This being Thanksgiving Weekend, football is king. High school, college and pro football are part of the tradition associated with the holiday. In comparison, Black Friday, the supposed biggest day in the merchandising world, is a relative newcomer.
I am not going to recite a history of how Thanksgiving came about. Nor am I going to discuss what Thanksgiving means—that is definitely open to personal interpretation.
No, I am going to remain true to this blogger’s mission as an observer of sports opining on what he sees fit to write (with my apologies to The New York Times). And that is what this blogger is thankful for—having a forum to talk sports and a group of loyal readers who get the gist of what I am saying.
Sports fans have been inundated with football. Wall-to-wall saturation on the airwaves. Much of it has been predictable, with a few upsets and a lot of demolition of long-standing opponents.
First, I am starting with some melancholy reporting. I grew up with the heated football rivalry of Highland Park versus Metuchen. Two boroughs situated along Route 27, with a large portion of Edison Township between their borders. There was no game between these arch rivals this year, as HPHS could not provide enough bodies to field a team.
Mention Metuchen in Highland Park, and my blood begins to curdle. I am very confident that the same applies to Metuchen residents when Highland Park is heard. I am a child of this vitriol—I absorbed it on the streets of the small town across the Raritan River from Rutgers University and Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick. Whenever I traveled through Metuchen, dubbed “The Brainy Boro,” I was never comfortable inside its boundaries. I have driven through it many, many times, had a few meals there, purchased groceries on occasion at the old Foodtown. But nope, never liked the town, no matter how nice its main thoroughfares looked. When the old high school burned to the ground and was still smoldering, I was relieved that nobody was hurt, yet I was secretly hoping it would make their football team worse. Talk about brainwashing.
When I was in seventh grade, I attended my first Highland Park-Metuchen game at the old Memorial Stadium in New Brunswick. The neutral site was used so that equal numbers of fans from both towns could attend, and that any bloodshed would be mostly limited to the playing field. While the New Brunswick Police and the Middlesex County Sheriff’s office manned the perimeter of the stadium area, random violence still occurred. Even the menacing presence of a German Shepard near the entrance to the stadium was only a small deterrent.
I don’t know whose idea it was to play in New Brunswick but it was a good one. New Brunswick High vacated the field on Thanksgiving Day, playing their hated foe—the South River Rams—at the old Rutgers Stadium. South River and New Brunswick were two of the older high schools in the area; Highland Park students attended NBHS before their high school was opened in he late 1930’s.
I remember that it was cold. Highland Park-Metuchen games were always cold. The game began promptly at 10:30 a.m. This allowed for the game to be played and everyone could return home—happy or sad—in time for s late afternoon feast.
Memorial Stadium was composed of a sizable grandstand on one side and smaller bleachers on the other side of the field. While I remember that the teams alternated sides each year, I don’t recall if the fans were divided or one set of boosters was relegated to the smaller bleachers on the visitors side. Thee was a baseball diamond at one end of the complex, and snow fences encircled the playing area. Plus there were lights—the New Brunswick High Zebras hosted a number of night games during the regular season; this was a rarity in the 1960’s.
What I remember is that the HPHS Owls were a juggernaut under the coaching of Jay Dakelman. Jay was a kind and gentle man away from the sports arena. He ran the summer day facility at the high school. Jay taught me how to play dice baseball and caroms. Chinese checkers, too, although I was never really good at it. He saw that I could play baseball, and his camp offered me the ongoing opportunities to play whiffle ball, take grounders on the dirt field with the rickety old bleachers, or to play softball on the tennis courts under the auspices of Tommy York, one of Jay’s favorite players form the early 1960’s.
Give Jay a football team and a whistle, and he was tough taskmaster, demanding excellence on the gridiron. The Panzer College graduate (the forerunner to Montclair State University and a place where gym teachers were molded) was tyrannical at practice or roaming the sidelines during the games.
As a result, Jay’s teams were stellar, starting with All-State QB Joe Policastro in the 1950’s, continuing with Richie Policastro, Jo-Jo’s cousin, Wayne Donnelly, Jack Simczak, WR Glenn Meltzer and throughout the decade of the ’60’s with my contemporaries. These guys were my heroes and I dutifully rode my bike to the high school practices, absorbing what I could as a young boy and being treated like a mascot/good luck charm.
Naturally, I wanted to emulate them. I had the arm, so I thought I could play QB. Except that I was 5’-2” at the time, a beefy 150 pounds. So I was third (or maybe fourth) string QB on the Freshman/JV team, a third team RB, a third team LB. I finally got to play on the kickoff return team, and I had one carry against one of the Edison junior high schools for 4 yards, one yard from scoring a TD in a rout.
