Another Round at the Say When: The Running Back and The Coach
A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on.
One in a series.
The line is ringing.
The old high-school running back places the phone on speaker mode, so he can hear better, as he sits on his living room couch in this rural scattering of old homes and long-abandoned bars.
He spent his glory years in this outpost on the Nevada-Oregon line, playing eight-man high school football for the stalwart McDermitt Bulldogs.
Too much has changed in the 47 years since he wore that blue-and-white uniform, when he made all-state and smashed the face guards of would-be tacklers with those big hands.
He’s 64 now, retired, his hearing shaky. His hair is receding. He’s diabetic. He doesn’t take good care of himself, he admits, drinks too many sugary soft drinks.
Most mornings, his still-compact frame feels achy, even though he quit drinking almost three decades ago. His body long ago lost the sheer physical skills of that tough-minded boy with the watch-me attitude.
One season, the running back broke multiple bones in both hands. Before each game, he took of his casts, taped up his hands, and hustled out onto the field.
All that abuse of his body, and he’s still here.
On this day, he’s babysitting his grandson, Malcolm, a wide-eyed toddler with brown hair, who sleeps on the couch beside him. Earlier, the two-year-old pulled apart the old man’s bluetooth hearing aids.
Just like his grandfather, breaking down defenses.
So he struggles to hear. The phone is set at high volume as the line buzzes.
Then, a voice.
“Hello?”
The retired running back sees daylight.
He gulps.
“Coach Armstrong, this is Todd Murrah.”
There are fewer more important men in a boy’s life outside his father than his high school sports coach.
For one year, when the running back was a senior, a new field leader showed up on the McDermitt high school football scene.
Dan Armstrong was barely out of college, commanding a clutch of boys that could have all been his younger brothers.
They won a state championship that year in eight-man football.
Now the coach lives in Carson City, 275 miles and an entire universe away from McDermitt.
This is the first time the two have spoken in nearly a half-century. People tend to go their own ways, even players and coaches. They keep their memories to themselves.
But not today.
“Call me Dan,” the old coach says on the phone.
He’s been expecting the call.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?”
The coach continues to talk.
“How you doing?” he begins.
Murrah can barely hear him.
“What’s that?”
“I was just asking how you’ve been.”
If he concentrates, he can hear.
Well enough, anyway.
‘Ahhh, I’ve been doing pretty good,” he says, recovering his balance. “Just getting older. And you’re really old now. So, we’re just getting a lot older together.
“I’ve got eight grandkids now.”
“Eight?”
“Yeah, eight of ‘em.”
“Dang!”
The coach’s voice is loud and clear.
Both he and the running back were young and ambitious when they’d first met, two athletes just beginning to find themselves.
The running back was 17, the coach just 23.
Now, they’re both old men.
Two relaxed retirees sharing the memories of football games long past.
The old running back didn’t plan it this way, actually.
Days before, he was talking about that play, the one against Gabbs, another little school in the middle of nowhere, where his Bulldogs were driving for yet another score.
It was during that memorable 1973 season where the team won Nevada’s eight-man football championship, throwing this tiny town into a frenzy.
The running back was on the five-yard-line, nearly wide open, running toward another score, when he froze. He had one man to beat, a lumbering 240-pound lineman.
The two made contact and the running back froze. He didn’t dodge or dive. It was as though his feet were suddenly grabbed by something lurking deep below the surface. He didn’t move. He couldn’t.
In a split second, he tumbled face forward to the ground.
Tackled. He didn’t score that touchdown. He didn’t make it.
He ran back toward the sidelines. His coach was yelling at him, in that red-faced way that coaches do.
“What the hell happened?” he yelled.
The coach had assumed he’d just laid down like a quitter. And that bothered the running back for a long time, especially since the coach mentioned his perceived failure time and again after that.
The boy didn’t tell him then. For some reason, he couldn’t. He walked to the bench, sat down, took off his helmet, lost in private misery.
But all these years later, the reason for his failure was right there before his eyes.
And he wanted to set the matter straight, with his coach, and with himself.
So on that afternoon a week before, on a whim, he dialed the coach’s number. The call went right to voicemail. But he left a message anyway.
The words he left on the recorder seemed abrupt, like they were coming from someone who’d just awoken from a bad fever dream, a Rip Van Winkle of high school football suddenly awakening.
But the old running back wanted to finally put his conscience at ease.
He didn’t score on that day, he said, talking to the silence, because that big lineman had been laying across his toes. He tried to dig his cleats into the dirt to keep moving.
But he was helpless.
Back then, it was a failure he could not accept, much less talk about, especially to his coach. It would have been making excuses.
But old men are more willing to make up for the sins of the boy.
The coach got the phone message. And whether or not he even remembered the play, the call opened up an entire galaxy of memories long forgotten.
He wanted to talk to his old high-school running back.
That boy who’d become a man a long time ago, whose life had experienced so many more letdowns than failing to score that high-school touchdown.
A failed marriage. Too many wrecked cars. Bad financial decisions.
So now they’re talking again, two old men reliving the touchdowns of the past.
The coach makes a confession: He, too, struggles to hear.
“I got an ear cut off in a car wreck a few years back,” he confides. “So I’ve learned to talk louder than the average person.”
There’s nothing to be ashamed of.
“I have hearing aids in both ears too,” the coach continues. “It’s tough sometimes. Especially on the phone. You can hear the sounds but you can’t make out the words.”
“That’s right,” the running back says.
They throw out names of players past, names of old girlfriends, people they both knew.
