Column: Tradition, football go hand in hand

By By Tony Krausz / assistant sports editor
Nov. 29, 2003
Sometime around noon today, a group of young men in their mid-20s will make their way to a field on the campus of Busch School in the southside of the city of St. Louis.
There final destination is different from years past, where these high school companions used have to make a left turn at an oddly-angled stop light and proceed to make a precarious u-turn to slide their cars one after the other on the side of a small city park.
The day has also changed for this gathering of friends, they used to come together the day after Thanksgiving, but because of certain group member's jobs, they meet the Saturday after Turkey Day.
But one thing hasn't changed over the last 11 years they still come together to play football.
You may ask why somebody in East Mississippi is writing about a bunch of people nobody has ever heard of in St. Louis.
Well, as I wrote in Friday's paper, traveling to the site of the Ole Miss/Mississippi State game has become a Thanksgiving tradition for me over the last three years.
But long before, it really is depressing when you can use that cliche and mean it. Anyway, long before I decided that sports journalism was the way to go this gathering of young men was part of my Turkey Day tradition.
It started in 1993, my freshman year of high school. One of my high school friends, Matt Bunch, who is currently a teacher or "the shaper of young minds" as he likes to call it, decided to organize a pick-up football game the day after Thanksgiving.
Some how the game stuck. Even when we left for college, the annual pick-up game, labeled the Bunch Bowl, became one of the few times everyone was able to get together at the same time.
Now it is in no way as sophisticated or nationally recognized at the Egg Bowl. We don't have any official stats, and when past games are rehashed the tales of "grid iron" glory tend to change with each telling.
Somehow a length-of-the field pass has gotten longer every year, no one is really sure how it is possible. By the time we are 35, the pass will have been caught in Illinois.
Also, the quality of play isn't quite there with the NCAA Division I contest between the Rebels and the Bulldogs.
It would be great to say, we play like Ole Miss did on Thursday with the offense clicking and the defense smacking people around, but in truth, we play worse than MSU has this year. How scary is that.
But either way, it is tradition for this group of friends to square off against each other on a homemade football field, much like it has been tradition for Rebel and Bulldog fans to watch their teams play on Thanksgiving.
Granted things have changed a little bit like the Egg Bowl being moved to Thanksgiving 13 years ago. As previously mentioned the site of the game has changed, apparently the old park now has a bike ramp in the middle of what used to be our playing field.
There will also apparently be a sign in one of the end zones declaring the game is "Bunch Bowl XI," and Bunch will now play the national anthem before the start of the game.
He wanted to get fireworks to accompany the pregame festivities, but sadly, that plan fell through.
So the game has gotten slightly more intrinsic than whey I played my last "Bunch Bowl" in 2000, or as another original game participant and close friend, Tim Buckley, says, "We've basically lost what little sanity we have left."
If you don't believe him Bunch, the game's founder and planner for the last 11 years, admitted this when I talked with him Friday afternoon "Instead of teaching the kids last week, I've been planning this thing out." Ah, the shaper of young minds indeed.
So maybe "Bunch Bowl" has gotten a little more intense, but one thing hasn't change. There will be the traditional argument about how the orange cones, used to mark off the sidelines and end zone, are not evenly lined up on both sides of the field.
It has been three years since I've gotten to be part of this friendly bickering, much less the game, but at least my buddies remembered me last year.
In the 10th annual playing of "Bunch Bowl," I was elected as the first and only member of the "Bunch Bowl Hall of Fame." Sure its no Canton, Ohio, but there were rumors of a sign being made in my honor. Plus, the only real qualification I had for being elected to the imaginary Hall of Fame was that I hadn't played in the game for the two years prior to my induction.
Bunch does try to dispute this by saying, "There are other guys that aren't playing any more, but they are just not worthy enough." Good friends.
Though there is a down side to being the lone member of this Hall of Fame group, "You can't come back. You can never play again. You are done," Buckley reminds me. Yep, good friends.
So I don't get to play the game any more, such is the price of moving out of state and not being able to make it back for the yearly contest.
But at least I'm remembered, and I did get this promise from Bunch, "I'll make a u-turn just for you." Some traditions should just never be broken.