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Monday, December 11, 1995 Page: 16A
Curry’s Berwick tradition: Greatness on the gridiron
When you watch Astaire dance; when you hear Sinatra sing; when you see the
Berwick Bulldogs play football..All you can do is sit back, look up and
admire.
Most of us know greatness only fleetingly in our lives. It carries us once
or twice and is gone, like a perfect wave that an ecstatic surfer rides,
knowing it may never come again.
Maybe your greatness came on a hunting trip — on a crisp December morning
when the coffee warmed the soul, the stillness calmed the spirit and the buck
strolled right into your sights. Or maybe as you got ready for a big date one
night, you looked in the mirror and knew you could do no wrong. And you were
right.
Or maybe you remember one crystalline Saturday not so many Octobers ago,
when you spent the day raking leaves and then jumping into the piles with your
laughing daughter. On that day at least, Dr. Spock himself couldn’t have
parented better.
Memories of such dizzying heights make us appreciate Berwick all the more.
Because somehow or other, Coach George Curry and his Berwick team live on a
peak of greatness. Curry not only leads his team up that Alpine slope once. He
does so week after week, year after year, again and again and again.
Curry shares that trait with Penn State’s Joe Paterno, probably the most
admired man in the state. We suspect both men say they’re in the teaching
business, not the coaching business. They teach young men how to harness their
full potential: how to work at 95 or 98 percent capacity, not the 60 or 70
percent others putter along at. How to draw from wells of strength and
resourcefulness the youngsters never knew they had. How to ascend at least one
honest summit of human achievement — the mastery of high-school and college
football.
And it all comes together in the winning of football games.
Congratulations, Coach Curry, the Berwick players and the whole Berwick
football organization. Your hard work and raw dedication have put you on top
of your game and, in USA Today’s considered opinion, on top of the high school
football world.
We who live in the mere foothills of such achievement salute you!