the story of a small town high school team that overcame all odds to win a state championship. “Hoosiers” was about a basketball team, not a football team, and the characters and events had been sweetened for the big screen. But to this day it is still the closest that Hollywood has come to capturing the drama that my 36 teammates and I lived some 40 years ago in Trenton High School’s last and perhaps only perfect season.
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The Bulldog coach in 1966 was Dewey Combs and he bore no resemblance to Coach Dale, the Gene Hackman character. Instead of sympathy and understanding, Coach Combs was made of good ol’ boy grit and determination. In his world there was exactly one way to do things: his way.
And his way was football. Almost everything I recall about Coach Combs is on the football field. I have only two lingering images of him at the high school proper. One is of him in the front seat of the driver’s ed car and in the other he’s diagramming football plays while monitoring study hall.
Looking back now it would be unimaginable to apply his coaching methods today. They simply wouldn’t work. Unyielding players would walk off the field or get thrown off.
Outraged parents would protest the excessively long practices. School and community would have to step in and bring enlightened coaching and positive reinforcement back to the gridiron.
Dewey Combs and his taskmaster assistant, Craig Campbell, were cut from the same molds as Vince Lombardi and Woody Hayes. It was medieval football, where punishment came before encouragement and toughness before skill. Forty years ago there was a lot more leather and canvas, cursing and intimidation, three-yard gains and clouds of dust. Field goals were, at most, occasional. And they were kicked with the toes, not the instep. Shame was an important motivator.
Modern equipment and training methods were yet to be discovered. It would be two years before men would walk on the moon Lightweight plastics and high tech fabrics from the “space race” hadn’t yet trickled down to rural Missouri athletics. Water was either a reward (“good job boys, so get a drink”) or punishment (“I want all of you little girls to go get water because you’re sure as hell not football players”). Sometimes we’d practice for two and a half hours without water.
In his good. ol’ boy Arkansas drawl, Coach Combs would say, “I want boys who are agile, mobile and hostile,” carefully stretching out and rhyming those last three adjectives Because he knew that agility and. mobility were mostly God-given talents, Coach spent a great deal of practice working on hostility development When motivation was needed, he and Coach Campbell would run the “hamburger drill,” the purpose of which seemed to be humiliation and pain. In games, if an opposing team’s linebacker was causing problems, we’d run a play called “billy goat right.” While it never seemed to gain.much yardage, it always managed to neutralize the intended target.
Such orders were dispensed with streams of profanity. wreathed in a cloud of smoke from an ever-present, unfiltered Camel. We didn’t do as he did, we did as he said. At the time, I don’t think any of us loved Dewey Combs. But all of us respected him and perhaps even feared him. He reshaped us with hammer and tong. Practices were a crucible in which individuals were melted down and alloyed into a team, Stars and-scrubs were treated with equal intimidation. Today I consider him one of the four or five most influential people in my life.
1966 was not Dewey Comb’s first opportunity to run the table. The Bulldogs came oh-so-close four years earlier. They were undefeated that year, but not perfect.
I was coming of age that fall and in awe of the high school players, their size and toughness. I wanted more than anything to be just like them when I was old enough to play for THS. There I was on the sideline of the Marceline game that year; some 20 feet from a Trenton player who was hovering over a Bulldog punt as it rolled to a stop. Assuming, the ball was dead, he turned his back and headed to the sideline. But a ball isn’t dead until the ref blows his whistle. An alert Marceline player scooped it off the turf and ran unchallenged into the end zone. Touchdown. The home crowd was stunned. The energized Marceline team went onto hold the Bulldogs scoreless for the remainder of the game, which ended in a 7-7 tie. The Bulldogs came that close in 1962.
But that close was not to happen in 1966. We started the season with a 40-0 drubbing of the reigning state champions – Savannah. It was played on their home field and frankly we had no idea of just how good we were or how important that victory was. We simply did as we were taught in practice. But the game seemed so much easier than practice and it would be that way throughout the reason. Friday nights were fun and easy in comparison to the brutal practices we endured- during the week.
Next were Carrollton and Macon. In both games we broke the 40 point-mark, while allowing our opponents only a touchdown apiece. Kirksville was tough, but couldn’t score on our defense. The bus ride back to Trenton was dark and somber because-a brooding Coach Combs was upset with our 20-0 victory. We were better than that.
Marceline followed Kirksville and Coach Combs was not going to allows a repeat of that devastating tie and imperfect season. They scored seven points against us but that was no match for the 48 we piled on them. Then Unionville, Milan and Brookfield in succession fell helpless against our offensive juggernaut and impenetrable defense. In those three games we averaged more than 50 points to our opponents’ zero. By then we were cocky, sure of our place atop the heap in Missouri football. Strangers would congratulate us on Saturday mornings at Five Points and in the evening at the Lazy K.
The St. Joseph News-Press had taken note of us from the start, with one of their reporters having witnessed our surprise thrashing of Savannah On the Monday following that game, the paper ranked THS atop the Keith Young Power Ratings, a place we would never relinquish that entire season.
But now the Kansas City Star was covering us. We were number one in the state. THS had the highest power ranking in the history of the poll We feared no one, Well, we feared no one until that Friday when we took a long bus ride to Fort Osage High School in Independence.
