New Mexico Hobbs Eagles Football Champions 1969-1972 Reunion

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• published: 27 Apr 2015
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Read the entire article at : http://www.hobbsschools.net/news/current_news/players_from_state_champion_football_teams_hold_re It was a scene that repeated itself over and over again at last week’s reunion of the 1970-72 Hobbs High School football teams. Players nearing their sixties and traveling from as far as Arizona and Arkansas walked into the lobby of the Arlington Hilton, glanced at a gathering group of back-slapping men and tentatively approached classmates they hadn’t seen in more than four decades. “You Don? Don Pearson? Nah, Golly, man!” Pat McMurray said in disbelief before breaking into a grin of recognition and hugging the 1970 team’s starting defensive end who now lives in Wichita, Kan. A few minutes later, Pete Farmer of Hobbs (‘71) and Bobby Kelley (‘71 and ‘72) were taking off caps and comparing bald heads. “Pete, we were losing our hair when we were sophomores,” chortled Kelley, who has spent most of his professional career in Dallas brokering diamonds. “You look just like your daddy,”another chimed in when Vernon Patterson drove in from Charlotte, N.C. “Thanks! Thanks a lot!” said the son of former longtime Lea County lawman Pat Patterson. Dubbed “A Gathering of Eagles,” the event honored four football coaches – three of whom now live in the Metroplex area - from the last state championship football teams fielded by Hobbs High School. They included head coach Doug Ethridge, who arrived in Hobbs from Monahans in 1968 and brought with him a multiple-set offense that was ahead of its time, according to Dan Foster, a half back and defensive back on the ’71and ’72 squads. “Coming to a basketball school – we were scoring 170 points in a game – I know that’s a tough road going into a basketball school like that and (Ethridge) did it,” said Foster, now an orthopedic surgeon in nearby Bedford. Bobby Kelley, "Ethridge wasn’t in Hobbs long – he left after the 1971 team was upset by Las Cruces Mayfield in the playoffs on a fluke play – but he stayed long enough to put one state title in the history books and pave the way for a second championship in 1972". (The Eagles would avenge the previous year’s loss with a 31-15 drubbing of the Mayfield team). After a weekend of reminiscing, players and coaches alike agreed that a “perfect storm” of talented athletes and coaches led to championship seasons that only a few are lucky enough to experience. “Nothing in life matches the intensity, the pressure, the feeling of accomplishment of participating and then winning the state championship,” Patterson said. But the real wins, players agreed, came from the life lessons and examples set by Ethridge, Ken Clearman, Charlie Williams, Buck Brandon and the late Pat Tone, George Janes and Kyle Ellis. “These were tremendous men,” said Steve Cooper, who now heads Chevron’s human resources department in Houston but never imagined attaining that kind of success as a troubled teenager. “You challenged us to be better than what we were,” Cooper said during a banquet that had an equal share of good-natured ribbing and unabashed tears. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you did for me that helped pull me out of that sewer and helped me become the man that I became.” Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 31, wide receiver Kevin Wieser (’72) said the mental and physical conditioning of his teenage years helped him deal with a disease that has hobbled, but not grounded him. “We were trained not to quit and I was not going to let it get the best of me,” said Wieser, a former youth minister who now lives near Little Rock. “They allowed us to drink the black and gold Kool-Aid,” Kelley added. “And they taught us how to win.” Kelley and Wieser were the driving force for the reunion. The pair ate lunch a couple months ago with Ethridge and Clearman and “had the most amazing visit you could imagine,” Kelley said. “At the end of the day, Kevin and I walked away and said, speegle‘You know, we shouldn’t be the only two guys who get to do this.’ And that’s kind of how this all sprang up." So Kelley and Wieser tracked down former teammates, photographs, newspaper clippings and games films. Key to the process was the team’s unofficial statistician Arnold Thomas, a 1970 defensive back who would later spend 30 years on the sidelines as a Texas high school athletic trainer. When he won the state’s Athletic Trainer of the Year award in 1999, it was none other than Ethridge – an inductee into the Texas High School Coach’s Hall of Fame himself - who presented him the award. “That’s one of the proudest moments I’ve had – knowing I coached Arnold,” Ethridge said of the ceremony.