We played a HS football playoff game at Melrose in 95. 10 mins after we got off the bus, we heard gunshots nearby. The kickoff for the game was delayed due to another nearby shooting. Yeah, we were shell shocked and was down 28-0 8 mins into the game.
Our coach actually called a fake punt inside our own 10 yard line on 4th and 30 in order to get the running clock started. I was the intended option on the play and I flopped and drew a P.I. call. Our coach was pissed. Ha ha.
NOTE: seriously tl;dr for most of us, but if you’re up late and bored…
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Ooo, white boys getting nervous!
J/k, j/k…
When I was in high school in Hawai’i, 1968-1972, there was originally just one football league, public and private schools. Most schools had no land for a football field, and so we all played at the ancient wooden Honolulu Stadium, aka The Termite Palace.
So I was a student at the (apparently) lah-de-dah K-12 private school called Punahou School, founded by Congregationalist missionaries in 1841, and widely perceived, somewhat rightfully, as the school for the privileged descendants of the missionaries (many of whom intermarried into Hawai’ian royalty) who pretty much destroyed Hawai’ian culture, with the help of the US Marines and various US commercial interests who wanted to exploit whatever Hawai’i had going on; see “Cuba” for further explanation. Anyway, for whatever reasons, we were pretty much despised by all and sundry, and before the leagues split up into public/private schools, things could get “interesting”. All this to say that in my freshman year, when we played Roosevelt High School, the Punahou kindergartners and first-graders on the lowest stadium rows had their legs sliced open with razors during the game. So there’s that.
I was an Army brat, and so like the others in my sitchy-a-tion who didn’t grow up there, I didn’t really fit in. But one subset of us Punahou graduates did rate a movie, although alas, George Clooney was not among us.
Barry Obama, another outsider who lived across the street from school in the same building as my best friend, was a 7th-grader there when I was a senior. I have no memory of ever having seen him, possibly because I was a lordly senior, and 7th-graders would have been far below my view. I probably did ride up and down the elevator with him, FWIW. The linked movie is a popcorn-muncher, but the book
Hawaii by James Michener was a dead-on shot in terms of capturing Punahou. Anyway, for the movie crowd:
Lotsa terror on the Pippin!!
