Travis turned slowly around on the grass, with his big cooler forgotten at his feet, and lifted his eyes to the top of the great scoreboard that rose over the end zone. The lights were just coming on. In tall white letters against the evening sky, the words were as clear as they had been for thirty years. He read them, and the sound carried across the whole field. “Reece Field. Named for Hollis Reece, quarterback, nineteen fifty eight state champions, who played the final drive with a broken wrist.” Twenty thousand people had gone silent in the bleachers. I am Hollis Reece, eighty years old, and I stood by the flagpole in my pressed jacket with the little gold football pin.
In 1958, I was a seventeen year old quarterback on a team of oil field boys, and we played for the state championship in the cold in Austin. In the third quarter, I broke my wrist on a sack. I did not tell the coach. I taped it and threw the winning touchdown pass with my left hand. The next morning, the whole town was on Main Street to meet the bus. After graduation, I sold oil field pipe for thirty five years, and every Friday night, I stood by the flagpole, in the same spot, to watch the boys run out of the tunnel.
The old assistant coach, Duane Beal, seventy four years old, who had taken off his headset, crossed the end zone with a slow limp. “Hoss,” he said, using the name the town gave me in fifty eight. “Hoss Reece. I carried water for you that night.” The cheerleaders, in their red and white, had stopped their routine. The band director held his baton still. On the sideline, the varsity team, forty young men in helmets, turned together to look at the flagpole, and the quarterback, a tall boy with number twelve, took off his helmet.
A gold football pin on an old jacket gave one retired pipe salesman the length of a homecoming game to bring a booster back to the field in Odessa.
I gave my terms with a hand on the flagpole. “Travis, you love these boys, and I love that about you. You thought an old man in a jacket was a stranger with no business on the field. That is a mistake any good man could make. I ask only three things. Tell the story of the final drive to the team on Monday. Put my name on the program every Friday, so that the young ones know whose field they are standing on. And let me lead the boys through the tunnel tonight, since I have not been on this grass in eleven years.”
Travis sagged against the cooler, and the big bluster went out of him. “Mr. Reece, my father played here in the nineties,” he said, in a hushed, humbled voice. “He told me about the scoreboard and the man it was named for. I was the one who asked the booster club to repaint the letters last spring.” He shook his head slowly. “I have looked at your name every Friday night for six years, and I told you that you had no right to wear the pin. I called you Grandpa in front of twenty thousand people. I do not know how to take it back.”
But the young man was too ashamed to stand still. Travis suddenly bent, tore the gold football from my jacket, and started across the field at a jog toward the press box, saying he had to check the date on the back against the old yearbooks. He reached the forty yard line. Coach Beal stepped onto the grass in front of him with his arms out. The quarterback with number twelve walked off the sideline and stood in his way. And the whole varsity team, in a line, followed him onto the field, shoulder to shoulder, in front of the grandstand.
Travis stopped on the forty yard line with the pin in his fist, and the lights of Friday night shone down on the red and white. Forty boys stood in front of him, helmets under their arms, not saying a word. The quarterback spoke, in a clear, young voice that carried to the stands. “Mr. Travis, that is Hoss Reece. We have heard about him since we were in pee wee football. Give him his pin.” Travis walked back to the flagpole through the line of players, who parted for him, and he pinned the little football on my jacket, and the whole crowd stood.
The consequences were thunderous. At seven in the evening, I walked out of the tunnel at the head of the team, with Coach Beal at my left and the quarterback at my right, in the roar of twenty thousand voices. The band played the fight song. I raised my hand, and my wrist, which had never been the same since fifty eight, ached in the cold. Travis stood at the end of the line with his head bowed. By the end of the game, which we won by a field goal, he was crying quietly with his hand over his mouth.
In the name of my wife Betty, who passed in 2019, I started the Betty Reece Fund. It pays for football equipment, helmets and physical exams for boys and girls who cannot afford to play, and for scholarships for graduating seniors, in Ector, Midland and Crane counties. In the first year we outfitted three hundred and twelve players and sent twenty four seniors to college. One was a fifteen year old from Odessa whose father worked the oil rigs, and who put on a real helmet for the first time and looked in the mirror with a grin so wide it would not fit.
On the first Friday of the next season, I stood by the flagpole at the end of the field in the golden light, and the wind carried the smell of dust and popcorn across the grass. Travis came over from the sideline in his booster polo and stopped in front of me. He did not have the cooler. He held out a folded program, with my name on the front page, and below it, in his own handwriting, a single line. Thank you for teaching us. “Mr. Reece,” he said, “will you stand with me for the anthem?” I put my hand on his shoulder, and we stood.
