Thursday Night Lights by Michael Hurd

Author:Michael Hurd [Hurd, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Yates versus Wheatley

At E. O. Smith Junior High School, I thought I’d play in the band ’cause my sisters were real musical. We had a piano in the house, so I said, “I’m gon’ follow music,” so I started singing in the glee club. There were about 200 or so people in there singing. One day, the woman playing the piano stopped and said, “Something’s not sounding right, and its coming from over in this area.” She said, “Sing one at a time,” and when she got to me, she said, “You’re the one! Go find you another class for fifth period.” So I went out for football.

GODWIN TURK, Houston Wheatley

In 1970, the University of Houston bought a piece of Houston’s black history, gave it a couple of facelifts, and forty-two years later wiped it from the face of the earth. The school bought Jeppesen from the Houston Independent School District for $6.8 million and changed the name in 1980 to honor the oilman and UH regent Corbin Robertson, who funded the facility’s renovation. In 2012, the stadium was razed and bulldozed into piles of concrete and rebar rubble. When the dust cleared, the Cougars had a shiny new $128 million den befitting the wave of gentrification engulfing Third Ward, Houston’s Harlem. Jeppesen was long gone, and as gentrification often dictates, so was a lot of black history from a neighborhood that had served as a vibrant cultural, educational, and entertainment hub for all of black Houston. None of that was acknowledged during the stadium’s metamorphosis. While UH held the legal claim, Jeppesen spiritually belonged to the black community and the Prairie View Interscholastic League, which for more than four decades staged its Wednesday- and Thursday-night football games there, its basketball games in the field house, the nationally recognized Texas Southern Relays every spring, and HISD’s most popular, highest-revenue-producing event, the annual Wheatley-Yates Thanksgiving Day football game—the Turkey Day Classic. All were huge events for the city’s black community.

Several decades later, the pain lingers. “That was our stadium,” lamented Coger Coverson, former Yates lineman and later head coach at Worthing. “When they tore it down, they had all the UH people out there, passing the ball from yard line to yard line. Jeppesen Stadium was important to the black community, and it really hurt to see it go away. I was extremely disappointed when they sold it, and more disappointed when they stopped the Thanksgiving game.”

The University of Houston took away the stadium, but integration and the PVIL merger with the UIL killed the Thanksgiving game because of scheduling, bringing an end to the most popular game in PVIL history, a holiday extravaganza rivaling the Texas–Texas A&M and Texas-Oklahoma games, and the largest high school sports event in the United States. The Jeppesen stands filled early, and those who couldn’t get seats gladly stood on the cinder track that encircled the field. Others, by the hundreds, milled around outside the arena, following the game through the loudspeakers’ play-by-play and socializing, greeting family and old friends hoping to somehow squeeze inside for the second half.

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