Nobody talks about high school football in my small, quiet town anymore. It doesn’t excite anybody, not even the student body judging by the turnout of each new crop of gridiron fodder. Our last winning team was 1991; our last very good team about 1979.

Even so, lured by the distant thump, thump, thumping of the drums in the band, I strolled the six or seven blocks to the stadium on a recent Friday night. It was a sharp, frost-on-the-pumpkin night. The locals were playing a team suffering through an equally dismal season; there was hope.

Alas, in a most entertaining game, the locals, falling short on a last-minute drive, lost again, 31-26. The next week would complete their winless season. Mercifully.

Apart from action on the field, the most noticeable thing to me, and perhaps to the parents in the half-filled stands, was the condition of the players’ uniforms at game’s end. Muddy. Grass-stained. Just like after games in my playing days long, long ago.

The locals play on a severely crowned, native-soil, Kentucky bluegrass field. A friendly acquaintance of mine maintains it. He became an employee of the school as a bus driver about 10 years ago and several years ago was “promoted” to athletic field supervisor, although I’m pretty sure there’s no such official title. He’s a dependable employee and keeps the field mowed, watered and green. Because the field is used exclusively for football, high school and middle school, and the annual graduation ceremony that’s about all that it requires to remain safe and attractive. 

But back to the muddy, grass-stained uniforms. Appreciate them or wrinkle your noses at them while you can. Someday they will be as uncommon as a solar eclipse.

Just like televised images of Augusta National during the annual Masters Tournament changed American’s perception of what a golf course should look like (as unrealistic as it is), the public is beginning to expect athletes, both young and not-so-young, to play on fields perpetually green and clean. And they expect to see the athletes clean too.

This is one of the main drivers in synthetic field installations and signals a fundamental shift (or perhaps “evolution”) in the public’s perception of what an outdoor sports field should be.

As for me —with the vision Jimmy Brown at old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, shambling back to the huddle after a bone-crunching 15-yard burst off right tackle —things don’t always have to be so neat and clean. That vision of Jimmy Brown just wouldn’t be right without his grass-stained home whites tattoed with blotches of glorious brown mud.

It just wouldn’t be football.