By MONTE DUTTON

On Friday night, I showed up at Wilder Stadium before any of the Clinton High School players. Keith Richardson and my paternal grandmother unwittingly made me ridiculously punctual. In an age in which most of my acquaintances are fashionably late, I am annoyingly early.

I wanted to chat with people about what I had heard on the radio a week earlier. I didn’t want my judgment clouded by what I had not seen. I wanted to watch the band rehearse. I wanted to watch people. It’s my avocation. I feel like I get just about as much out of being at a game as I do watching it.

Football sidelines have a community of their own. I know the ballboys about as well as the players. I walk by the cheerleaders and crack good-natured jokes. I know the soldier-cadets who do the pushups for every point, and the Red Devils generally do their part to increase the future of military fitness. I know the chain crew. I get to know the officials.

It made me think of Roger Miller’s ode to hoboes, “King of the Road”:

Third quarter, chance of rain / Destination county fame / Three touchdowns by his name / He’s the player of the game.

I know every daddy and every mom / Words to the high-school song / College where the umpire once played ball / Memories of the free-for-alls.

If I’m suitably satirical, I can be king of the sidelines.

All of this ends at 4 a.m., give or take an hour. I could probably get done sooner if I didn’t call Phil Kornblut with a post-game report and insist on watching highlights of games on three different channels. There’s usually a replay of a game between BYU and SMU, or two other U’s, to keep me company.

Upon awakening, I tumble out of bed directly into cheap tennis shoes and stagger to the facilities, then to the clothes horse that used to be an exercise bike for keys and wallet, and then to the truck, and then to a drive-through window for a breakfast combo with coffee. It is acceptable to go through a drive-through without being otherwise presentable.

There’s no college game for me to cover, which should overjoy me but doesn’t. Furman is playing the Fighting Dates of Open, and Presbyterian is in Indianapolis to play Butler.

Barely finite games were on TV. I followed PC on my laptop, watched a lot of Coach Prime and a little Clemson, then a lot of Texas, followed by a lot of Chattanooga-Wofford and a little of the Gamecocks in Rocky Top.

I’m not sure I broadened my horizons with any of the above.

Still unimpressed with the NFL to date, I nonetheless watched only about a third, tops, of the NASCAR race at Talladega, mainly because I’ve developed a compulsive fanaticism regarding just how bad the Carolina Panthers can be.

The only redeeming feature of Sunday was within the mesquite and spruce walls of my favorite guitar.

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