Football is mostly like it was back when guys in my generation were playing in high school and college, but halftime shows have changed a lot.
Offside penalties are still five yards, and it takes 10 yards to get a first down. There are 11 players on a team like there have been for years, and the length of the field is the same as ever.
All of that was evident in the Super Bowl last week. It was also obvious that halftime shows at that event and in most other games are drastically different from “the old days.”
Back when John David Crow was playing in my hometown of Springhill, the marching band would go on the field at halftime and play some John Philip Sousa songs.
Sousa is not as well known as Jennifer Lopez and the other lady who did the Super Bowl halftime performance. But he wrote more than a hundred famous marching tunes that have been played thousands of times at football halftimes.
Among them were The Washington Post, Stars and Stripes Forever and Semper Fidelis, the official march of the U.S. Marine Corps and its band which Sousa conducted for years.
The whole Springhill band would fit in a school bus with room to spare. They would play the Sousa music, march in straight lines up and down the field and end their shows with the school fight song, “Give ‘em the Axe, You Lumberjacks.”
All of this seems like ancient history, because there’s not even a Springhill High School anymore. It was replaced with a nice consolidated school called North Webster.
The Lumberjacks nickname, which seemed appropriate for that paper mill and forestry town, has been retired. The teams are called the Knights now. I don’t remember ever seeing a knight around there.
My old black and gold letter jackets are antiques. The new school’s colors are purple and silver, and the band’s obviously not playing the Give ‘em the Axe tune anymore.
John David Crow died a few years ago, but I hope folks still remember him. He played for Bear Bryant at Texas A&M and won the Heisman Trophy.
Bryant was in New Orleans a few years later after he had moved to Alabama. I worked at The Times-Picayune and interviewed him at the Monteleone Hotel. He smoked Chesterfields, sipped Jack Daniels and talked about Crow.
When Joe Burrow at LSU won the Heisman Trophy this year, there were recollections of Billy Cannon getting the award 60 years ago. I never saw Crow’s name mentioned.
As I was watching Jennifer Lopez and Shakira during this year’s halftime show, I pictured Mr. Marshall, who was the band director at Springhill, flipping over in his grave.
Jennifer and Shakira were certainly flipping, gyrating, spinning and shaking vigorously for people their age and putting a lot of stress and strain on their skimpy costumes.
My eight-year-old granddaughter’s parents sent her out of the room during the halftime spectacle with all of its whirling flesh. That is a sad commentary on the state of Super Bowl halftime shows.
The short skirts the twirlers wore when the Springhill band performed were sort of exciting for us teenage boys, but they looked like waders and mackinaws compared to the Super Bowl outfits.
To be honest, I like most of the dazzling halftime band shows these days much more than the old-fashioned performances with the Sousa songs and the rhythmic, military-type marching.
Northwestern’s band has well over 300 members. They move in multiple, flowing, flawless formations, covering the field with flag lines, dancers and musicians and shaking the stadium with powerful, electrifying sounds.
When the Northwestern and LSU bands performed together at halftime of the game between the two schools at Tiger Stadium this fall, it was a breathtaking show that left more than 100,000 fans in awe of the experience.
The show featuring Shakira, Jennifer Lopez with her Versace mirrored bodysuit and guest stars called J Balvin and Bad Bunny left me wishing the Northwestern and LSU bands were there.
Or even the Springhill band from back in the day. Some tubas and trombones, Sousa songs and majorettes flinging batons would have been a welcome relief from a show that parents wouldn’t let their kids watch on TV.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES