Football Scores
Football coach George Bruto is the heart and soul of Adrian
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DREXEL, Mo. | The 44 football players from Adrian High School squatted in the cold grass. Their coach, a man who helped define their town for more than 30 years, walked among them, eying each player.
The game that would mark a coach’s milestone and a town’s pride was only 20 minutes away.
“Adrian!” the boys screamed together as they stretched.
The 61-year-old coach loomed over his players, his assistants surrounding him, his gray-white hair and thick black glasses obscured as he looked down at the ground, thinking.
“Adrian!” his players shouted again.
More than a dozen cows grazed nearby, separated from these skinny teenagers by a rusty wire fence. The opposing team warmed up 50 yards away. And as the air turned from cool to cold, and the sun began to set over fields of baled hay and corn, the lights of pickup trucks and cars carrying many of Adrian’s 1,800 residents blinked from roads just east of here.
The day they’d waited for all week was getting closer, the game that would mark George Bruto’s 200th win at the helm of his school, a win that would mark what one man’s legacy means when he dedicates his life to one small town.
“He’s just so important to this town,” said Chuck Miller, who played for Bruto in the 1980s and whose son played for him until graduating last year. “He’s like a father figure to all of Adrian. He’s affected us in ways more than football.”
That’s particularly important now. As the turmoil on Wall Street spreads to places like Adrian — as fear and worry and consternation take hold a little more tightly — it’s good to remember the good men among us, folks here say, and what those men say about our country.
Good men like Bruto who, at this moment, has kneeled on a patch of browned field to say a prayer with his coaches. His players do the same several yards away.
Then he’s up, marshaling his boys, leading them to the field, walking proudly toward a win that a whole town hopes to celebrate. Hundreds of folks in metal bleachers and standing on a crammed sideline cheer behind, whooping and shouting their town’s name. “Welcome to the Jungle” blasts from the speakers.
Bruto turns to his kids.
“Are you ready!”
“Yes sir!”
“Do you believe!”
“Yes sir!”
“Then let’s go!”
“Yes sir!”
• • •
Adrian is easy to find and easy to miss — a speck on the map about 50 miles south of Kansas City, just off Highway 71. It’s a small, tidy town filled with American flags, pieces of Americana-like tree forts and sweet tea, and folks who stop and stare at strangers before offering a friendly wave.
This is where Bruto came in 1978 as a young man trying to figure out what to do with his life. Long before he put his imprint on Adrian, Adrian put its imprint on him.
“I started out in Lockwood, and we won three games in two years, and I told my wife I wanted to get out of coaching,” he said. “Then the head coach at Adrian called and offered me a job.”
So he made a life here. He started out as an assistant coach and, in 1986, took over as head coach. His wife became a librarian, then a principal, then the superintendent.
Along the way, Bruto discovered you could use your lot in life to shape people’s lives. And he cared, cared so much that one minute he was grabbing your facemask and hauling your ass across the sideline, the other he was crying and telling you how proud he was of you.
And it was about more than football. When a friend and former player drowned shortly after graduating in the 1980s, it was Bruto who showed up to grieve with his former players.
“Bruto came to the house,” recalled Mitch Edmiston, who played for Bruto in the 1980s. “He was a cornerstone. He was like a dad.”
“He feels it from the heart,” said Miller.
He was always there, a touchstone to being young, to needing a father figure, to learning life’s lessons before you had to deal with them. Cancer, death, heartache, job problems — it seemed Bruto was there to help or, somehow, had prepared you years earlier for what you were now facing.
“He’s not just a coach, he’s a lifelong friend you can turn to,” Miller said.
Adrian’s the kind of town that can take a man like Bruto and give him a chance to make a difference. It’s a place where, in 2007, when the city decided to build a new football complex, folks built it together, as a family.
“It wasn’t about the school, it was about the community,” Bruto said. “People volunteered to build. They brought meals. People poured cement. They cleared brush. Everybody helped.”
That’s Adrian — close-knit, based on teamwork, and often circling back together to football.
Take the economy. As folks struggle, they often look to Bruto and his teams as a respite.
And while mayor Ray Cusumano is quick to point out that in Adrian, folks don’t want to dwell on the negative — “It isn’t doom and gloom here, the sky isn’t falling, and this town is always a cup-half-full kind of town” — they do recognize times are tough.
Adrian’s also a commuter town, which means rising gas prices squeeze more out of people’s wallets. The pinch is being felt extra hard on Adrian’s Main Street, too.
“It’s affected us a whole lot,” said Charmie Kagarice, the manager at Del’s Adrian Appliance. “People are buying more used appliances and waiting to get stuff fixed. They just can’t afford.”
Up the street, at Harla’s Hair and Tan, Harla Ferguson says the same thing.
“There’s a real sense of worry,” she said. “And it’s here. We can see it in our business, and with people in town.”
And that, as much as anything, is why Friday night’s game mattered so much — why Ferguson and a lot of folks like her wouldn’t be anywhere but 17 miles up the road in Drexel watching a high school football game. Because there’s much to love about America in places like Adrian, and what there is to love seems even more apparent when times turn tough.
