Photo Courtesy of Missy Buck Gillman

The first thought that may surface when bright lights glint off the golden ring and its glistening baubles might be: Too much, too soon. Deeper examination, however, of what’s at play here could alter that thought.

Just as gaudy Super Bowl rings, too overpowering even on the cucumber fingers of some National Football League players, are personal accessories of the Lombardi Trophy given to each season’s NFL champion. So too are the Metro Christian High School Class 2A State Championship rings (see photo) symbolic of a job well done.

These rings are unlike those that life partners of whatever stripe give to each other when they are joined together in one of the increasingly numerous ways this can occur. These rings—the rings of champions—are earned, not given. Both types of rings are about love—the champions’ rings the love for teammates and what those who played the game together have done, not as one. They mark forever each player’s worthiness.

The ring accompanying this essay belongs to Dempsey Gillman, grandson of the late Bucky Buck. Dempsey and his teammates at Metro Christian High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during a most challenging season complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, successfully defended the championship the Patriots also had won the previous season. Dempsey had not played on that team, having transferred from Collinsville, another football small town north of Tulsa, before the past season. For the 2020 champions, Dempsey, a junior, had made important plays and contributed in big ways.

Because I knew Dempsey’s grandfather and way he thought, I could not help but wonder about the complexity Bucky might have found in this championship totem. As happy for and proud of Dempsey as he would have been, he might have asked whether championship rings were necessary. When we were teammates and friends in the early 1960s, the best of the best received State Champion football patches that they sewed onto their letterman jackets. Was that enough? Did a high school player need a ring?

Times change and recognition evolves. Today’s rings are yesterday’s patches. But one simple and, I think, critical fact remains: For most of players a high school championship will be the highlight of their athletic careers, maybe their lives. Few high school players, even the stars, are good enough to play in college and win more championships, much less go on to the NFL and a Lombardi Trophy. The chaff is separated from the wheat.

Bucky is gone, and I miss him and his wisdom every day. But I know he would have recognized the meaning and significance of what Dempsey and his teammates accomplished. He did not believe in participation trophies. Trophies and rings are earned, not handed out showing up. Yet they are. These are (ego) inflationary times.

When Bucky and I were boys, we did not have training facilities and strength coaches. Our training rooms were outdoors, the hayfields and oil patches around Nowata, Oklahoma. We football players didn’t train for the season by bench pressing and curling chromed bars with giant steel plates at each end in air-conditioned and carpeted comfort; we corralled cumbersome bales of hay lifted, flung, and otherwise propelled them onto the back of flatbed trucks, careful to not forget the gloves that kept the baling wire from cutting into our hands. If a boy was tough enough to do the hard, heavy work he probably was tough enough to play the game it helped to prepare him to play.

Before Bucky’s senior season—this and much more is detailed in my book Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart—his “personal trainers” found a unique means to prepare him for the season. There are quotations around the term “personal trainers” because they were his uncles, Wilbur and Dewey, with whom he worked that important summer in the oil field. They were full-grown men, as tough as they come. They contrived a simple way to make linebacker/fullback Bucky Buck in their image and improve their Nowata Ironmen. In fact, their training regimen did honor to the team nickname and the hellions they were.

After a long, demanding day in the oilfield, Dewey and Wilbur were ready to pile into their pickup and head into town for a cold one. Bucky was not invited along for the ride. Instead, his uncles made him run seven miles to town each evening. By the time preseason practice began, his coaches were raving about what great shape Bucky was in. Bucky took the forced training in stride. “It was run,” he said, “or be late for supper.”

Though Dempsey is engaged at this time of year in perhaps his best sport—baseball—where he is a home run hitting catcher, he thinks of himself first and foremost as a football player. Since, living in Ohio, I am kept more than politely socially distanced from Dempsey, I am in no position to do for him what his grandfather’s uncles did for him. I can, however, suggest that the months that stretch ahead of him could prove to be the most important offseason, preseason, and season of his football life.

Those runs to supper from the oilfield—not to mention his inherent toughness—helped Bucky earn a scholarship at Fort Scott (Kansas) Community College where he played linebacker with two of our Nowata teammates, All-Conference wingback Clarence Smith and All-State tailback Richard Nash. He might have gone on to play at the University of Miami but decided Florida was a country too far from his beloved Oklahoma, and the family that ultimately came to include Dempsey Gillman, a chip off the ol’ Buck block.

If Dempsey works as hard at improving on the football field as his grandfather did, there are no limits to the heights he might reach. He will be one of the better returning defensive players for Metro Christian and perhaps the team’s best all-around player. He does not strike me as the type of young man who will spend time staring at his State Championship Ring when he should be preparing for and figuring out how to win another. Bucky, not entirely in jest, could probably tell him just how to make a run for it.