By then our roster was down to 32 or so players, injuries. and walk-offs having thinned out the ranks. Fort Osage, with an enrollment of well over a 1,000 students, had a football team as large as the entire junior class at THS. Our squad was so small that Coach would use “half line scrimmages” in practice. He’d line up the right side of the defense against the left side of the offense. We’d practice that way for an hour and then he’d flip everyone around and play left against right. Now we were facing an opponent that could field entire offensive and defensive teams that were three players deep.
I remember looking across the field during warm-ups-and wondering how we-could ever hope compete against an army so large and well equipped. All of their uniforms matched, they had new helmets and jerseys. In comparison, we were rag-tag; only the starters and a few second stringers had truly matching jerseys. They would be bringing in entire teams with fresh legs when the ball changed hands. Most of our starters were playing “both ways” that year. We wouldn’t get rest.
Making matters worse was a horrible November sleet that had begun in mid-afternoon. and stayed long after the game ended. In places, the field was muddy enough to suck the cleats right off your feet. My teeth were chattering as I lined up for the dreadful opening kickoff. The pre-game drills had done nothing to warm me up and I seriously wondered if it was possible for my bones to shatter in such cold. Those few parents brave enough to drive to Kansas City that evening huddled in their cars and cheered by flashing their headlights.
On our third play from scrimmage, I think it was Wayne Wendt who broke free and ran about 60 yards for a touchdown. We never looked back. Despite wet, bone-chilling conditions and a larger, better equipped opponent, we prevailed 31-7 and dominated a big city team. No one could beat us now.
Thus the table was set for final game of the season against Chillicothe on Veterans’ Day. Both schools were undefeated and untied. In the polls, Trenton was ranked first and Chillicothe second. The Hornets were also bringing a 25-game unbeaten streak to town, fully expecting to ruin the THS homecoming.
The homecoming parade that morning from Five Points to the high school (which later became Adams Middle School) brought out the whole town to cheer the team to victory, Forty years ago Veterans’ Day was a national holiday and Trenton was shut down. Everyone was either going to the game or listening to Jay Way’s play-by-play coverage on KTTN.
The night before I hadn’t slept well at all and was anxious. For kicks that morning. I rode shotgun with Jack Boehner as he drove his mother’s Chevy convertible in the parade with two waving homecoming princesses perched on the backseat. As we crept along the parade route, I slumped down low in the front, worried-that Coach Combs might see me. He had lots of unwritten rules and I was probably breaking one of them. What the &#S%@ are you doing with cheerleaders in a car before a game?!!
But it was on that long, slow parade route that the magnitude of it all came into focus for me. This was going to be a big game, a really big-game; a game like north Missouri had never seen before.
Days before the parade even began, people were claiming their seats. Flatbed trucks had been positioned on the open-grass on the north side of field as fans staked out their viewing spots. In his game report, Fritz Kreisler of the Kansas City Star wrote:
“Game time was 2 o’clock, but the fans began arriving at 9:30 a.m. for the Trenton-Chillicothe game in Trenton. By noon all of the 2,000 seats were gone and U.S. 65 between those two north central Missouri towns was almost a solid line of motor cars. By game time more than 5,000 persons made a solid ring around the field.”
This was heady stuff for teenage boys. Make no doubt about-it, though, we knew as we took the field that the game was bigger than the team or event he high school. This was Trenton versus Chillicothe; the entire town was counting on us.
Newspaper accounts described the hitting as fierce and the play as impressive. But after two quarters Chillicothe held a 3-0 lead on, of all things, a field goal. I think that may have been the first time we had been behind all season. It was not a familiar situation at for us.
At halftime we sat in silence in the dank, concrete void under the bleachers that served as our dressing room. Outside, the crowd noise seemed distant and irrelevant. For several minutes Coach Combs paced the floor in front of us, puffing on his cigarette. Finally he spoke. With clenched fists and red face, he stared at us and shouted, “you can’t lose this game.” Whatever was said after that really didn’t matter. Every one of us knew he was right. This was the stuff of boyhood dreams; an opportunity that comes once in a lifetime and then only to the most fortunate. We could not lose the game; we had been commanded to win.
We dominated in the second half, imposing our will on Chillicothe and scoring 27 points to their 7. Unlike in “Hoosiers,” however, there was no last minute score, no clutch-play at the buzzer, no individual on the field who carried us to victory, Rather we won that game like we had won every other game that season, as a team. We were the victors and our season was perfect.
The hero that day was Coach Combs. In jubilation, the team carried him off the field. His success in 1966 landed him a bigger and better job in Joplin next year and Coach Campbell went with him. The seniors graduated.
The following year we had new coach and new high school and new dressing rooms. Our beloved school counselor and highly-regarded football official, C.F. Russell, retired. I sometimes wonder if ever again there was a halftime pep talk underneath the stadium that now bears his name. The Bulldogs finished 5-5 that year and the 1966 dream season began to fade into history.
After graduation I left Trenton, and eventually made my way to Californi., bringing with me a box of clippings, photos, varsity letters, yearbooks and awards. Over the years I’ve shown them to my kids and tried my best to explain how it felt; what it was like to have perfect season. But to them it was a time long-ago, the uniforms looked funning, my shoes were high tops and, well, it’s just Dad reminiscing.
So I have pondered: were the 1966 Bulldogs good enough to go undefeated today and win the state championship? No, we weren’t trained or equipped to compete in the modern game. That was then, this is now.
But perhaps a better question might be this: could this year’s Missouri State Champions go back in time and beat the 1966 Bulldogs? I know if we were to ask Coach Combs that question he’d say, “No way. They’d be crying for water like little girls before the end of the first half.”