Temple Rebuilt

Chiefs fans are suffering through their worst season in over twenty years. Football teams at Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri are crashing at least as wretchedly as they did back in the day when Sports Illustrated referred to our region as “the Bermuda Triangle of college football.”

So if you want to happily chill your kidneys at a postseason football game, hope for a rematch between Rockhurst and Blue Springs in the high school state quarterfinals.

Tony Temple, the Rockhurst sophomore running back, experienced loss for the first time in his eleven years of organized football when Blue Springs knocked off Rockhurst 21-7 on September 10. “I’ve been playing since kindiegarten, and Blue Springs was my first loss,” says Temple.

Blue Springs handed the defending 5A state champs their first defeat in fifteen games in front of the largest Rockhurst home crowd of the season — and live on television and radio. Blue Springs smacked the Rockhurst Hawklets in the beak from the opening kickoff. The Blue Springs Wildcats rendered Temple inert while running and passing through the Rockhurst Hawklets’ vaunted defense as if debunking an urban legend. “I gotta admit,” says John O’Connor, Rockhurst’s 5-foot-11, 220-pound senior center, “we played terrible offensively on the line.”

Temple finished with only 46 yards’ rushing against Blue Springs. He sat out the next game — against Hopkins, Minnesota — to rest his injuries and saw only limited play against St. Louis Sumner while scoring three touchdowns on only 53 yards.

When Touchdown Tony arrived in Garden City, Kansas, on October 5, The Star’s preseason cover boy hadn’t rushed for 100 yards since Rockhurst’s 19-14 opening win in August. Finally healthy, he rushed for 221 yards as Rockhurst dismantled Garden City 40-3. The following Monday, Garden City phoned Rockhurst. “They called to inform us they were dropping us from their schedule,” said Tony Severino, the Rockhurst head coach.

Blue Springs has become a rallying cry for the 2001 Rockhurst football season. “Right now I would say Blue Springs is the best team in the city,” says Kevin Kane, Rockhurst’s most-decorated senior defender. “But when we play them [in the playoffs], well, we’ll do our part. We’ve still got to take one game at a time.”

Rockhurst’s fixation on Blue Springs is no slight to other opponents. The Thursday before the October 19 Park Hill South game, every Rockhurst lineman shaved his head. Park Hill South’s players sprinkled magical mojo dust on themselves. “We only do this for Rockhurst,” admits PHS Panther Ryan Hill. “It’s supposed to be made up of the ashes from seniors past and some other stuff only seniors know about.” Temple ran through the Panther defense for 200 yards and three long touchdown runs in Rockhurst’s 42-3 win. As he boarded the bus after the game, Temple quietly said, “I’m back.”

Meanwhile, Blue Springs has dominated every opponent this season, with no team coming within two touchdowns of the Wildcats. Rockhurst will need some mojo of its own if the team wants to topple the talented Blue Springs Wildcats in a rematch.

Defining his role on this Rockhurst team, Temple recites the typical pabulum you get from well-coached players. “My role as a sophomore is to do the little things like catching the ball and making blocks,” says Temple. But when discussion turns to Blue Springs, Temple sets his jaw and predicts the date, time and location of redemption for his one and only football loss: “Monday night, November the 12th, seven o’clock at Blue Springs.”