Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, December 9, 1993                   TAG: 9312080146
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-3   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Ray Cox
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THESE GUYS DON'T MELT IN THE RAIN

Emmett the dog has put paws over ears, despite the fact that his canine heart rejoices when he's all wet.

The other writer in the house has rolled her eyes at the very mention of the Giles single-wing offense and repaired to the kitchen to work on another masterpiece of the culinary arts, insisting that this important work be done alone lest she be distracted by continuing babble.

The story must be told, though. I am duty bound. The spectacle of Giles 8-0 Group A Division 2 victory there on the banks of the Russell Fork River last weekend in hilly Dickenson County must be recounted or else somebody years from now will think that we were making this up.

Fiction it is not that water stood several inches deep on vast reaches of the playing surface.

Nor is it the ravings of a lunatic that the entire area between the 20 yard lines was devoid of all vegetation.

It is no lie that every punt and imcomplete pass died with a splat when it fell in the brown ooze.

It is not the figment of an overzealous scribe's fruitful imagination that Giles defensive back Marty Smith tipped his headgear after the game and poured forth enough coffee-and-cream-colored water out to fill a subtantially sized soup tureen.

No bad dream has ever been as farfetched as the reality of numerous normally pale faces blackened by a mud so thick that the only way you could tell you were looking at a human visage was the three holes for a pair of eyes and a mouth.

No surrealistic movie ever went so far as to reproduce the hilarious scene of half the Giles team crammed shoulder to slime-covered shoulder in a shower only slightly larger than a respectable walk-in closet.

Comic theater would never get away with portraying what actually happened after that game at Haysi, when some Giles players - apparently driven to distraction by grime - were climbing into sinks to sit and rinse off.

"We can't do anything about the rain," Haysi coach James Colley said.

So the folks from the host school did the best they could. They spread plastic tarps on the field Friday night and left it covered until almost noon the day of the game. Considering the way it rained throughout the previous night, that was like trying to hold back a flood with a dish towel.

In fact, a flood was what some of the locals were talking about if it kept on raining. That made for a nervous time for people with work to do in the Haysi field house after the game.

"Sure it's flooded this field before," said Colley, who's been the coach there 14 years. "Twice we've had water up to the third cinderblock [from the floor] in the fieldhouse since I've been here."

That's the adventure of living in these straight up and down parts. When the water comes, there's no place to go but up the side of the mountain.

Giles was awfully stout-hearted to put up with all that, not to mention two Haysi incursions inside the Spartans' 20 in the fourth quarter.

Character is an overused word in sports, but what happened in Haysi is what the cliche mongers are talking about when they utter that word.

Character is one of the reasons why two teams play for a state championship after everybody else has already put up the equipment for the winter.

Ray Cox is a Roanoke Times & World-News sportswriter.