From the Editors: Game On!
Any head coach would tell you that football is a game of field position. Getting the football at your own 10-yard line is a lot different than getting the football at your opponent's 10-yard line.
But they'd also tell you that it's not about how you start, it's about how you finish. Whether it takes 90 yards to score the go-ahead touchdown or just 10, as former New York Jets coach Herm Edwards once emphatically enunciated "you play to win the game!"
Where you've come from is a predictor of — but by no means a guarantor of — success or failure. Before Veterans Stadium hosted its first contest on (appropriately) Veterans Day 1924, it would've been difficult to imagine football as the sensation it is today. Early pigskin enthusiasts muddied themselves wherever they could find a spot — in fact, it took the players building a makeshift fence around a patch of grass at Seventh and Cherry streets before Erie had anything resembling a designated football field.
Ainsworth Field (opened in 1914) helped dignify the sport somewhat, but it was at the Vet where Erie's passion for the gridiron was truly kindled. With the fortress-like Academy High School (opened in 1920) looming in the background, the site has played host to nearly a century's worth of classic interscholastic clashes (including some the largest in Pennsylvania high school football history), six NFL games (a 1940 tilt between the Steelers and Bears attracted a whopping 8,000 fans), and even a high-profile rock concert or two (Bon Jovi's 1987 Slippery When Wet tour).
Legendary coaches (Paul Brown of Massillon Tigers, Ohio State, Cleveland Browns, and Cincinnati Bengals repute) and beloved mayors (Lou Tullio, who coached the Academy Lions and Erie Vets professional team) have paced its sidelines, and it's stadium lights — installed at a then-outrageous cost of $4,000 in 1931 — were an object of much fascination in an era that predated outdoor primetime sports as the norm (consider that the MLB didn't play a game at night until 1935). There's a good reason all those roguish, cash-strapped NFL teams were clamoring to play here!
Not to toot our own horn (we'll borrow sousaphone co-inventor John Philip Sousa's, who played the Academy High auditorium in 1926), but we have some great sports history to cheer for. And as the Reader celebrates back-to-school season, we're hoping to see Erie stack wins in some other major categories, such as architectural preservation (Preservation Erie Greater Erie Awards), artistic expression (FEED Media Arts), and even (sending up a Hail Mary) governmental transparency and accountability.
We'll leave the lights on for you.
