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When the average fan watches a pro football game, they see gods. Ideal physical specimens come to life, performing athletic feats they themselves can only dream of.To get more news about Dak Prescott, you can visit cowboysbuy.com official website.
On a field filled with larger-than-life superheroes, the scrappy underdog who looks like maybe he doesn’t belong always stands out and inevitably becomes a fan favorite.In sixty-plus years of Dallas Cowboys lore, perhaps no player personified that ethos more than Bill Bates.
“I think [the fans] could see some of themselves in me,” Bates said, as author Jeff Sullivan shares in America’s Team: The Official History of the Dallas Cowboys. “I wasn’t the biggest guy out there, oftentimes one of the smallest. I wasn’t the fastest guy out there. I was the gritty, hardworking stiff who was out there living his dream, and fans appreciated that.”
Appreciate it, they did. For fifteen improbable seasons, he was a fan favorite, even on rosters loaded with legends. But Bill Bates was always more than his stats; that’s the whole point. He was the poster child for playing with passion, for giving his all to the game and the team he loved, and for making dreams come true.When Ken Sparks was hired as coach at Farragut High prior to Bates’s sophomore year, his first order of business was to change the team’s uniforms to more closely his own favorite pro squad.
The Admirals already wore blue and grey; Sparks ordered a shift to blue and silver and added a familiar five-pointed logo to their headgear.
“Wearing that star on my helmet,” Bates would say many years later, “I dreamt about playing for the Dallas Cowboys.”
Over his high school career, Bates recorded 14 interceptions, over 1,000 return yards, and almost 200 tackles, and then played basketball and ran track on the side. Signing on to play football at the University of Tennessee, just twenty minutes from home, Bates was the fourth-best high school recruit in the state.
Bates built on his local reputation as a hard hitter with the Volunteers, starting at safety all four years. But his introduction to a national audience came by being on the receiving end of a collision that still makes highlight reels four decades later.
Tennessee was hosting No. 16-ranked Georgia in their 1980 season opener. A then-record crowd of over 95,000 packed Neyland Stadium in Knoxville to watch the Vols face the Bulldogs. In the Georgia backfield that night, an 18-year-old running back named Herschel Walker in his first collegiate game. |