“Who’d you marry?” the coach asks.
“LaRae McClintock.”
“Not Cindy Albisu?”
Cindy was the head cheerleader. She and Todd had been inseparable. But she marred someone else. The running backs says her husband had recently died in a car wreck.
“You and LaRae had how many kids?”
“We didn’t have any.”
“I saw Lorraine at the stock car races years back. She said she was living in Boise.”
“She’s still living there.”
The men move on to the subject neither can forget. That group of young players who won the eight-man state championship in the 1973 season.
They talk about where everyone is, where they last saw them. One still works as an accountant in Elko, another was running a bar in Lamoille, and what about that guy somebody last saw somewhere on the Pyramid Lake reservation?
Some of those boys are dead now. Taken too soon.
The running back can go through his old yearbooks and, page after page, and point to kids wearing their game-faces, kids who are now long gone.
The coach says he ran into one former player at a rodeo a few years back. “He’d been in a car wreck and had a huge scar across his face.”
They mention another killed in a crash.
“Well, that’s one big disappointment,” the coach says.
The running back says his second wife, the mother of his kids, also died in a car wreck. She was on her way to Boise and made it a mile past Burns Junction before she flipped her car. His brother-in-law also died in a wreck a decade ago.
Why so many car wrecks, the men wonder aloud.
“Around McDermitt, there was nothing to do but go out and party,” the coach says. “There was a lot of distance between places. A lot of open road. I count my blessings now, how many times I drove drunk.”
They mention running back Sidney Kochamp.
“He hasn’t had a drink in 25 years,” Todd says.
“I’ve got 35 years,” coach says.
“I’m 28 years sober,” Todd says
“Tip of the hat,” the coach says. “I heard you were having a time a few years ago. Who can blame you? There’s not much to do in McDermitt.”
But the reason they’re on the phone isn’t to talk about the tragedies of today, but the glories of yesterday. Those moments on that football field on the Nevada-Oregon line are still very much alive in their minds.
Oh, man, what a time they had! They were all as tough as raw shank steak.
The fall of 1973 was the coach’s first season. He’d talked to the outgoing coach, an old-timer named Burt Polkinghorn, about what kind of talent he had.
“My only goal was to win a state championship,” he says.
Polkinghorn mentioned one name in particular: Todd Murrah.
“You scored touchdowns. You didn’t care how you got them. You were the teacher of that team,” the coach said on the phone. “I’d blow the whistle and you’d run and score a touchdown and then come running back.”
The running back mentions the game theory the coach drilled into his head.
“Primary responsibility,” he says.
The coach picks up on the theme, like they were still at practice.
“Know your job. Each and every play,” he says. “If everybody does it, we form a cohesive unit. Nobody can beat us.”
The Bulldogs didn’t always win back then.
“I’d like to play that that Crane game again, right now,” the coach says.
“Me, too,” says the running back.
That year, Crane was their first non-conference game of the season. It was a private school peopled by Oregon farmers and ranchers; big kids all of them.
They led Crane 18-0 with 8 minutes to go.
Then Dave Holloway, No. 43, fumbled and Crane picked it up and ran for a touchdown.
The coach gave Holloway a second chance and he fumbled again.
Crane came back to win 20-18.
The coach doesn’t blame Halloway.
“We found something out that game,” he says. “Dave had great hands to catch passes. So we began throwing him the ball.”
The Crane game, he says, is one of five moments in his long coaching career that still haunts him. Another was the time he lost a quarterback who could have brought McDermitt another championship.
At the time, the coach says, he played John Ugalde as his third-string thrower. His mother thought he should have been a starter, so she took him out of school and moved him down to Winnemucca.
She said he had a better chance at getting a scholarship there.
That season, the Winnemucca coach called him to gloat.
“You got any more players like that Ugalde kid?” he asked.
“Yep, I’ve got five or six more, and you’re not getting any of them.”
The running back laughed at that one.
He’d gone to the senior dance with Ugalde’s sister, who apparently forgotten that he’d broken bones in both hands on the football field and kept squeezing his palm, sending jolts of electricity up and down his spine.
Back then, one side of McDermitt’s field as in Nevada, the other in Oregon.
Not only did he run the ball, Todd was the team’s kicker for four straight years, sometimes booting that ball through the other team’s uprights.
A referee once told him that he was the only kid he knew who could kick a football from one state and have it land in another.
Then Armstrong mentions something his star player has forgotten.
“Boise State called me and wanted to offer you a kicking scholarship,” he says. “I think your Dad wanted you to stick around.”
The running back mentions another tryout that his coach had arranged. He drove to Winnemucca to show his talents for coaches at Nevada University at Reno.
“I didn’t do too well,” he says. “I couldn’t kick leather. But I could kick a rubber ball.”
“You could kick both,” his old coach says.
The call is coming to a close.
The two men talk about throwing a 50th anniversary party in 2023 to memoralize their long-ago championship.
Both promise to try and round up those players who are still alive.
The running back hangs up the phone.
The call his stirred up memories, most of them good.
“I wish I could have gone out and done something,” he says. “I could have done better with money management, watched the money I did have. I’ve been a diabetic for 15 years and still cant even spell the word. I drink soda. I don’t take my medicine.”
Could football have been his ticket out? Does he regret not playing at the next level?
“I didn’t really like football, not until I was a senior,” the old running back says. “I didn’t think I was good enough or even big enough to play college ball.”
He pauses.
“I think I could have been a good kicker, though.”