I played football for Emory Bellard

Emory Bellard passed away last week. He was a legend in collegiate football circles, credited as the inventor of the wish-bone offense. Sometimes the newspaper articles will mention in passing that he was a successful high-school football coach, at Breckenridge High School, and at then at San Angelo. It was during his tenure at BHS that I played football for Coach Bellard.

I have written before about the football program at Breckenridge; about how in the period from 1951 to 1959, the Breckenridge Buckaroos football team won four State Championships outright and tied for a fifth. How 8 of the 27 team members were named to All State. Well, I was not one of those 8, and that's not the football team I was on. My team was the gang of boys taking a Physical Education class under none other than Coach Bellard himself. You see, athletic coaches in those days also had to carry a class load. The assistant coaches taught things like history and civics, and the head coach had a heavy schedule of supervising one or more PE classes.

Every morning we would go out to the athletic building and suit up in shorts and tee shirts, do calisthenics for 15 or 20 minutes, then scrimmage each other in a pretty crude version of touch football. Then it was hit the showers and rejoin our classmates for more mundane activities, such as study hall.

During the football season, the drill changed somewhat. On Fridays when there was a home game scheduled, we would head straight to Buckaroo Stadium and line up across one end zone, then we would duck-walk to the other end zone, pulling up any grass burrs we encountered. Goat heads, we called them. This was West Texas, and goat heads were pernicious and lethal; I patched many a bicycle tire flattened by these thorns, and they sprang up like... well, weeds. But there weren't any in the grass at Buckaroo Stadium. The PE class saw to that.

None of the glowing articles I've read mention that coach Bellard was blind in one eye. I don't remember which one, but all the guys in PE knew that if you got on the correct side, he couldn't see you. That was important, because while doing calisthenics, it gave you the opportunity to slack off. One morning I was taking advantage of Coach's limited eyesight during leg lifts and would only lift one leg at a time. It was not as good a plan as I hoped, though, because I got caught. The punishment for lazy leg lifts was to put 'em both up and hold 'em up as long as you could. If you couldn't hold them up long enough, you got to run laps. I surprised even myself at how long I could hold both legs up, but as I recall it wasn't worth it.

Coach Bellard came back and spoke to the 45th reunion of the class of '58. He was gracious and warm and spoke of his years at BHS as being among the best of his stellar career. He even mentioned the fight song that I wrote the dumb words for. He didn't mention my goofing off in PE. A true gentleman.