Fort Worth Magazine
Arlington Heights was the one to celebrate the renewed rivalry with Paschal.
A full-throated bravo is due the boys of Paschal and Arlington Heights, who gave us the football game we all hoped for under the Friday night lights at Farrington Field, the perfect host and absolutely the only appropriate place to play this renewed rivalry between historic Fort Worth institutions.
That “sentence” is exhausting — diagram it, I dare you — but so, too, was this game in which each 11 went after each other for 48 minutes like heavyweights trading punches, each refusing to back down until the last second ticked away.
Fort Worth Magazine
The Battle of the Bonfire trophy will be awarded each year and kept on the school campus by winner for 365 days, or thereabouts.
Heights ultimately won this Battle of the Bonfire, 28-23, in front of a good crowd I estimated to be 5,000-6,000, possibly more on a fall, damp night in North Texas. School district officials were calling it the biggest crowd at the stadium for a high school game in a decade. The threat of rain likely kept more away.
Those who stayed away missed a good one. The game came down to the final drive and was decided, as they often are, by a combination of misfortune and great defensive play.
I’ll get to all of that.
This game also meant more than just property rights in Fort Worth. Heights (7-1 district, 9-1 overall) clinched second in District 4-5A D1. Paschal (6-2, 7-3), which last week clinched its first playoff spot in 28 years after its figurative 40 days in the desert in Class 6A, will represent the district in the playoffs as the third seed. These two Fort Worth schools have in common losses to district-champion Saginaw.
Heights will face Richland next week at Farrington Field. Paschal gets a handful with Denton Ryan, the No. 2-ranked team in the state on the road.
Kaeden Grant had two touchdown runs and a 24-yard TD pass to Jakob Hemphill in the third quarter for Heights, which clinched the game on Kelle Johnson’s interception.
Carson James had another scoring run for the Yellow Jackets. James, one of three sons playing for Heights coach Curtis James, had 160 yards on 22 carries. He’s a twin to defensive lineman Carter James and one of those guys who is “not afraid of contact,” as they say. He picked up extra yard after extra yard simply like a bowling ball knocks down pins.
In fact, one suggested that he was wearing a license plate rather than a standard uniform number. And the twins are only sophomores. Caynan James, a defensive lineman, is a junior.
“He’s the runt,” said Curtis James of Carson. He could have fooled me. “I have five kids, so he's the last one. He's been always treated like a little boy. The little boy finally grows up.”
The reality is the little boy hasn’t fully grown. Lord, have mercy.
“This is humongous. Humongous,” Curtis James said of the game itself. “We've been trying to get it back and it just landed when we were in the same district, so it made it easy to schedule it.
“The big thing was scheduling it at the end, so we could have a big turnout. It's just fantastic for these kids, both sides, to be able to have crowds like this. We don't normally have crowds like this.”
The first game played between these archrivals was 1922. Paschal won 48-6, the first of 15 consecutive victories for the then Central High School. The game was played annually for generations. That changed when Heights was reclassified to 4A. (That was when the highest classification was 5A. The University Interscholastic League, which oversees high school sports, has since added a Class 6A.) Classes are based on schools’ enrollment. Paschal remained in the state’s highest classification until this year.
With it back on the schedule — the teams last played a nondistrict game in 2013 — the respective booster clubs rechristened the game the “Battle of the Bonfire,” a reference to an infamous incident before the 1963 game.
On the eve of the game, Heights held a bonfire near Benbrook Lake, which indeed seemed a good place to stage it. Where there is fire started by teens, water nearby is a great idea. Bud Kennedy, a 1972 Heights graduate, has dubbed it the “Great Bonfire Incident of 1963.”
On this particular year, however, the bonfire was interrupted by Paschal “forces,” who arrived by ground and air.
Carloads of Paschal’s purple people, current students and graduates came onto the scene carrying, as Bud Kennedy recalls it, “an armory of weapons, including baseball bats, lead pipes, whips and Molotov cocktails.”
A private plane, piloted by a 1962 Paschal graduate, dropped rolls of purple-and-white toilet paper onto the Heights revelers. There was more, however. A 1948 sedan covered in gasoline-soaked mattresses, “The Panther Ram Car,” was set on fire and set towards the woodpile.
Suffice to say, the police and their paddy wagons got their steps and miles in that night.
A week later, President John F. Kennedy, in town during his ill-fated trip, smiled at the mention of Paschal: “Isn’t that the school with its own air force?”
It also goes to show that all generations at one time or another are "lost." Who can possibly be completely found and whole at 16 or 18?
As far as I know, none of the stuff of vandals and sacking of Arlington Heights things transpired this year, though I haven’t checked the police reports. (There was also once the incident of, ahem, a Paschal student taking a bulldozer to the Heights field house some years ago.)
For the game this year, the booster clubs had a trophy commissioned by Trophy Arts, to be awarded to the victor. The Davey O’Brien Award was also on hand. The foundation is awarding a $1,000 scholarship to a player on each team, likely to be announced next week.
Fort Worth Magazine
Hello, David O'Brien.
Paschal and quarterback Jashaun Thomas played their asses off on Friday. It was not for lack of effort the Panthers fell short. Linebacker Tex Shope was all over the place on defense, covering ground like dirt on the West Texas plains. You'll never forget where you were the first time you hear the name Tex Shope.
Thomas had 121 yards rushing and three touchdowns, including a 63-yard run on the second play of the game. He later added scoring runs of 11 and 6 yards, the last getting the Panthers to within one, 21-20.
Grant’s 19-yard TD run increased the Heights lead to eight. Paschal junior kicker Josh Wedemyer, who has a leg on him, converted on a 28-yard attempt to make the score 28-23.
The Panthers got the ball back with 2:21 left on their side of the field but nearer to midfield.
Thomas found Chris Davenport on a pass completion on first down. Thomas’ pass on second down was incomplete. On third down, Thomas darted up the middle for four yards and a first down.
Paschal was out of timeouts. Hurrying to the line, Paschal got the ball in play, Thomas stepping back to pass on first down. He found himself immediately under pressure by Heights defenders, all of them either in reach or with a grab of him. Trying to avoid the sack, Thomas threw the ball up high into no man’s land just a few yards past the line of scrimmage.
Kelle Johnson got on his horse, got there, and intercepted the lofted, wayward pass.
The reporter who grew up in Paschal’s boundaries (though not a Paschal guy), with Paschal neighbors and legend all around him, grit his teeth and let loose an audible groan in the press box — a gross violation of professional protocol, by the way. Dammit! The regret wasn’t so much because Paschal lost as it was the heartbreak for the kid, whose performance was one of those Farrington Field, which at 85 has seen a bunch, won't soon forget.
We’re not supposed to write about those kinds of things, but Jashaun Thomas should feel no shame. He was among the best players on the field on Friday, making things happen for his team time and again.
His mistake was no mistake at all: He simply tried to make a play when one wasn’t there. A sack when his team had no timeouts wasn’t a great option either.
They call that a dilemma.
But Thomas is a junior. He will be back next year for this game.
And so will I. No way I’m missing it.
