For some fleeting moments 17 years ago, it marked a level of greatness not seen before, at least on paper, in the Muskogee High School football program.

The national rankings that were born from the pages of USA Today and even regional daily papers such as the Dallas Morning News recognized coach Ron Freeman’s team. USA Today had the Roughers ranked 16th, Dallas Morning News had them 10th. Not even the 1986 state championship team had that.

But the ’86 team didn’t make a trip to East St. Louis, which ended with a 22-0 victory over the East St. Louis Flyers, ranked No. 12 nationally by USA Today and No. 1 by ESPN.

For some who attended the game, the memories are renewed often. Steve and Margaret Wagner made the 427-mile drive to the game. Their daughter, Lynn, was a sophomore cheerleader.

“We had some friends in nearby Belleville, Ill., who went with us to that game and even today still talk about it in awe,” Margaret Wagner said. “We were at a Christmas party up there just recently and they introduced us as being from the place in Oklahoma that beat East St. Louis.”

TOUGH PLACE

East St. Louis had a national reputation for both sports and crime. Muskogee witnessed the effects of both, addressing one. “People were coming up to us in a restaurant, in the hotel, at the airport, saying “you don’t do that,” recalled Richard Bradley about the game’s outcome.

Bradley, the MHS quarterback club president and father of quarterback Carter Bradley, made a trip to the city a year earlier to go over details of the trip. His most striking impression was walking toward the front door of the school.

“I was getting the lay of the land and here’s this huge banner as you walked on campus about drug use and possession of firearms and being subject to seizure and then going inside the building, you had to go through a metal detector,” he said. “It was an impression that was enough to make you a little nervous.”

In 1991, FBI statistics showed East St. Louis had the nation's highest murder rate (117 per 100,000) and half of the 41,000 who lived there were unemployed and three-fourths got some type of public assistance. The murder rate was three times the national rate and almost four times that of neighboring St. Louis, which set a homicide record in 1991 with 30 per 100,000.

Adds Jamie Young, the only remaining coach from Freeman’s staff that season who is still at MHS: “Even our poorest kids had never seen some of the sights they saw going through town,” he said. “Deserted buildings, burned-out buildings. I remember some of the kids making a big deal out of a charred water tower. To them, this was like scenes from Beirut.”

MOORE CONTROL