Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Writer recalls doing a dance for football pictures

The weather is beginning to cool off and the dog days of our 2006 summer will soon be just a memory.

My attention turns to beauty pageants, the Forest Festival, and fall football games.

I am looking forward to doing the journalists dance at our game against Jessieville Friday (already played by the time you read this).

It will be my first opportunity to do such a dance this year, but certainly not the only photographers dance in sports I have ever done.

As many of you know, I finished college at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, back in the fall of 1982.

By late that fall, I had my trusty Cannon TX out on the sidelines of the Marianna, Arkansas, Trojan football field.

And most of the players were pretty well twice my size. The dance, as my then boss Marvin Caldwell referred to it, is a necessary part of not having to buy a new camera after each game, and also to not have to go to the emergency room.

Although I have been brushed, I have never been mowed down by a player attempting that ever-sought after touchdown.

In my day (I can say that at 47), they taught us to hover somewhere between the home teams 20 yard line and the end-zone, which is where the winner wants to be to score a touchdown and then the team gets a chance for an extra point or two.

Well, trying to get that close-up shot of the players expression as a touchdown is scored, with the added touch of an official sticking both arms up, is not always easy. And I was always one to get just a little too close to the action for comfort.

Thus the dance. The trick is when the team members bound off the field, dont be standing where they are bounding.

I know a few of them on the ambulance crew here in Gurdon. It is my hope and prayer I do not need their services for being two slow with my Go-Devil, get out of the way, photographers dance.

But if I do get hit, I will leave it up to you, my readers, to recover the camera and try and salvage the last close-up photograph on it!

In all sincerity, I wish our mighty Go-Devils all of the luck in the world this year, and I will do my best to write about as many plays as I can jot down, just because I know how parents and grandparents are; they want to remember when...

And so do I. Remember, I have little Joshua Matthew now. And as I write this, he will soon be two months old. It wont be long when it will be me looking for that mention of his name and that one good play he had during the big game.

Until next time, this is John, still on his Journey.