Insight: One of the good ones

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Sometime around the age of 15, I got the notion that I could play football.

Ed Pierce and Chuck Young sit and talk during a high school
reunion gathering in Henrietta, New York last August.
They were teammates on the Rush Henrietta JV football
team in 1969. COURTESY PHOTO

Despite being a little over 5 feet in height and weighing 103 pounds, I could run fast but that was about the extent of my football ability. I didn’t weigh enough to make a difference, and I had trouble memorizing plays. The varsity football coach talked me into becoming a manager for a few games to see if I’d rather do that. I lugged around a lot of mesh bags of footballs and filled water bottles for other players.

Eventually though, I told the coach I wanted try playing and so he assigned me to the junior varsity team. Most of the players on the JV were a grade below me and looking to demonstrate their skills and move up to play on the varsity.

The JV coach said the team could use defensive backs, so I was excited to run through plays in practice as a safety and pass defender. In the first practices that I participated in with the JV team, I learned that football at the JV level was intense, and not everyone was enthusiastic about someone my size thinking they could play among players much taller and stronger than me.

For at least a month during practice, I stood in the backfield holding a tackling dummy as the team’s linemen ran through plays. One player made it his mission to hit me hard and knock me down on every play that came my way. He outweighed me by at least 150 pounds and towered over me at 6-foot-2.

Each time he hit me, this angry lineman would scream at me to stay down or to quit the team. He was unrelenting and I found it hard to believe anyone could stay as angry as he was for weeks at a time.

Several times while practicing plays in which the offensive linemen pulled into the defensive backfield in my direction to block for running backs, the player who took delight in knocking me senseless crashed his helmet into mine with force.

Through those hits I came to learn what the expression “seeing stars” meant. Each time his helmet crashed into mine things suddenly went dark. Then little bits of light began to show through before I fully regained my senses just in time to set up for another play.

Each day I would walk home from practice sore and covered with bruises in just about every imaginable place. The thought of quitting entered my mind often but for some reason, I was determined to stick it out.

After several weeks of taking physical punishment from the same lineman on almost every play in practice, my father asked me what I was trying to accomplish when I could easily ask the varsity coach to let me go back to being a manager.

My answer to him was the same answer I gave to that lineman. “I hate to lose and I’m not going to quit.”

Our JV team had already played six games of an eight-game schedule by that point and the chances of me getting into a game decreased with each passing week.

But I stood my ground and held on each time that lineman put yet another vicious hit on me. Before practice ended one Wednesday afternoon, he not only knocked me to the ground, but he also then stepped on one of my hands and stood over me bellowing out a loud “Hoo-Rah.”

At that moment, I was in pain and had trouble getting to my feet. A hand reached down and offered me help up. To my surprise, it was our team’s star running back, Chuck Young. He told the lineman to leave me alone and said enough was enough.

He said because I wouldn’t quit and withstood weeks of violent hits from that lineman that I deserved some respect.

Before the next practice, the coach told the team to save the hard hits for our opponents on game days and not in practice.

Chuck became my close friend and introduced me to all his other pals on the team. 

During the fourth quarter of our seventh game of the season on the road, the coaches instructed me to go into the game, and I played the safety position for the rest of the fourth quarter. On one play a long pass was thrown my way, and the opponent’s receiver had me beat but the quarterback overthrew him by 15 yards, and the ball fell to the ground.

On the team’s bus ride home from that game, Chuck Young led a “Three Cheers for Ed Pierce,” and it was one of the best moments I have ever experienced.

I remained friends with Chuck through the years and followed his career as he became a police detective, retired from that, and then worked as a mortgage professional. He was married, had a daughter and a granddaughter.

At each passing class reunion, we would sit and reminisce about the old days.

Sadly, Chuck passed away in January and we all miss him. There are indeed many good people out there and Chuck Young was one of them. <