This game was supposed to be all about discipline.
It was, after all, a meeting between the Chicago Public League’s two military academies. And when the Chicago Public Schools started Chicago Military Academy-Bronzeville in 1999 and began to switch the existing Carver High to a similar model about the same time, the idea was that military-style discipline would foster academic achievement.
So irony was trumped only by embarrassment Friday night at Gately Stadium when officials suspended the second annual battle for the Bacon Cup midway through the third quarter after a battle broke out in an end zone.
Two opposing players began to scuffle after Carver scored to increase its lead to 26-0. Players from both teams, including some from the bench areas, swarmed to form a massive scrum.
Officials quickly broke up the melee and just as promptly suspended the game. Referee Charles Matthews declined to comment.
By rule, players who enter the field during a fight are automatically ejected. CPS director of sports administration Calvin Davis said later that Matthews told him so many players from the Bronzeville bench had entered the field that the Eagles no longer had enough players to continue.
Davis said Carver likely would be declared the winner but that he would withhold a final decision pending a review of game film.
“You certainly would expect them to be a little more disciplined than the average school,” he said of the military academies.
Carver coach Fred Ward insisted that he and his assistants had kept their players who were not in the game on the sidelines but acknowledged the Challengers were ashamed of the incident.
“It’s not our typical behavior,” he said “We talked about a word of the day, and the word today was honor.
“We didn’t represent honor very well.”
Bronzeville assistant coach Tyrice Jackson agreed.
“It’s highly embarrassing,” said Jackson, who ran the team in the absence of head coach Curtis Brown, who was attending a funeral. “We stress discipline and keeping your cool, and we did not display it [Friday]–neither side did.
“Right now I’m kind of speechless.”
The only good part of this mess may be that Gen. Frank Bacon didn’t have to see it. Bacon was the driving force behind the founding of Bronzeville as CPS’ first military high school, and he was its first superintendent.
Bacon died Aug. 27, 2003, at 74, and when Bronzeville met Carver for the first time a few weeks later they played for the shiny silver Frank C. Bacon Cup. Carver won 40-0.
A behavioral meltdown is not what you expected at a game named for Bacon, an outgoing, disciplined man, nor at a game at which the public address announcer referred to the players on both sides as cadets.
Bronzeville and Carver students wear uniforms at school and participate in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, which means they perform daily drills.
Bronzeville, for example, conducts formation in the school’s drill hall at 7:30 a.m., and you had better be dressed properly.
“It’s a very, very, very strict school,” Brown, the dean of students, had said Tuesday.
Senior lineman Tache Williams and senior wide receiver Tyrre Burks are part of the second class of freshmen to enter Carver under the military model.
Williams said Wednesday that his enrollment at Carver was at first a parental idea, “but then I started to like it.”
Burks agreed that martial law takes a little getting used to, but that it’s not too hard to adapt to and can make for a better football team.
Ward is a 1985 Carver graduate, and his mother, Mary, taught there, so few people appreciate how things have changed since the days of sagging pants, untrimmed hair and gang problems.
“The mentality is different. It’s a different school,” he said. “We teach responsibility and accountability.”
Although the Bronzeville-Carver football rivalry is embryonic, it is nonetheless intense. “It’s a very big deal,” Burks said.
Bronzeville had been plotting revenge for a year for the one-sided outcome of the inaugural Bacon contest.
“Carver has our cup,” Brown said. “The cup says, Frank C. Bacon.
“We were humiliated last year. We did not fight back and were pushed around.”
Friday they fought in a most inappropriate way. Ejected players face one-game suspensions, and so many Bronzeville players are apparently in that position that the Eagles may not have enough athletes for their next game.
Davis said suspensions might be staggered to avoid that fate but said guilty parties will be penalized and that he may make the teams take part in a counseling program.
“That bowl is such a good thing,” he said of the Bacon Cup, “and Frank Bacon did so much for the military academy. It’s just a shame something like that had to happen.”
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btemkin@tribune.com
