Content provided in partnership with

The healing nine yards: with a lot of boiled owls and a little football, Mississippi will survive Katrina

Sporting News, The, Sept 23, 2005 by Dave Kindred

The first thing Mississippi sportswriter Jim Mashek did before getting out of Dodge was go to his little rental house in Pass Christian.

There he gathered up stuff he didn't want to leave for Katrina. He's 49 years old, once a husband, forever a newspaperman, which means that his evacuation plan was simple--fill a trash bag with his cleanest dirty clothes. He took along photographs of his nieces and nephews, and he found some high school football photos of the lean and mean Mashek.

Then he drove east out of The Pass into Alabama.

Left his golf clubs behind. Served 'em right.

Most Popular Articles in Sports: The first family: Archie, Peyton and Eli are incredibly famous, immensely ...; The growing gap: driving distances are skyrocketing on the PGA Tour. So why ...; Which pistol caliber for self defense? Four different people come to four ...; Drag racing - National Hot Rod Association; The world's most popular .22: the Marlin Model 60 just keeps on ticking; More »

Four days later, Mashek returned to what was left of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He saw that for the hundred miles of coastline cities between New Orleans and Mobile, Katrina was more than a Category 4 hurricane.

"A freakin' war zone, man" is the way he said it.

The way he wrote it: "Hurricane Katrina was the wrath of God."

Men, women, children and animals were killed, perhaps by the hundreds. Buildings disappeared. Boats tilted awkwardly on highways. In Pass Christian, a big house had been lifted and dropped in a street. Mashek saw his place off its foundation, its contents covered with muddy slime. He also saw a sign of man's wrath: "Looters Will Be Shot."

He had returned from Alabama with ice, water and boots.

The (Biloxi) Sun Herald's news side recruited him from sports to write about the hurricane. He was asked to drive along the Gulf Coast and tell what he saw. He'd done big-time college football. He'd done the NFL. Now he found himself in Bay St. Louis, hard by the Gulf of Mexico.

There Mashek talked to a high school football coach, Casey Wittman, who said of his home, his school, his town and maybe of more: "It's gone." St. Stanislaus High School had won its season opener three days before Katrina came shrieking in. "We lost everything," Wittman said. "We're here trying to find the kids." His football players--he had no idea whether they were alive.

In Pearlington, a man put his small dog in an ice chest, and together they floated in the rising waters until Jonathan Danese came along in his boat and hauled them in. They heard screams for help from somewhere and saw eight people on the roof of a church. One at a time, Danese and his little boat took them to safety.

Waveland was "a ghost town," Mashek wrote, and at Long Beach a Catholic priest told him he couldn't explain a hurricane so apocalyptic it seemed to be the wrath of God. "But I can't lose my faith," the Rev. Louis Lohan said. "To be honest, I see God's love through people." The steeple of the priest's church stood tall, its four stained-glass windows unbroken by winds that lifted houses.

Despite Katrina, they'll play high school football along the Gulf Coast. Even some schools that are closed until October will miss only a week of their schedule, maybe two. In a time of tragedy, playing kids' games may seem at best inappropriate and at worst insensitive. There are bodies not yet found. So I asked Ennis Proctor a question. He's the executive director of the Mississippi High School Athletics Association.

"What's the rationale for playing?" I asked.

He explained it well.

It's not that football is all-fired important.

But community is.

"In Mississippi, we have a lot of smaller towns with everything built around the schools," Proctor said. "We want to get the kids involved in something now, and we want to get the towns involved. Coaches, superintendents, principals--they think it's the thing to do. They think of it as part of the healing process that we'll all have to go through."

Proctor said he had talked with Jerry Alexander, the legendary Moss Point High School coach who, in 29 years in his town at the tip of southeastern Mississippi, has helped create five state championship teams. Moss Point's Dantzler Stadium can seat almost 10,000 of the town's 15,000 residents. "Jerry expects they'll be ready to play right away," Proctor said.

It'll be good for folks to be together. Maybe they'll hear about Frances McDonald. She's 81. She's a college mathematics teacher. When Jim Mashek met her, she told him she'd sat through the storm in her Bay St. Louis home, refusing to leave, as if daring Katrina to come through the door.

The more Mashek heard, the more he liked the woman. He decided she was tough. This tough: "Tougher than a boiled owl."

In Mississippi today, in Mississippi drowning, may all those folks be so tough.

The healing nine yards: with a lot of boiled owls and a little football, Mississippi will survive Katrina

Sporting News, The, Sept 23, 2005 by Dave Kindred

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Business

Most Popular Articles in Sports

Most Popular Publications in Sports