Bearcats and Tigers Battle For Conference Championship

Although no one new it at the time, the Hendersonville Bearcats took on the Tryon Tigers at Harmon Field in what turned out to be for the Parkway Conference Championship. The Tigers, leading the conference at 2-0, were  underdogs as the  powerful Bearcats were ranked 4th in the Western North Carolina Polls. In a game that went down to the wire, Tryon's two point conversion attempt to win the game, failed, and the Bearcats took home a 7-6 victory.
40 years has caused most of my game memories to become blurred - but this game has several lasting ones:

• Ken Warrington's running in the 4th quarter was brutal. Every play there was a "Pop", with a defender grunting at the intensity of Ken's hit (we found out Ken's helmet split during the game).
• Quarterback Stuart Williams actually missed the hand-off to Warrington on the late scoring play, but followed Ken into the end zone for the score.
• With the victory bell ringing after the score, the crowd took up the chant , "We Want Two!". There were no tie breakers in those days.

Write-ups from local newspapers:

• "The Bearcats might have been ranked 4th in AA schools in the state, but they had their hands full Friday night as the smaller Tryon team played its heart out."
• "The Hendersonville Bearcats prevented an attempted two-point conversion late in the fourth quarter to avoid suffering an upset at the hands of the tiny Tryon High Tigers"
• "Joe Hunt's Hendersonville squad almost had more than it could handle in Tryon and he thinks his team had been brain-washed into thinking the Tigers weren't quite as good as they were. "Elmo Neal had been crying about how little his team was," said Joe, "but their line is bigger than ours. We really weren't expecting the game to be close, but I think we might have underestimated Tryon. They had a good, sound football team."
• My first inclination was to kick but I saw that we probably didn't have enough time to score again, so we went for the two points." It was this decision of Elmo Neal, the Tryon Tigers coach, that gave the Hendersonville Bearcats a narrow 7-6 victory and prevented a major upset. Neal's small, inexperienced Tigers battled on even terms with the traditionally strong Bearcats in the last half. "We felt like we could run against them," said Neal, "but we didn't get to our game plan until the third quarter. Hendersonville uses a defensive shift and we began to hit its weaknesses," commented the proud mentor. "We have a good football team," concluded Neal.

You can read more write-ups of the game by clicking here.

Rosman Coach Bill Cathy came into the locker room after the game to tell the team they had played a great game. The significance of this was that Rosman was the last game on the schedule and Rosman historically gave Tryon fits. I found out later that Coach Cathy watched a lot of Tryon's games and probably new more about us than we knew about ourselves.

The Tiger Rag also made its first appearance of the year with Senior Editor Sue Davis. You can read a copy by clicking here. (40 years has hurt the readability of this issue)