Most of us are still nice guys who keep it on the field. I just retired after 12 years of pro football. MOST ballplayers are nice guys who keep it on the field. Unfortunately we don't get a lot of press coverage. It goes to the handful of troublemakers that aren't nice guys. It's a shame really but please don't generalize all of us due to the sensationalism of today's news and the shenanigans of a few...

Mr. Delano captured the moment perfectly with this shot. Kinda reminds me of the Gogi Grant song "The Wayward Wind"

In a lonely shack by a railroad track
He spent his younger days
And I guess the sound of the outward bound
Made him a slave to his wand'rin ways.

Love it when some obscure little place on the planet is featured on Shorpy that I've been to. Melrose was the high school team that in 1962 McCurdy HS beat for the NM state football championship. McCurdy was a small parochial school in Santa Cruz that had about 50 boys in the whole school. Not that Melrose was any metropolis. Luckily, we had a talented QB who pretty much carried us on his back, and who was also the biggest guy on the team. That, and we were a bunch of undersized, but quite ornery, animals on defense. I must have been the skinniest lineman to ever put on pads. I bet I wasn't over 145 lbs. Pure heaven it was for all of us getting to knock someone down and not get punished for it...rewarded, even. But we kept it on the field back in those days. Bunch of nice guys, actually.