Prep football fans put 'rank' in rankings

There was a large box sitting on my desk with a pretty red bow on top.

“Hey, you’ve got an admirer,” somebody hollered from the other side of the sports department. “You might get a date out of this.”

Nobody would let me wait to open it, of course, so I began tearing off the wrapper.

Inside the box was something wrapped in what seemed like mountains of tin foil.

I started to open the foil and almost fainted.

Hell, people within a one-mile radius probably wobbled on their feet.

The “surprise gift” was a massive cow patty, which stunk to high heaven and beyond.

That thing was world-class.

It was so big that I’m pretty sure someone put a couple of ’em together. Or maybe more.

If not, then damn...

I wanted to see that cow.

Anyhow, there was a note attached to the outside of the wrapping.

It said simply: “This is what we think of your rankings.”

OK, then.

THIS MOMENT of eye-watering excitement occurred at my very first newspaper job.

I was working for the Topeka Capital-Journal, which was considered one of the best mid-size newspapers in the country.

It was a fabulous place to learn the business, and that obnoxious, knock-you-down gift was merely part of the admission price.

Now then, so you’ll know why someone would go to all that trouble — just so I’d find a giant box of cow poo at my work station — you need a little background.

As a relative newcomer on a staff where you moved up only one role at a time, I was covering the state high school beat.

This happened in an era when Kansas — which came late to the party — still did not have prep football playoffs.

Actually, they began a year later, and the ranking that earned me the meadow muffin happened to be proven correct — which I loved, obviously.

But before there were playoffs and proper state champions in various classes, the rankings published by the Capital-Journal (me, as the final judge) were considered almost official all across the state.

You can probably see where this is going, since folks in a lot of Kansas towns were mighty proud of their high school football heroes.

THE IDEA originally was that the public was not supposed to know who had the final say in our rankings.

Yeah, right.

Whoever was in charge of the state prep beat had to be “the guy,” and readers picked that up in an instant.

To be fair, I worked at getting it right (or as close as possible) like a man on a mission.

I talked to coaches, officials, writers from papers all over the state — and obviously I’d get out to whatever we considered the biggest game every Friday night.

One weekend, I drove all the way out to Hill City, and if you want to Google a map, Hill City is closer to Colorado than it is to Topeka.

I learned a lot from that trip — and later, there was a huge reckoning that finally exploded because of my presence — but we’ll save the poor Palco Roosters for another time.

That story needs to be a solo act.

My point here, though, is that I really worked and studied (and drove) to make our rankings fair and pretty close to accurate.

Unfortunately, my efforts failed to please everyone.

LET’S SEE, I got to the parking lot after a game one night in Oskaloosa and discovered that all four tires on my old VW were flat.

The hell of that episode was that I thought I’d been pretty kind to Oskaloosa in print, and their rivals despised me even more.

That’s when you know you’re on the right track, by the way — when both sides loathe you equally.

Of course, I had my name chanted in various towns, with all sorts of colorful adjectives attached — none of which are fit to publish here.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, matched the seething that came from the little town of Solomon.

To this very day...

Well, obviously I look completely different, and those good ol’ boys in Solomon should be grandpas whittling on the porch by now — but if I were driving across Kansas on I-70 next week, I’d make sure I had plenty of gas before I passed Solomon.

Still not stopping there.

No, sir.

LET ME defend myself here.

Kansas then had five classifications for its sports competitions. Solomon (population about 1,100) was a 2-A school.

Through some unfortunate geography — and I suspect a bit of urging from the populace of Solomon — the football team played exclusively in a 1-A league.

And a weak one, at that.

In each of the two years I did the rankings, Solomon went undefeated and ran up monster scores against schools that had, like, 13 kids on the football team.

Great fun for Solomon, I guess, but...

I refused to rank them in our Capital-Journal Top 10.

The athletic director once phoned me to complain, and I explained that he had an open date at the beginning of the season — so why not schedule a legit 2-A team of roughly the same size?

You know, pick a fair fight.

To the AD’s credit, Solomon did open the following year (when I was in a different job and Kansas had finally instituted playoffs) against a school called Lyons from a pretty strong 2-A league.

Solomon got done by about a thousand.

All right, it was only 41-7, but still...

I smiled a lot that week.

LET’S BACK up, though, to that last non-playoff year — when I was getting phone calls from people who claimed to be from all over the state, insisting that I was biased against Solomon.

One afternoon a man in coat and tie walked up to my desk.

“Are you Steve Cameron?” he said.

I said sure (because we had guards at all the doors), and the gentleman introduced himself as the paper’s circulation director.

At which point, he reached into a briefcase and pulled out a huge wad of white paper slips.

He then launched them into the air above my head, and they spread out like an endless snowstorm.

“These,” he shouted, “are cancellation notices from every single subscriber in Solomon!”

Then, the hammer.

The guy demanded that we publish an apology to the people of Solomon.

My boss immediately chimed in and said: “That would be implying that their football team is better than it is.

“So...no!”

It was all a real shame, since Solomon is a cute little place. I’d had a great milkshake there once.

But now?

Hey, Abilene is only 6 miles west.

It’s got the Eisenhower Museum (Ike was born just up the road) and the Greyhound Hall of Fame.

And fine milkshakes.

Email: [email protected]

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday or Wednesday.

Steve’s various tales from several decades in sports — “Moments, Memories and Madness” — run on Sundays.