Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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I think that just about every boy who has played football in high school has started the season with dreams of going undefeated. It rarely happens, of course. In fact, do you know how many undefeated football teams MHS has fielded in the last 100 years? Only three. That’s just how rare it is.
The first undefeated team was in 1927, and the last was three decades later, in 1957. The 1927 team went 10-0, beating Fostoria for the mythical state championship. The 1957 team notched an 8-0 record with Jim Burson as the quarterback. One of the games, I believe it was Bellefontaine, was cancelled because of a flu epidemic.
But the team I want to tell you about was the one that was sandwiched between those two, in 1949.
That team’s quarterback was Bill Worthington. The previous year, I was the MHS quarterback, and we had a decent record – six wins, two losses, and one tie. That wasn’t bad, but it was nothing to write home about.
I didn’t play football in my senior year, and Bill took over as quarterback. The players that Bill inherited were pretty much the same players that I played with the previous year. But with Bill as their quarterback, they became only the second football team in MHS history to go undefeated. There was one tie, a 0-0 result against Worthington High School. Yes, Bill led that team to an 8-0-1 season.
Bill and I had been friends for years, ever since we went into the first grade together in 1938. When we were little kids, we both played a lot of football on the vacant lot behind the Sohio gas station on East Fifth Street. And years later, after we both got out of high school, we often joked about our records as the MHS quarterback. You know, “was Bill that good, or was I that bad.” I think it might have been a little of both. We had fun with that over the years.
I have a lot of good memories of Bill Worthington, but I think my favorite is when he led the 1949 MHS football team to eight victories, no losses and one tie – an undefeated season. That was something pretty special.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at williamboyd514@gmail.com