PARK CITY — The waiting started just over a week ago. Probably after halftime, after senior receiver Andrew Pederson gathered his men with a gusto seldom seen outside of football: “Let’s go!” he shouted. “Huddle! Bring it in! Let’s go!” Then his teammates crowded together, and someone said some words unfit to print, and Park City took the field to secure a spot in the state championship.
Led by Jack Skidmore — the 5-foot-9 senior quarterback with poise, intelligence and, at that point, zero Division I offers — the Miners quickly put the game away amid chants of “One. More. Week!” Yes, when the coaches addressed the players after the final seconds ticked away, you could see the enthusiasm and excitement.
But upon closer inspection, you could also see something else: Several players bowed their heads. Maybe in prayer. Maybe in distraction. Or maybe they were pulled down by the gravity of the moment, young men lost in contemplation about what happens next: the slow tick ... tick ... ticking of the week ahead, and all the exhilaration and exhaustion it’s sure to bring. As former Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith once observed, “This is what sports are most about: the moments before.”
Eight days is hardly a moment, but the sentiment holds — and not just for the team. Do you think the fans packed elbow to elbow in the Rice-Eccles bleachers didn’t also feel the same sensation, the sense of waiting? The uneasiness and electricity of knowing their team, their school, their alma mater would play in the biggest game? The waiting started just over a week ago for them, too.
Such moments don’t come around much. Even kids on Christmas, after descending from the high of unwrapping presents and the previous night’s anticipation, know Santa’s next visit is just a year away. But a chance at state? That could take decades to reappear, if it reappears at all — a fact Park City knows well. And so the eight days between a semifinal win and state becomes a series of moments, each passing day more potent than the last.
The phenomenon isn’t unique to Park City, but the municipality of just under 8,000, known for the Sundance Film Festival and skiing and glitzy mountain chalets, is perhaps one of the best places in America to witness this uniquely American phenomenon. Despite playing football for — the school claims — 112 years, and despite reaching five football finals, and despite multiple state titles in what Park City principal Roger Arbabi calls the “country club sports” like tennis and golf, Park City has never won a state championship in football. And because the community is small and isolated, the chance at a state title has a unique way of binding people around a common cause — something that in the social media age seems like a relic of bygone times.
In towns and communities across America, late November and early December provides tinder for similar circumstances. For teams, players and coaches to cement a legacy and be remembered. And since football often ends in high school, to win one last game, to go out on top. It’s the kind of event participants — even spectators — will eventually tell their kids and grandkids about; the kind that’ll follow them around like an artful forearm tattoo.
Park City has its chance Friday morning at 11 against Sky View. But while this chance offers an opportunity to be memorialized in the school’s hallways forever, it’s also just that: a chance. And chances can be forgotten.
What will their headline say?
Gary Knudson remembers.
He’s 86 now, with double hearing aids and a slight tremor in his hands. He’ll admit — regrettably — that he doesn’t remember everyone’s names or every event from the five years he spent as Park City’s football coach in the early 1960s. But he sure remembers the semifinal game in ‘63. He remembers his team up on Judge Memorial Catholic High School, 13-7, with little time remaining. And he remembers, more than everything else, the timeout he didn’t call.
Rather than pause the game to coach up his quarterback, to tell him to kneel and run out the clock, he let his squad play on. The quarterback scrambled, took a shot to the ribs and fumbled. A Judge Memorial player recovered and scored just in time for the Bulldogs to edge Park City, 14-13. They cruised to a state title a week later.
“I can blame the quarterback, but it was my mistake,” Knudson said. “It cost us state.” Here’s a different kind of moment: The moments after. When, if things don’t go your way, you watch it over and over in your head, your brain in constant flux between rewind and play, with the occasional pause to dissect what went wrong and what could’ve gone right. Park City has endured many such moments over the years.
The first came in 1941, a season commemorated near the entrance to the Park City Library as “one of the best years.” The school lost just once — in the Class B finals against Bingham. Nowadays, that football season might be remembered positively. It wasn’t at the time. The Park Record wrote of the contest, “The Park City High School football team returned home last Friday after its defeat by the Bingham Miners weary and dejected.” And of Bingham’s first touchdown, which seemed decisive given Park City’s apparent lack of offense, the record reads, “Benny Culberston climaxed the new champs’ first touchdown drive with a smash from the one-yard mark to send Bingham fans wild and chill Park City fans with a blast far stronger than the crisp breezes which wafted their way through the cement battlefield.”
The story of losing in the state finals repeated itself in 1945. And 1980. And 1990. And 2001. But while the school’s results didn’t change, the town around it did.
Knudson and his wife, Helen, arrived when Park City was at its lowest. The ’50s were a dark time for the town, founded in the late 1800s as a silver mining outpost (hence the school’s mascot). The town boomed and reached its peak of 9,000 residents in the late 19th century, but amid falling silver prices and, eventually, the Great Depression, Park City declined. By the time the Knudsons moved to town, the population lingered in the low thousands.
“Back then, it was real,” Knudson said. “Everybody was poor. They had nothing to shout about. A lot of the miners had left. There was no work here. It was depressed.”
The weather didn’t help. Knudson kept a shed out back full of coal to endure the brutal winter.
“You had to learn how to bank it so it’d last all night,” he said, “and you wouldn’t freeze to death.”
