1984. No, not the George Orwell 1984. Or the 1984ish foolishness we are currently suffering through.

No. The real 1984. The year. The 1984… with 12 months and 365 days. Yeah, that one.

Talk about the best of times and the worst of times. I was a junior in high school and our football team won the first game of the season. We beat up on my friends in Brownstown to the tune of North Harrison Cougars 59 Brownstown Central Braves 0. The bus ride back home was blissful. Reliving Mick Rutherford picking up a blocked punt and returning it for a touchdown was worth the time to go up there by itself.

Yep, it was nice. And yes, we were a confident bunch. No team had ever stepped onto Brownstown’s field and scored that many points. No other team has since. Next game up? The county rivals the Corydon Central Panthers. The same night we beat up on Brownstown, Corydon beat up on Paoli 26-0. And yes, we were a confident bunch.

Did I say we were a confident bunch?

I don’t know what Russ Brown had against my dad. Understand my dad was the head coach of my high school team. Once upon a time, Russ Brown was a sportswriter for the Courier-Journal in Louisville. You’re old Uncle Dan remembers when high school sports were covered nicely by that paper. I read it online now, I can’t get it delivered anymore, and there is not a word about Southern Indiana sports. Most of the news in it today is no less than two days old. Sounding like a grouchy old man was never easier.

Before my dad coached North Harrison, he coached Brownstown Central. Yes, the team we beat in 1984 59-0. In 1975, he took his BCHS team over to Paoli and they decided to celebrate the country’s bicentennial a little early. The Braves beat the Rams 76-0.

A few days later, Russ Brown wrote a story that highlighted that game and made it clear that the Braves had a good shot at beating the favored Charlestown Pirates. The Pirates were loaded. Kem Martin is still a legendary Pirate name. He ran for 271 yards. Charlestown won 41-8 in a game that featured fog so dense at times, you could barely see the other sideline across the field. I haven’t seen anything like it sense, and that will be 50 years in October.

Photo by Stan Denny

Russ Brown did it again nine years later. After the 59-0 beating North Harrison put on Brownstown Central in 1984, Russ had another story. This one was on the front page of the sports section. With the help of Brownstown Central coach Howard Jackson, whom Russ called up to whine a little, it was decided that the next day Corydon Central would have no chance against the county rival North Harrison Cougars. After all, remember, we were a confident bunch.

Corydon beat us, the confident bunch, 46-20. I think it is time for me, journalist to journalist, to give Russ Brown a call and find out what his beef was?

We won the next two games. We were 3-1 and feeling pretty good. Then we played Providence and lost half of our defensive power to injury. Dad was at the hospital tending to an injured player and yours truly, a junior on the losing team, had to call the score in to the Courier-Journal. The stringer asked me a few questions about the game; they printed every word verbatim.

We were 3-6 heading into the last game of the season. Earlier that year, it appeared we, the NH Cougars, might be in danger of only playing 9 games. We did not have a tenth game on the schedule. According to the head coach, the athletic director was fine with that. The coach was not. I don’t think those two got along very well. Coach Johnson raised cane and ultimately, there was a 10th game scheduled…in Illinois. Well, that is what Mick Rutherford said when he got off the bus 80 miles and six pig trails from North Harrison at a place that was geographically flat as a pancake, “Where are we? Illinois?”

The North Daviess Cougars hosted the North Harrison Cougars. In the process the North Harrison Cougars made Indiana Football History and put a kid in the Faces in the Crowd section of Sports Illustrated.

That night the North Daviess Cougars ran the ball 59 times. Brett Markel ran 53 of those for 411 yards and 8 touchdowns. The 411 yards were a state record, besting 380 by Andy Knecht of Covington in 1980.

I think I may have set school record that night for the most punts in one game. The first half I punted barefoot because I wanted to. After all, we were a long way from home. At halftime, I was hailed by a ref, “56! Hey 56! Come here. Look son, you’re going to have to put your shoe back on to punt in the second half. “Why?” I asked. Turns out that was the rule according to them. I asked if they had a rule book on them. They didn’t take too kindly to that. In the second half, wearing a shoe on my right foot, I had two punts blocked. I told the ref, “That wasn’t happening in the first half, thanks a lot.”

You know that fog that they played in during that game in 1975 that I mentioned? I think some of it showed up at North Daviess in 1984, but the North Harrison Cougars were the only ones who saw it.