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Members of the 1983 Parry Mc-Cluer High School football team still recall the hostile atmosphere when the Fighting Blues arrived in Big Stone Gap for their Group A state semifinal game against Powell Valley.
A year earlier, the Vikings had picked off the Blues in the same round at Camden Field in Buena Vista. Powell Valley won that game 14-13 – a missed extra point providing the difference in the scoreline – on its way to the first of four state championships between 1982 and 1990.
In 1983, PM arrived to find a sea of red and blue at Bullitt Park. And Viking fans weren’t about to let the Blues forget about the 1982 result.
“We were out there just in our street clothes,” said Danny Cole, a welldecorated offensive and defensive lineman for PM. “Their fans were out there chanting, ‘14-13, 14-13.’ That put a little craw in our bellies that’s not going to happen again.”
It didn’t. Butch Wheeler caught a touchdown pass on the opening drive, and the PM defense held Powell Valley at bay as the Blues returned home with a 7-3 victory.
A week later, PM knocked off Madison County 21-6 at Washington and Lee University’s Wilson Field, securing the program’s third state title in seven years. Forty years later, the 1983 Blues will be honored with induction into the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame this fall, at the Blues’ home football game against Craig County on Oct. 13 and at the induction banquet on Oct. 14.
Near Misses
The 1982 semifinal wasn’t the only agonizingly close call for the Blues during that stretch.
In 1981, PM lost 19-14 to J.J. Kelly in the Group A semifinals, conceding a Hail Mary touchdown on a fourth-and-long play late in the final quarter.
For a while, it seemed like the Blues’ players in the early 1980s were snakebitten, stopped just short of adding to the legacy of the 1977 and 1979 championship teams for legendary coach Bobby Williams. It wasn’t a comfortable – or familiar – feeling.
“By the time we got up there [to the varsity team], it was just expected that we were going to win state,” said Mark Wheeler, who played fullback and linebacker and also served as the placekicker. “If we didn’t win the state, it was a disappointment.”
The 1983 season started out with another defeat, this time a 19-16 loss at Giles. Even that early in the fall – and even against a quality opponent – such a setback could have derailed the Blues’ hopes of another deep run.
Enter Williams – a PM Hall of Famer himself – and his fellow coaches. Dave Ellison and Charlie Wheeler were assistants for the varsity squad, while Kerry Camper and Mike Turner helmed the junior varsity team. Mike Craft, who later took the Blues to two state quarterfinals as the head coach, also helped out with the program.
The coaches got the Blues’ heads on straight, and PM responded by squeaking out a 13-12 road win against another tough foe, Fluvanna County, in week two.
“We had probably one of the best coaching staffs,” said Rad Patterson, a defensive back on the 1983 team. “It’s amazing how they worked together. They formed a good little group and stayed together, coached together.”
On a Roll
Everyone else who stood in the Blues’ way in the 1983 regular season was in for a thrashing. PM outscored its final eight opponents by an eye-popping 33023 margin.
The Blues’ talent and depth led to that string of lopsided wins. The PM roster featured over 60 players, and – while several of the stars played both offense and defense – the Blues had serious competition for nearly every position.
“Back then, we had enough talent on both sides of the ball that we could really challenge each other in practice,” Patterson said. “Our practices were pretty intense.”
The varsity team was also at the end of a massive pipeline. Little league squads in town all ran the Blues’ straight-T formation on offense and Williams’ “monster” defense, and of course the JV coaches worked from the same schemes as the varsity team.
So while there was skill all over the field – including powerhouse running back Butch Wheeler, the speedy halfback Kirk Wheeler, quarterback Brent Huffman, and defensive playmakers like Cole, Wayne Beverley, Mike Groot, Terence Huffman and Timmy Roberts – anyone who played football in Buena Vista at that time was on the same page of the playbook.
“They knew everything when they got there” to the varsity level, said Charlie Wheeler, whose 24-year run as a PM assistant overlapped with most of Williams’ tenure from 19741994. “It was just a matter of fine-tuning it.”
The Blues’ Pioneer District rivals knew that tune, but they weren’t exactly singing along. PM hung at least 40 points on all five district opponents, shutting out four of them. The regularseason finale was a 55-0 demolition of Lexington.
