Fall and Football

It’s Friday, and I am late getting out of town for another hunting trip. As I am fleeing the busy life in St. Paul I drive past St. Thomas University and see the stadium lights lit up. The purple and gold fans are lined up outside at the ticket booth for another Cretin-Derham Hall home game.
Yes, I was a Raider, or I should say I am still a Raider. I also have a State Championship football medal on my wall to prove it. For you history buffs, I got the medal my senior year, which happened to be the last time Cretin-Derham Hall won the State Championship, so you can figure out how old I am if you do the math.
Nothing signals the coming of the fall like the shortening of the days and football training camp. I cannot tell you how many times I have had late checkouts from hotel rooms in the Dakotas to watch the end of a Viking game. Sunday afternoons in that part of the country are bittersweet.
There is nothing like snoozing between plays on Saturday afternoon during a good college football game. With birds properly cleaned and on ice, college football is a great half time for hunters before scouting for more flights. Unless of course all you have to do the next morning is follow a bird dog into a fresh CRP field for rooster pheasants. If that is the case, college football is the perfect end to a morning, and an excellent break before dinner.
They say that Phil Robertson, the Duck Commander himself, was a heck of a quarterback. In fact, he started for Louisiana State University in front of a little known quarterback named Terry Bradshaw. It is also said that Phil Robertson would often show up for home football games, smelling like a slough with duck feathers stuck to parts of his clothing. Phil Robertson is one guy that seems to have his priorities right.
I was a varsity football player at Cretin-Derham Hall, during my junior and senior years of high school. I was one of the few kids that frequently missed Saturday morning practices. Those falls I had a lot of late night and early morning drives with my father to duck camp. There is a Highway Rest Stop on Interstate 94, just south of Fergus Falls, where my dad and I would frequently stop on some of those mornings. At the Rest Stop, we would put on waders before meeting the other members of our hunting party in the marsh.
At that time, the hardest thing for me to do was walk freshly showered into the coach’s office after a Friday night game, and ask to miss Saturday practice. I was always afraid that my coach would say no. Now Rich Kallock’s street fighting days had long been over, and the notoriously famous high school coach was an approachable guy. After the chuckles from the assistant coaches had subsided he would look me dead in the eye.
“Now, if you are going to miss practice, just make sure you shoot at least one duck. Alright?” He would tell me. I would reply with, “Yes sir.” Then leave before he had a chance to change his mind. None of the other players ever said anything to me about missing practice, and I doubt they even noticed.
Rich Kallock retired as the Cretin-Derham Hall head football coach a few years ago. He was a great man and I will always treasure those mornings he let me play hooky from practice. I have always wondered if he was a duck hunter. It doesn’t matter now whether he was or not. In my mind he must have spent the falls of his youth crouched in cattails with a wet retriever, scanning the horizon for ducks.
As for getting my one duck, you can bet the farm I harvested at least one bird on those Saturday mornings. Sunday mornings however were a different story.