[Panther Thunder]

[YOUTUBE="Pikeville vs. Paintsville 1988"]A350PRNdFhY[/YOUTUBE]

Pikeville's D was the key to this win as statistically, Paintsville probably came out looking better on paper. Jerry Pelphrey has a big game for Paintsville with multiple big plays, tackles, and an INT. Credit to Brugh's Team, from most of the film I have watched from the 87-89 seasons, '88 Paintsville is one of the better teams the Panthers faced, IMO.

For a better description of the game and culture in Pikeville at the time, I will post the corresponding People Magazine Article covering the Pikeville program just prior to "The Thrilla in Pikevilla".

The Boys of Autumn

• November 07, 1988
  
• Vol. 30
  
• No. 19
  

By Alan Richman
As Summer Makes Its Transit to Winter, a Small Kentucky Town and Its High School Football Team Live Out the Time-Honored Rituals of Their Season of Glory

Even as progress comes to the hills and hollows of Appalachia, bringing such necessities as European body-wrap salons to the towns and Brie en croûte to the malls, one thing never seems to change: the fortunes of the Pikeville (Ky.) High School football team. Last season the Panthers won all 14 games and averaged just under 50 points a game. This season they were undefeated again going into the annual big game against their archrival, Paintsville. Such heroics have made head coach Hillard Howard, 41, about the most respected man in eastern Kentucky never to make a couple of million dollars in coal.

"We have to take care of Hillard. He takes care of our kids," says Ralph Roop, a Cadillac salesman and father of a 270-lb. lineman, handing over the keys to a 1983 Fleetwood Brougham d'Elegance, once owned by an elderly widow and passed along to Howard at cost. The coach walks around it once, checks the gas tank (full), starts the car up and heads for home, spitting H.B. Scott's chewing-tobacco juice into a paper coffee cup as he drives, not a drop marring the plush blue interior. "I'm still not used to a car with good brakes," he apologizes as the Cadillac lurches to a halt at an intersection. "Before I started getting all these nice new cars, I had to hang one foot out the door to stop." The Cadillac looks real nice in the driveway, shaded by a willow tree and parked next to the 1987 Pontiac Bonneville that the grateful people of Pikeville bought Howard last year, right after his team won the Division A state championship.

Of all the love affairs in sports, none is quite so special as that of a small town with its football team. Maybe it's the weather that does it, the combination of autumn leaves and summer grass, the air as crisp as a tight spiral. Maybe it's the sacrifice, the glory of young men throwing their bodies into the struggle, asking nothing for it but a letter to sew on a funny jacket that some of them will wear the rest of their lives. Only in football are the memories so vivid. Marley Newsom, 62, a Pikeville barber who was quarterback of the 1941 team, remembers "crying like a baby down on the field" the day his team suffered its sole defeat of the season. Only in football are the bonds so enduring. Henry Stratton, 63, a tackle in the '40s, has eight lawyers in his local firm, and six of them played football for Pikeville.

As one autumn follows another, small-town people watch their children grow up. They see them as grade-schoolers, playing pickup football behind the bleachers. They see the same kids years later, competing under the Friday-night lights. Sometimes the kids end up playing a better game of football than even the most bright-eyed booster would dare to expect. "People were always telling us they couldn't wait until we were juniors and seniors," says Greg Hackney, Pikeville's star halfback. "When we were seventh and eighth graders, only three or four teams even scored on us, and we were playing middle schools with ninth graders." Most of the seniors on the Pikeville team have been starting for six years, on various teams, and in all that time they have lost only one game.

The Panthers are a Division A team; Pikeville has about 300 students in grades 10 through 12. A school like Henry Clay High in Lexington, rated Division 4A, has about 1,800 students in the same three grades. In 1987 the two teams played, and Pikeville won by 13 points. This year Pikeville won again, by 15. "For the last two years, Pikeville has probably been the best football team in the state, regardless of size," says Jake Bell, the coach at Henry Clay. "They have a run of really great athletes. It happens in small towns."

It seems that for the past few decades a lot of good things have happened in Pikeville. The hills of eastern Kentucky remain for the most part a bastion of fundamentalism and poverty, scattered with signs reading You Need Jesus and families living "on the draw." The dominant architecture of Appalachia is still double-wide trailers, although some of them are in yards with swimming pools. "We've got the haves and the have-nots, a mixture of $200,000 homes here and $20,000 shacks there," says Gene Davis, 57, a former Pikeville football coach, now the vice-president of a local bank. Pikeville is a pocket of relative prosperity in all this, a city of about 5,500 people that functions as a regional service center. If the local economy is not oblivious to the booms and busts of the coal industry, it is at least partly shielded from them.

It is shielded as well from some of the harshness of the times and the sense of old values quickly eroding. Coach Howard, who has a master's degree in education and doubles as the assistant principal at Pikeville, says the worst discipline problem he comes up against most days is tardiness. The secret of all this serenity might just be that every kid in town who is big enough or mean enough to get in trouble ends up playing football instead. There are more than 50 players on the squad, and each one who sticks out the season, no matter how little he plays, gets a letter. There isn't much else for a kid to do in Pikeville, except cruise the shopping plazas along the four-lane. "Football is everything here, for everyone, not just for us," says Hillard's wife, Marsha, 41. "You can't believe how football oriented the town is. We sort of coast through the summers, live for when the season starts."

To hear the people of Pikeville talk, last year's football team was the greatest thing to happen to eastern Kentucky since the coal boom of the early 70s, when prices went from $9 to $60 a ton in just 15 months. "The team last year was so good," says Howard, "that this year, after we won a game 37-0, I heard, 'Coach, what happened? What's wrong with them?' Every Friday, before the game, I hear, 'How many points are we going to score?' People have already decided we're going to win another championship."