Terry: Friday nights have highlights, lowlights

Football season is back and things are returning to normal — a new normal apparently.

Tom Brady of the defending Super Bowl champion New England Patriots deflected Deflate-Gate and dodged his four-game suspension the week before the start of the season. He quickly put it all behind him with four touchdown passes Thursday night.

linkI missed the start of the game so I don’t know if the officials did a ceremonial ball inflation check on the 50-yard line before the start of the game. Their opponent, the Steelers, did complain before the game that they were getting the Patriots’ radio network in their coaches’ headphones.

Very interesting.

The Portales Rams put a whippin’ last week on former district rival Lovington that beat anything I ever witnessed. I would venture to say, though I can’t prove it, the Rams have never been up four touchdowns in the first half of any game with Lovington.

It was surreal and I had to ask the folks in the stands around me if I was really witnessing that game. That’s a new normal I could live with. Too bad it didn’t happen while they were still in our classification.

One early season happening that I hope and pray isn’t a new norm was the incident in Marble Falls, Texas, in which a pair of defensive backs from San Antonio’s John Jay High appear to have intentionally carried out a hit on a referee during the game.

In my career at small-town newspapers in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, I figure I’ve covered close to 200 football games from NFL to the smallest six-man schools. There’s no telling how many games I’ve watched on television but I’ve never seen anything that appalled me more than the site of those two players intentionally spearing an official with his back turned.

I’ve watched and even been in the middle of a few disputes between football players and between football players and referees and referees and coaches, but it’s all been face-to-face pushing and shoving. Most of the time it happened when tensions were high and officials weren’t in control, which was apparently the case in Marble Falls.

The worst game I was ever in as a player was in ninth grade when Portales traveled to Tucumcari. The officials weren’t controlling things too well and our team was getting beat and penalized a lot. Soon fights broke out, players got ejected and heads got busted. No one took a shot at the refs, though and no one got hit while totally unprotected.

I hope those involved are severely and criminally punished and I hope Brady’s example of skating around the punishment doesn’t apply to these young thugs.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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