November 22, 1963 JFK and the Gaffney Lancaster Game Part two

 and over like a chant to ward off the real world. But then things would quiet down, and tongue-tied clumsiness would rule the bus again.

As we finally rolled into Lancaster, our football fire rekindled, and when the small stadium came into view, a scream went up from the Gaffney buses that startled nearby Lancaster townspeople walking to the game, bundled up against the cold.

The drivers parked the buses and we scrambled off, making our way quickly to the visitors' side of the stadium, filling it easily. We settled in and waited for the game to start.

Ah, the game. The Game. That great contest for the state title, this battle of undefeated young gods, the anticipation of which had nearly been the center of our lives for a while, turned out to be utterly anticlimactic. Flat. There would be no release for us.

The deflation began when it became obvious that the good citizens of Lancaster were less inclined than we to swallow their shock at the President's death. The hometown cheers were lackluster, and a preacher delivered a long-winded pre-game prayer of "sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy and her little children" and asked God to "give strength to President Johnson." I remember wincing at the strange new words "President Johnson."

Beyond that, the driving force of Lancaster High's success had disappeared. Their star running back, a 20-year-old named Jimmy "Muletrain" McGuirt, had turned 21 earlier that week, rendering him ineligible for this last momentous game. Gaffney's team, intact and ready to play, romped, 27-0. After the first two touchdowns, the night became a bore, allowing time for teenaged minds to wander back to what had happened in Dallas.

Friends congregated near the concession stand at halftime. Who was the guy they'd arrested for killing the President? No one anybody'd heard of. Is Kennedy's body still in Texas? No, they flew it back to Washington. How do you know? Somebody had a transistor radio on our bus. When'll they bury him? Everyone had heard something but nobody really knew anything, and the talk spun aimlessly.

I wandered down to the bottom of the stands and managed to get Crush-Shirley to walk over and talk to me across the barrier between the spectators and the field where she and the rest of the cheerleaders stood.

"Hey, Shirley looks like we've got 'em beat."

"Yeah, it’s great. We’ll do the same in the second half, too." She jumped and did a split in mid-air, as if performing a cheer. Her hair bounced up, down, and then away from her face. She wasn't in the least embarrassed about doing this; I was enthralled, hormones ablaze.

"Yeah. It's great. Say, um, you think you'd..."

"It does seem kinda weird, though, you know, with Kennedy and everything. I dunno." She looked to the side, toward the ground.

"Oh... Well, yeah, it does. . ."

She soon realized I had had no compelling reason for hailing her away from her cheering duties. She looked over at the other cheerleaders, looked back and shrugged her shoulders.

"I'd better get back."

Before I could answer, she turned and ran back to her friends. It hit me then that that had been as close as I'd ever get to dating Shirley. She was in the crowd, just out of my reach.

Things weren't the way I had thought they were.

For the rest of the game, I split my time between friends -- roaming the stands, buying Cokes, cracking stupid jokes -- and my Dad, who, although never a terribly expressive man, was more distant than usual. Not much passed between the two of us. He bought me a hotdog and a drink and asked me about one or two of my friends. We tried talking about the game, but there wasn't a lot to say except that Lancaster sure missed their big guy, and that our quarterback, Rodney Camp, sure could sling the ball, and that the whole thing was "a smear." When it was over and Gaffney’s latest state title was guaranteed, the crowd was subdued as we walked back to the buses, took our seats and headed home.

The ride back to Gaffney was by turns raucous and uncomfortably silent, as the late night of November 22 lurched unnaturally between reckless championship

furor and the dazed anxiety the rest of the country was enduring. My father and I sat next to each other, but we may as well have been in different vehicles. We were unused to talking about anything more substantial than TV or movies or sports, and the disabling enormity of the day, and the letdown of the deflated game, seemed to silence any hopes we had had of quick reconciliation.

About 20 miles from home, chatter and laughter was rumbling through the bus when a student, thinking he was funny, yelled out, "OK, let's all have a moment of silence for our beloved President." He laughed, then choked it back as all talking on the bus stopped, all of us suddenly embarrassed.

My father and I got back to his house after midnight and I went to sleep on that uncertain night in a bed that seemed foreign. In the morning, we rehashed the game over breakfast, trying to inject some retroactive excitement into it; we finally gave up. After awhile my eyes wandered to the newspaper lying on Dad's kitchen table, so I grabbed it and read aloud the latest details of the tragedy that had fragmented so many people's fragile plans.

After breakfast, I packed up my clothes from the previous day and Dad drove me home.

Much of this account is only clear in retrospect. It was only later that I realized what I'd really been after during that trip; just as it was only in retrospect that we could see the outlines of the downward slide toward rancor and division the country embarked on after Kennedy's murder. That Saturday morning it all felt a lot simpler: I just knew that something awful had happened.

At the top of my driveway, I got out of Dad's car, talked through the open window, agreeing to maybe go to a movie in a couple of weeks. I turned and walked down the hill and through the sliding glass doors and into my home, where my mother and stepfather were watching the televised aftermath of Kennedy's death. They seemed to look me up and down to see if I was all right. Then, after a brief exchange of information about Friday night's game, the three of us turned to the TV and slipped into the four-day shared national intimacy of grief.

John, or Johnny Grooms was born in Gaffney in 1949, son of a Gaffney textile employee and his Belgian “war bride.” He graduated from GHS in 1967, left town in ’73, worked for a couple of decades as editor-in-chief of an alternative newsweekly in Charlotte, circ. 60-70K. He lives in Charlotte with his wife Pat.