PM’s Region C playoff opposition wasn’t much more of a match, as the Blues walloped Drewry Mason 33-14 in the regional semifinals and won 35-0 at Holston in the championship.
It was on to states with a full head of steam.
Settling a Score The general sense among PM players from the early 1980s was that the Blues had a superior team to Powell Valley in 1982, but that the Vikings might have been better from top to bottom the next year.
Yet motivation can often erase those kinds of advantages, and there was no more determined bunch than the PM squad that arrived in Big Stone Gap for the 1983 semifinals. Certainly, no one on the bus needed to be reminded of what had happened at Camden Field the year before.
“That’s kind of where the journey began,” said Chris Floyd, who played guard for the Blues. “When we lost that game [in 1982], those of us that were coming back the next year, we were determined that wasn’t going to happen again.”
PM jumped out to an early 7-0 lead, but the Blues’ offense couldn’t generate much after that early touchdown. Meanwhile, Powell Valley fullback Joe Mullins racked up yardage in the middle of the field as the Vikings threatened to score time after time.
And yet the PM defense stood tall when it mattered most. A combination of some key penalties and turnovers helped the Blues to keep Powell Valley out of the end zone all game long.
“They would drive the ball and drive the ball to the 20-yard line, and for whatever reason the drive would stall out,” Cole said.
Or maybe fate was simply smiling on the Blues that day. After suffering heartbreak in the 1981 and 1982 semifinals, PM surely deserved to find itself on the right side of a close playoff game.
But the job wasn’t quite finished. Back to Glory
A much shorter trip awaited PM for the 1983 Group A championship game, as the Blues – and, from the looks of archival photographs, just about every citizen of Buena Vista – made their way over to W&L’s Wilson Field to face Madison County.
Though the semifinal at Powell Valley might have seemed like the bigger hurdle, the Mountaineers were no pushover. Madison won state titles in 1973 and 1976, and the Mountaineers had fallen 14-13 to the Vikings in the 1982 final.
And in an era when power running games were the standard, Madison ran a spread offense years before it became the norm. Even though the Blues had studied the scheme on film, it still took some time to adjust to it on the field – and at halftime of the 1983 title tilt, the Mountaineers were ahead 6-0.
It was time for Williams and his staff to provide one last bit of motivation for the Blues.
“We were in the locker room over at W&L, and the coaches came in,” Mark Wheeler said. “They didn’t get on us or holler at us or scream, like we thought they would.
“They just were honest with us,” he continued. “They said, ‘You’ve been working this hard all season to get to this point. It’s totally up to you to go out there and do it.’” The message was received loud and clear, as PM turned the tables with a dominant second half. Groot had a strip-sack that set up a pivotal touchdown, and the Blues blanked Madison 21-0 after the break to take a 21-6 victory.
“We didn’t want to disappoint our coaches nor our fans,” Cole said. “We just felt like we did what we set out to do, and we were supposed to do. As a Fighting Blue, I expected it [to win the state title]… It’s just something that was instilled in us from previous years.”
Leaving a Legacy
PM would go on to claim two more state championships under Williams, earning back-to-back Group A Division 1 crowns in 1986 and 1987. But the 1983 squad has made an indelible mark on the Blues’ proud history. And that goes way beyond one season from 40 years back. Patterson and Mark Wheeler both went on to serve as head coaches for the Blues, and Cole is one of several players from that team who put in time as an assistant. Floyd covered PM for years for both this publication and local radio. Many others have stayed closely connected to Fighting Blues football throughout the years.
If you were a young man growing up in Buena Vista back then, football was in your blood. The 1977 and 1979 teams inspired the 1983 squad, which in turn set the table for two more championships later in that decade.
“We definitely had a successful program,” Patterson said. “That goes to the coaches, but it also goes to the players. Everybody wanted to play football.”
Several of the 1983 Blues seem to recollect key moments from that fall as if they had happened four days ago, and not four decades. But that may just speak to how special the season was for everyone involved.
“Looking back on different things, that was probably one of the highlights of my life,” Mark Wheeler said. “That season, and that team.”