But what I remember is how we got up for playing Metuchen on Edgar Field, the Bulldogs’ home site. Normally, we wore hand-me-down uniforms from the varsity. For some reason, Jay like to wear white almost all of the time. They were nice uniforms, but I liked the colorful maroon jersey much more. The MHS game was the only time that season we wore them.
I could feel the edginess of our starting players in pre-game warm ups. The passes were zipped a little harder and higher to me—which of course, I could not handle. Our coaches were angrier and seemingly wanted to play if they could. The bitterness was omnipresent.
Unfortunately, we lost and the bus ride back down Route 27 was disconsolate. When we returned to the practice field, the varsity was not too happy with our performance and let us know that we NEVER lose to Metuchen. That made a lasting impact on me, so it certainly made a greater impact on my fellow teammates, who would go on to meet the Bulldogs three times, winning two. The 1967 victory, in my senior year, capped off an unbeaten season for the Owls. I was a part of it, for in my sophomore year, Jay told me to keep statistics for the varsity, probably to save my body as I had lost 30 pounds and should not have been anywhere near a football field wearing shoulder pads and a helmet lest I be permanently maimed.
What I learned inside of the coaches’ office was how much they disdained the Metuchen football program. Our coaches didn’t like the coaching staff. They begrudgingly admitted the the Bulldogs had some pretty good players. And they didn’t like to lose to Metuchen in any sport I was the head basketball manager my senior year and statistician for three seasons and the football players for both sides played basketball which was rugged and chippy. Plus I didn’t like their cramped gym and the venomous fans they had (I even thought their cheerleaders weren’t very attractive—that is deep brainwashing).
I learned a lot about life from Jay Dakelman, a Jewish football coach in a non-Jewish sport who somehow got the best athletes in Highland Park to play for him at the highest level—including a number of Jewish players who garnered plenty of accolades for their play. I also learned about the football culture and what it took to be a winner—which in this instance required an abiding dislike fo your opponent, and most of all for your traditional rival.
Throughout New Jersey and other states, there exist local rivalries which are seemingly ancient like Easton, PA and Phillipsburg, who meet annually on Thanksgiving at Lafayette College. For many years, new rivalries popped up in Middlesex County to augment the most storied ones involving Highland Park and Metuchen, New Brunswick and South River, and Perth Amboy and Carteret; the two Edison schools, Edison High and J.P. Stevens began a traditional Thanksgiving battle once Stevens could play varsity ball, replacing the game between Edison and Woodbridge High.
To plenty of people, the Thanksgiving games meant a lot to them in terms of civc pride. I was genuinely glad that Highland Park had a ridiculously good winning percentage against Metuchen. Through the years, the NFL has gone from the one game in Detroit, normally between the home standing Lions and the Green Bay Packers, to a game in Dallas and now a third game which can be anywhere that is covered by NBC.
I recall the J.L. Hudson parade in Detroit was an event of enormous pride to Detroiters in the ’50’s and 60’s It is now know as America’s Thanksgiving Parade at age 92 and shares the the honor of being the second oldest Thanksgiving Parade with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; Philadelphia’s parade is four years older.
There have been college games on Thanksgiving through the years. Texas and Texas A&M was always a staple of Thanksgiving. Until the bitter feud ended with the Aggies bolting from the shadow of the Longhorns and going the Southeastern Conference for more money and greater prestige. This year only Mississippi and Mississippi State battled in the Egg Bowl.
The NFL has eroded the Thanksgiving football tradition. Plus high school football playoffs have taken teams away from playing on Thanksgiving, so as to not jeopardize the players’ health and chances in winning a sectional title. Even Highland Park and Metuchen stopped meeting on Thanksgiving a number of years ago and play at their respective fields, not in New Brunswick.
While I watched a lot of football on TV this past week, including the incredible Monday night affair between the Chiefs and Rams, the three NFL games on Thursday, Alabama-Auburn, Ohio State demolishing Michigan, Notre Dame whipping USC, Rutgers almost defeating Michigan State, and I missed the 7 OT’s that LSU and A&M endured, just to name a few, plus some serious college hoops live (Rutgers held Eastern Michigan to 4 first half points at the RAC on Monday) and on TV (Duke losing to Gonzaga was entertaining). I even watched Crazy Rich Asians again and was entertained by the outstanding performance of Holiday Inn at the Paper Mill Playhouse. Early this morning, I saw The Blind Side for the umpteenth time. Nonetheless, I longed for the simpler days when my beloved Owls would stomp on the boys from Metuchen.
I guess Thanksgiving brings out the best/worst in me. My entire family was here for the entire weekend. The holiday always leaves me with bountiful leftovers. With the renewal of some youthful memories.
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