A rekindled love affair: Clinton Arrows football

By Guest Columnist Nash Nunnery

Playing football ends for everybody. It ends for the professional, who’s paid a king’s ransom to play a child’s game. It ends for the high school kid who warmed the bench for three years yet busted his hump every practice, delighted just to be on the team.

Eventually, it ends for every single soul that ever put on a pair of cleats and shoulder pads. That includes me, a Clinton Arrow football player fifty years removed.
I arrived in Clinton as a fourth grader and attended my first CHS game in September 1964 – Arrows vs. Jackson St. Joe. The candy-apple-red jerseys and gray pants with the red stripe fascinated me. Oh, and, by the way, the good guys shutout SJ 14-0 that night. Coach Roy Burkett stalked the sidelines, Bernie Blackwell and Jerry Cronin scored touchdowns and Douglas Richardson kicked both extra points.

High school football, particularly the Clinton Arrows brand, became my first love.

The love affair ended for all intents and purposes on November 24, 1972, at Roy Burkett Field (RBF). My Arrows team whipped Mendenhall 7-0 on a frosty Friday night to capture the school’s first-ever Overall Little Dixie Conference Championship.

Sure, I wore a practice uniform for a minute at Delta State, but it was strictly for show. Wearing a green jersey just didn’t have the same cache as Arrow red. In my heart, football ended for me nine months earlier, triumphantly kissing a gold football-shaped championship trophy on RBF’s 50-yard line.

A few days before my CHS graduation in May 1973, I drove to Roy Burkett Field on a sunny Sunday afternoon. RBF was quiet under a Carolina-blue sky, the press box shimmering in the sunlight. I walked the field, locating areas on the turf where I’d executed a key block or a teammate had made a nice catch or run. Alone with my thoughts, I even found the location on the field where several Clinton Park buddies and I enjoyed an overnight camping adventure long before RBF was transformed into a football stadium in 1970.

I’d played in front of thousands for three years in this football cathedral, but there was no one in sight that afternoon. It seemed the loneliest place on earth. I was only seventeen, and I believed that nothing I did for the rest of my life would rise to those days wearing that red CHS jersey. In my mind, I truly believed I’d never have it better than playing football for the Clinton Arrows.

I was determined to walk away from that field and never look back. You wouldn’t catch me twenty, thirty or even forty years later crowing about my team and our gridiron exploits. I knew the type who couldn’t give it up, and I didn’t want to be “that guy.” So, at my insistence, Arrows football and I got a quickie divorce. Call it irreconcilable differences.

I walked away from CHS football. I returned briefly in 1975, but only as a working stiff to cover a few “Cardiac Kids” games for both Jackson newspapers. I was paid to be there and do a job, nothing more, nothing less. I refused to be “that guy” who holds on to high school football memories like grim death. Me? I was too cool for school.

That was in 1975. I didn’t return to RBF or watch an Arrows game again until November 2006.

I’d run into an old teammate who told me CHS was playing its last game at Roy Burkett. He said people were talking about it all over town and that we ought to go. I tried to make up an excuse, like having brain surgery that day, but my mind wasn’t quick enough.

Hesitantly, and with some anxiety, I agreed to go to the game. Almost on cue, I thought, “I have become ‘that guy’ I didn’t want to be.”

Roy Burkett FIeld was packed that night. Nothing much had changed, except maybe for the plush fieldhouse the school built south of the visitor bleachers. We brought lawn chairs and set them in the south end zone with five or six hundred other Arrows fans that couldn’t find a seat in the stands. I felt like a fish out of water, as I hadn’t set foot on this hallowed ground almost thirty-one years to the day.

In RBF’s last hurrah, the Arrows beat Tupelo 19-10 in the first round of the MHSAA 6A state playoffs. The team still sported the arrowhead logo with the “C” in the middle on the helmets, and the CHS band still cranked up “Superstar” in the fourth quarter. In a “life is stranger than fiction” twist, I learned my ex-wife’s son started at guard for the 2006 Arrows. He wore 66, my old number.

After the game, it seems the whole town was on the field saying goodbye to RBF. Folks were walking around to specific spots on the playing surface, pointing out various RBF landmarks, like the area of Barry McCay’s winning touchdown run in the ’72 championship game or the exact spot where the ’75 Cardiac Kids blocked another punt to eke out one more last-minute win.

I lingered on the field for over an hour talking with friends. Honestly, I could have stayed all night. I was home. Again.

Author Thomas Wolfe once argued that you can’t go home again. Yes, you can. And over the years since, I’ve gone back home time and time again to Clinton Arrows football, now playing at Arrow Field. I tried running from it but now embrace it with pride. It is what it is.

I made my peace with CHS football in 2006. It was being played long before I laced on the cleats, and it’s still being played ifty years after hanging up my candy-apple red jersey. Call me “that guy” if you wish, but I’m an old man now, and I don’t care.

In conclusion, all I can say is that I’m blessed to have been a Clinton Arrow. Like fine wine, my relationship with Arrows football has gotten better and better with age. It’s a part of who I am, whether you or I like it, or not.

Guess I’m not too cool for school after all.

I hope this answered the question.