On the wall
of my Mancave is a piece of art from the hand of Spencer Meagher. It is taken from
a picture published in the Alton Telegraph in the fall of 1974. In it, a young
man is running with a football. Two defenders are bearing down on him. The
caption was headlined, “wary eyes.”
I treasure
that watercolor. My wife kindly gave it to me for a birthday present a few
years back. When I look at it, I smile.
It
transports me back to an incredibly important time in my life when I learned many lessons about hard work and
dealing with disappointment. The art of course depicts me as a 17-year-old running
back about to be clobbered by two kids from O’Fallon.
I can’t
imagine someone taking that memory away from me.
Wednesday,
the Illinois High School Association blinked. They left a whisper of a
possibility that we will have a football season in the state….albeit in the
dead of winter. For a moment, consider being 17 and entering your senior year
at Fairfield Community High School. My teams sucked. Fairfield is endeavoring
to put their fourth consecutive undefeated regular football season in the books.
This could
all go south….but….I like the small slice of optimism offered up by the IHSA.
They could have cancelled everything…but they didn’t. I’m sure football and
volleyball athletes in our region felt gratitude for the reprieve.
It leaves
the door cracked open for the creation of a life memory.
One that could
put a smile on a face decades down the road.
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