Daingerfield 1983

Hello, welcome to my first post on my latest adventures of book writing. If you are here, you probably are well aware I have spent the past few years dodging Covid, and tracking down interviews, and looking through mounds of newspapers, annuals, and personal diaries on the 1983 Daingerfield football team.

It has been quite an adventure.

This newsletters serves a few purposes.

First, if you, or someone you share this with is on my mailing list, you will be the first to know when I go “live” when I publish. It helps me know what size of an initial audience I have.

Second, there is quite a bit I cannot squeeze in the book. As I was talking to 1983 Tight End Jeff Morris a few weeks ago, the time and place is like a rabbit hole of interesting stories and characters. Because I love research, (It’s my favorite part of the process), sometimes I have been guilty of spending a good afternoon and evening following the trail of some interesting fact I might not even include.

This might be a fun place to include those tidbits of history AROUND the time I am writing about.

For those who are wondering where I am on the writing, here is the answer. I am deep in the book, around the start of the playoffs. This is my first draft, so I expect much to change, and I get new info all the time.

My initial publisher and I did not agree once the editing began. He felt he wanted it around 200 pages and very shallow on the depth of the story.

As QB of that 1983 team, Doug Pittman told me, “Do it the way you want, get on with it, just like we did when we played”. So, I have done that. I have talked with many traditional writers I have great respect for, including David Thomas, who by chance is from Hooks, Texas, and wrote one, if not, the best write up on the 1983 Daingerfield team for the Fort Worth Star Telegram, when he was there.

There are many avenues open now for writers that haven’t been in the past, and as I shop around, I am open to those as well.

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One of the things I was surprised about was the lack of people who came forward when I placed an ad in the The Bee. It was a half page ad, and asked for stories, video, memories, ect., and I didn’t get but a few inquiries. I was quite surprised.

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Another question I get quite frequently, is “what about a documentary?”

The great David Mims and I have talked about this quite a bit, and the issue remains the same. We don’t have a complete video or audio record of the season. We have video of the last 5 playoff games and that is all. There is substantial write ups in newspapers of each game, but no video.

In fact, the story goes, there would be no video at all if it were not for Willie Everett.

He was home for the holidays while playing football at Baylor, and went up to the field house to work out. While there, he noticed coaches throwing away boxes of video tape. He rifled through them to find some from the 1983 and 1984 seasons, but the first 11 games were not there. Missing, to this day.

I am confident, somewhere, there sits video or audio from the radio, of all the games in a box in a hot attic waiting to be discovered. If that ever happens, we will have what we need to move forward.