After 20 years, pain gives way to nostalgia

"For a long time afterward, if you talked with any of the seniors on that [1988 Red Demon football] team, we didn't feel like we accomplished a whole lot," said 1988 Demon quarterback and current Dodge City High School athletic director Jay Gifford. "You never heard anyone talk about WAC championships or playoff appearances. All we wanted was the state title."
    But when the clock read zeroes and the scoreboard in Manhattan that night read Indians 14, Guest 12, the 1988 Demons didn't get it. They were one play, one injury, one break away from a berth in a state championship game matchup with the Lawrence Lions, against whom the Demons would have been favorites to win.
    "It's not a good remembrance," said 1988 cornerback/wingback Keith Galindo. "But when you look back at it, it was something special."
    The 1988 Demons, like six of the other top-ten teams in DCHS football history (two of the teams are from the pre-playoff era), came up short of their ultimate goal going into the season. The top-ten teams were selected by a committee of former Red Demon coaches, who selected the 1988 team as the eighth-ranked team of all time.
    What came so close to being the stuff of legends still sticks with team members 20 years later.    
    "It's still a pretty sore spot right in the craw," said 1988 outside linebacker Shannon Stauth. To bystanders, the retrospective mentality of ex-football players may at times border on absurdity, but the ones who played out the 1988 season and lived it on the field can recall moments during the season as if they took place last weekend.
    "Every once in a while, I'll go back and watch game film from the season," Galindo said. "Of course, my wife thinks I'm crazy."
   
Boys will be boys
    Gifford still recalls with a smile playing scout offense in practice and recruiting offensive lineman Charles Wipf as a receiver for one play. Since the first team defense would know Gifford's audibles, the quarterback pulled his hefty receiver aside and told him to go deep.
    As he audibled under center the defense shifted to adjust. When he received the ball from the center, Gifford's hog-molly had come open.
    As Wipf glided (as only a lineman can) down the sideline, he looked back for the ball. He must have timed the pass wrong because right when he turned his head, the ball was literally in his face.
    The tight spiral wedged itself in Wipf's facemask, and the would-be star receiver ran the play out with the ball stuck in his helmet. Those kind of improbable tales of minor consequence are examples of a sport that the entire community takes so seriously being used for its original purpose - recreation.
    Boys, even with coaches who demanded execution and a solid on-field product, could be boys. 
    One of Stauth's most vivid memories of the 1988 season came in the fifth week during the Demons' battering 41-6 win over the Panthers. He said that both he and fellow outside linebacker Howard Carter had the green light from defensive coordinator Bill Keeley and head coach Dick Masters to blitz any time there were not enough blockers in the backfield to account for them.
    "They ran their offense out of the shotgun and just couldn't get us blocked," Stauth said. "I don't remember how many sacks we had that game, but I know we knocked out their first two quarterbacks. After we had both gotten to their quarterback on the same play and one of the officials was helping him up, Howard yelled to me 'I'll meet you back here on the next play!' The ref told us not to try to hurt anyone."
    The attacking mentality of the hard-hitting Demon defense started with the dubbing of the Demon defense as the Mad Hatters during the J.C. Riekenberg era. The tradition of intimidating and outworking opponents was well in place before the 1988 season, but Stauth said each member of the defense got the desire to dominate from within himself.
    "Most of it came from deep down in the heart of each guy," Stauth said.
    Gifford said he also believes that the individual talent on the 1988 team accounted for more of the team's success than some remember as well. According to popular belief, the Demons' successes in the 1970s and 80s were built on working harder than opposing teams, scheming with smaller players to hide some teams' physical advantages and willing victories rather than out-running defenders to the goal line.
    "Guys like Tom Stubblefield and Howard Carter and Roman Rodriguez were able to out-athlete some of the teams on our schedule," Gifford said. "They don't rank you number one just for fun."

High Expectations
    The Demons had been the first-ranked 6A team in the state by the Wichita Eagle from the preseason until they lost to then-second-ranked Manhattan. But Gifford said it was the combination of the 1988 Demons' physical talent and the system the players came into that made them all believe that the state championship went through Dodge City that year.
    "Masters did such a great job of convincing his players that they were outworking and out-hustling opponents. He and his staff did a great job of selling that mentality," Gifford said. "Working hard all year wasn't an option. That was the system we had come into. When you add to that all the talent that we had with that team, that's why there was that feeling about the team."
    On the offensive side of the ball, fullback Tom Stubblefield was a damaging part of the run-heavy Wing-T offensive attack. Tony Allison, an offensive tackle  whose charge it was to open holes for Stubblefield and the other backs, said it wasn't hard to block for a guy who looked to punish defenders whenever he got the ball.
    Stubblefield credited the Red Demon coaching staff with implementing the offense at an early age so that when a group of kids got to the varsity level, they knew exactly what to do on each play.
    "The Wing-T was a machine," Stubblefield said. "Since eighth grade, we'd been taught not only the offense, but all the winning the tradition the Demons represented. You put on that uniform and you knew what it meant - we weren't going to let all those that had put it on before us down. Everyone was accountable and in sync, and there was no way a team could stop all of us."
    And through the regular season and the regional round of the playoffs, no team even came close to stopping the well-oiled Demon football machine. The only game whose final score was within two touchdowns was the 29-18 week 2 win in Junction City, which had beaten Dodge the year before.
    Going into the sub-state matchup with the Manhattan Indians, with whom the Demons by this time were forming somewhat of a playoff rivalry, the Demons had the swagger of a team that was supposed to win state. But Manhattan was a team that the Demons could not, as Gifford put it, out-athlete.
    After going up 14-0 quickly, the Indians used their own vaunted defense to keep the Demons at bay. A key ankle injury to Rodriguez and another to Gifford's knee steepened the two-touchdown hill the Demons had to climb.
    But receiver John Olivarez and Stubblefield each scored touchdowns to get the Demons to within one two-point conversion of tying the game. After Stubblefield's running score late in the third quarter, Gifford looked to his tight end, Carter in the end zone for two, but Carter couldn't hang on to the pass.
    A second hit to Gifford's knee put him out of the game in the fourth quarter, and the Manhattan defense held for the final 15 minutes. The only team to beat Dodge through the year went on to beat Lawrence in the state finals the next week.
    Offensive line coach Ron Hamm said of the team: "As kids coming up, they knew winning was expected - it wasn't really an option. When players expect to win, they work hard. Expecting to win and hoping to win are two different things."