But he persisted. He’d played football at West High in Salt Lake, where he was named 1952’s Most Valuable Player in high school football by the Deseret News and Telegram. His shoe was dipped in bronze and presented to him as a trophy, which he’s still proud to display. He also played at Utah, and he recognized how sports and games had helped him fit in all his life — even as a kid playing kick the can, rubber gun and hide and seek. “The camaraderie,” he said of high school football in particular. “People know each other. It would’ve been lonely for me (without it).”
So he took the job in a depressed former mining town for a base salary of $3,900, plus a $300 bonus for every additional sport he coached. It wasn’t much, but he enjoyed the rabid fandom and the team’s connection to the community, which stretched way back. In ‘41, before the team played Bingham in the state finals, the Park Record wrote, “It is understood that some of the stores throughout the city will close at 12:45 p.m., that the employees may attend the game.”
“They were really passionate up here,” Helen Knudson remembered.
“There was nothing else in town,” Gary Knudson followed.
That changed in 1963, when Park City began its transition from mining to tourism with the opening of the Treasure Mountain Resort. Gary Knudson left the school in 1965 to build ski lifts and eventually became a ski instructor. In 1977, the couple moved to Salt Lake City, where they lived for 22 years. But just before the Winter Olympics in 2002, they moved back to Park City, where the median home price today rests at $793,800, compared to the Utah average of $338,200.
The former mining town has become synonymous with skiing and wealth, in Utah and beyond. Among its current and former residents: Mitt Romney, Cheech Marin, Tony Danza, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. Several homes in the area are listed at over $11 million, with many more over $1 million. When wealth and prestige and tourism dollars started pouring into Park City, Gary noticed a difference in fandom and community investment in the football program. With more options, and with Park City becoming one of the country’s most renowned destinations for winter sports, interest dwindled. Until, Knudson said, the last couple of years.
Especially a year ago, when Park City’s football team reached the semifinals with three losses before a 20-0 loss to Dixie in the semifinals. This year, the Miners are 13-0, the top seed in class 4A. Their opponent in Friday’s final, Sky View, ranks second at 12-1. And interest is way up. You can see it around the school, where car windows painted with encouraging words dot the parking lot. You can see it near the school, where cardboard signs reading “Go Miners! Win State!” emerge from the snow like campaign yard signs along Kearns Boulevard. You can see it online, where Facebook posts proclaim the local Wendy’s will decorate its windows in support, and Trailside Elementary will stream the game during lunch. And you can see it around town, where local businesses like Chelsey Electric and Dolly’s Bookstore will close down for the game, harkening back to 1941. Many things may have changed since then, but the importance of going to state, it seems, remains.
Knudson knows such enthusiasm can give way to a lifetime of disappointment. He still thinks about the ‘63 loss every now and then.
“It bothers me,” he said. “I hope they don’t make that mistake.”
If they do — and Sky View will have something to say about that — then the next day’s headlines will likely be relegated to the dustbin of history, something the participants will both remember and hope to forget, something to be dug up later by some schmuck reporter rather than displayed in the school’s hallways or trophy cases. This isn’t lost on 44-year-old Josh Montzingo, the Park City head coach with the face of a choirboy and the enthusiastic temperament of a preacher. He doesn’t believe his team would be defined by one loss, but one win — well, that might be different.
“We’ve told the guys we’re so proud of them, and people are already gonna remember them and this magic ride no matter what happens in this game,” he said. “But if you really want to cement it and get that big crown and glory at the top, that’s gonna do it. Because nobody can top that.”
A chance at significance
It seems a little silly, doesn’t it? All this significance assigned to a game where helmeted men chase a leather oval around a green rectangle? Is winning a state title in football really so different from Park City’s dozens of other state titles in soccer and volleyball, tennis and golf?
The answer is yes — especially in a community like Park City. Even Arbabi, Park City’s principal, will admit it. He knows he needs to treat his athletes equitably, to make a star lacrosse player feel as important as a star quarterback. But, he’ll acknowledge, from the size of the crowd to the size of the team to the band to the cheerleaders to the relative infrequency of games, football is just different. And winning state in football is different, too.
“As much as we love our students being successful in other sports, it’s much different when you’re watching golf,” he said. “Students have been showing up to the games en masse. Every time we’ve won this year, students have run onto the field. We’re very proud of what they’ve done.”
Don’t believe him? Look around Park City, past and present.
Look at Pat McKissick, a star fullback under Knudson. McKissick died in 2014, but his obituary proclaims, above just about everything else, his high school football stardom.
Look at Park City Mayor Andy Beerman: “This is a historic opportunity for our Miners,” he said. “The entire community is excited and rooting for them.” Not for the Miners — for our Miners.
Look at this year’s senior class, whose members grew up playing youth football together and will have one more chance to do so — a fact that bodes well for the Miners. As Montzingo observed, “They kind of only know winning.” Especially Skidmore, who turned his playoff run into a scholarship offer from Davidson — a Division I program — earlier this week.
Look at Clint Weaver, a Park City football alum, son of a Park City football alum, who took Friday off from his job as an account manager at a tech company to watch his beloved Miners chase history up and down the green rectangle.
For goodness sake, look at Gary Knudson: the man has a hip replacement surgery scheduled for Friday, but since it conflicts with his ability to attend — or at the very least watch — the game, he’s having second thoughts. “What’s more important,” he wondered, “my hip or the game? I might have to cancel it.”
Finally, look at coach Montzingo. Look at how he talks about this team and its relationship with the town: “It’s kind of old school. You don’t get that much anymore. There’s just something unique and special about that,” he said. “These boys have really captured the hearts and minds of the town.”
And then ask yourself: How many events, how many rituals, how many festivals or parades or even football games can do — win or lose — what this game has already done?
