1972 Neville High School Yearbook
Neville High School reached the Louisiana state championship game for large schools in 1972 after Jerry Tucker pushed his way into the end zone against Brother Martin. More Photos »
Dennis Surratt crouches beneath center, a quarterback second-guessing a play sent in by his coach. The score is 0-0 just before halftime in one of the rarest and longest high school football games ever played. The weather is so bad that the radio announcer says, "Last time it rained like this, somebody built an ark."
Courtesy of Ron Brocato
Two Brother Martin players, Bobby Nuss, left, and Harold Villere, during the second game against Neville, which was played in a driving storm. More Photos »
The play, tackle trap left, requires nimble footwork and tricky ball-handling in the wing-T offense. Surratt is worried that he may stumble in mud so thick that the announcers struggle to read the numbers on the players' jerseys. But he does what his coach orders. He spins 180 degrees, fakes to his fullback slogging right and hands the ball to a halfback running left.
Surratt is not wearing a uniform. He is not on a football field. He is standing in the optical department of a Walmart in Opelousas, La. He is an optometrist and he is wearing a white lab coat, his name stitched across the breast. He is 57, his hair thinner and his waist thicker than at 17, but his memory is as lithe now as his feet were then.
He re-enacts the play from 40 years earlier, hands off the imaginary ball and watches the invisible hole open. His trepidation dissolves as it always does in the retelling. Later, he pushes up the sleeve of his lab coat. He rubs his arm.
"Still get goose bumps," he says.
On Dec. 1, 1972, Surratt and Neville High School of Monroe in northern Louisiana played a state semifinal game against Brother Martin High School of the renowned New Orleans Catholic League. These were the days before overtime was used. The playoff game ended 0-0. The first tiebreaker, first downs, ended even at 9-9. The second tiebreaker, penetrations of the opponent's 20-yard line, also finished level, at 1-1. Beyond that, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association had no official way to resolve a game.
So four days later, on Dec. 5, the state semifinal was replayed in its entirety. This time, the rain sheeted and mud spackled the players' numbers, and their uniforms glistened as if slathered in pudding. Neville won, 8-0. Three days after that, it played its third game in eight days without surrendering a point, winning, 6-0, over Airline High of Bossier City to take the Class AAAA state title for Louisiana's largest schools at the time.
Record-keeping in high school football is scattered and incomplete, so no one knows how many games have been replayed from beginning to end. Another playoff game in Louisiana was apparently redone in 1955. But experts said the occurrence was extremely rare. The National Federation of State High School Associations said it knew of no other start-to-finish replays. Same with officials and veteran sportswriters from prep football hotbeds in Texas, California, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
On Oct. 29, 2010, in the piney woods of East Texas, Jacksonville High defeated Nacogdoches High by 84-81 in a game that extended through 12 overtime periods and lasted 5 hours 24 minutes. But that game was decided by continuous play in one evening, not repeated and prolonged over five days as the Louisiana playoff was in 1972.
"Replaying a whole game would be a real rarity, especially a game of that significance, a state semifinal," said Doug Huff, a high school sports historian from Wheeling, W.Va. "And you might play three basketball games in eight days, but football is a different deal."
Neville High was a quaint yet turbulent place in 1972. The team's star safety became the valedictorian and married the homecoming queen. But the football season played out during a tempestuous period after the desegregation of Louisiana's public schools. Personal tragedy also encroached on the playoff against Brother Martin. One of Neville's key players rode for hours to the first semifinal game directly from his father's funeral.
Neville was coached by an intense and complicated former Marine named Charlie Brown, whose meticulous handwriting underscored his demand for perfection and who went to his grave last year with a secret about his identity.
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