“You gotta understand, this is a football town,” said Edmiston. “And football lets us leave all those troubles behind.”
Which is why Bruto’s 200th win means even more than it usually would.
But first, they had to win.
• • •
Things didn’t start well.
Drexel fielded the opening kickoff at the 10-yard line, swung right and headed up field until the only person between them and the lead was Adrian’s kicker.
He made the tackle, but Drexel had the ball at the 50-yard line.
The Drexel Bobcats entered the game with a 1-6 record. Adrian stood at 6-1. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.
On the first play from scrimmage, Drexel broke free for a 15-yard gain. Adrian’s defense lurched offside on the next play. Two hundred wins was starting to look a long way off.
“Three plays and three screw-ups!” Bruto bellowed. “Jimminy Christmas!”
The players on the sideline looked uneasy. The fans — nearly four times as many on the Adrian side — grew quiet. Then Bruto barked to his defense again.
And the players responded.
On the very next play, they stripped the ball and recovered the fumble. A few minutes later, the Blackhawks scored their first touchdown on an 11-yard pass to senior Josh Hubbard.
The crowd went crazy. Bruto calmly put one finger up in the air.
For the rest of the quarter, Adrian overmatched and outplayed Drexel. The Blackhawks threw with ease. Their offense looked twice as fast, their defense impenetrable. In the first quarter alone, Adrian recovered four Drexel fumbles. The Blackhawks blocked a punt. They hung 28 points on the scoreboard — in only 12 minutes.
It was as if all of Adrian had suited up and headed out there to play against Drexel. Which, folks will tell you, is kind of the way it works.
“Look at this turnout,” said Ferguson, who owns the beauty salon and closed up shop to head to the game. “The whole town cares so much.”
By the end of the half, the score told the story: Adrian 54, Drexel 0.
• • •
Bruto stood in the locker room during halftime and faced his boys.
The smell of sweat and soil filled the room. With their helmets off, the players — squatting on the concrete floor, standing near the showers, piled onto the wooden benches — looked so young it was hard to believe. They also looked tired enough to sleep.
Until their coach addressed them.
“So far, you’re doing a great job!” Bruto said.
The players lifted their heads. A few smiled.
“Now, take care of the inside!”
“Yes sir!”
“Get after them guys! You young guys, there are guys out there you’ll be playing next year. Show them you can play against them!”
“Yes sir!”
“Let them know they played the Blackhawks tonight!”
“Yes sir!”
They charged back out into the cold night, and there seemed little doubt Drexel would remember. For another 24 minutes, against Adrian’s junior-varsity players, Drexel still couldn’t score.
By the fourth quarter, with the score stuck at 54-0, the night became about remembering: For the parents, reminiscing about these moments, where they and their kids could share something special under Friday night lights. For the players, a landmark win for a coach they loved, something even now they knew they’d carry with them for a lifetime. For Bruto, one win that encapsulates all those autumns with kids he’d coached and then watched become men.
People stood under the stars and talked about what Bruto means to them.
“If football’s religion here, Bruto is God,” said Jame Moran, who graduated last year. “It’s like a movie in Adrian. You grow up dreaming to play for Bruto.”
Moran nodded toward the crowd behind him. Hundreds of people from town laughed and talked and watched the scoreboard tick down toward this accomplishment.
Russell Hahs, who stood next to his friend, noticed the same thing. “Look. He’s the heart and soul of this town.”
Mike Burris graduated from Adrian in 1987. Even now, the 39-year-old can remember how the coach would tear into him — and yet, somehow, reach him in a way others couldn’t.
“Oh, man, he would eat you inside out, but he’d never demean you,” he said. “He did everything he did to build you up.”
Sherri Hough has walked these sidelines before, as she was doing now, and she knows first-hand how much the coach with the quick temper and the emotional streak has impacted her town. She’s had three boys play for him — and each has seen Bruto’s wrath and Bruto’s love.
“What he teaches is not football,” she said. “It’s the lessons of life: respect, discipline, teamwork. He’s been wonderful for this town.”
Then the game was over — 54-0 — and an announcer’s voice came over the speakers: “We do want to congratulate coach George Bruto. This is his 200th win as the Adrian head coach.”
The city of Adrian cheered — Ferguson, forgetting how slow business had been, and Miller, letting the worry of the world slip away, and everyone else feeling like a family of 1,800 as their coach smiled and walked onto the field.
His accomplishment was now theirs. As with most things in small towns, they’d done this together, as a family.
Bruto’s son, Shaun, who’s one of his assistant coaches, turned to his dad.
“Congratulations, you old man.”
“Congratulations, coach!”
“Congratulations!”
“Well,” Bruto said, leading his team to the south end zone, “that feels pretty good.”
He walked into the center of his team’s huddle. He choked on his words and his eyes welled up as his players jumped up and down and a whole town watched with pride.
“We all did this,” he said finally. “Coaches don’t make teams, players do. You do.”
Then the entire team swarmed the old man in a hug. And the entire city watched and cheered. And George Bruto began to weep.
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