Sixty Six Acres – Albuquerque, New Mexico
My high school football coach Jesus Bautista used to call his team “chiquitos pero picosos,” a Spanish term meaning “small but piquant” (like New Mexico’s chiles). At 6’1” and a svelte 175 pounds in full uniform, I was the biggest guy on the team. That made me an enforcer of sorts when players on the other teams tried to bully my smaller teammates. For the most part, I was able to handle the biggest, meanest, roughest players we lined up against. The one exception was when we played Albuquerque Indian School. To keep us from touching their quarterback, the Braves positioned a steel wall in the backfield, an impenetrable barrier President Trump would envy. Disguised as a fullback, that human wall pummeled us mercilessly. We couldn’t go around him and we darn well couldn’t go through him…though I sure tried. I was sore for three days every time we played Albuquerque Indian School. To this day, every time we’re in the vicinity of the 12th Street acreage that formerly housed the Indian boarding school, memories still visit me of the felony-level atrocities “the wall” perpetrated upon me. Albuquerque Indian School is long gone. In its place, not far from the…
