Some rivalries are born because two schools are close together. Others grow out of championships, playoff games and years of seeing the same colors standing on the opposite sideline.
And then there are rivalries built one story at a time.
Lovington and Portales have plenty of those stories.
My first real introduction to the Lovington-Portales rivalry came when I was a sophomore in high school. The Rams had beaten us in football, 6-0, a loss that knocked the Wildcats out of the playoffs. That was bad enough. But Portales wasn’t quite ready to let us forget it.
Basketball season rolled around, and when Lovington traveled to Portales, their student body had constructed a huge sign with two simple numbers:
6-0.
There it was, hanging behind the Portales students, a not-so-subtle reminder of what had happened during football season.
One Lovington football player decided the sign had been displayed long enough.
Tom Embree calmly walked across the gym toward the Portales student section. He climbed the bleachers, reached the sign and gently removed it. He didn’t tear it. Didn’t rip it. Didn’t make a big scene. He simply rolled it up, walked back down the stands and carried it out to his vehicle.
The next day, that 6-0 sign was hanging on the wall of our locker room in the Fieldhouse.
And there it stayed.
Every day.
All offseason.
You couldn’t dress for practice without seeing it. You couldn’t lift weights without seeing it. You couldn’t walk through that locker room without being reminded what those two numbers meant.
6-0.
Sometimes motivation doesn’t need a speech.
When football season arrived in 1972, we got another opportunity at Portales.
Lovington won 16-0.
Funny how a scoreboard can talk.
Years later, I would experience Portales week from the other side—not as a player, but as a young coach.
It was 1981, my first year coaching at Lovington. Through eight games we were 4-4, and we had just suffered a gut-wrenching 22-20 loss to Tucumcari on a 56-yard field goal by Reagan Brown. We were down. Practices needed something. The players needed something.
We needed a spark.
And somewhere in the middle of all that came two words that a generation of Wildcats would eventually understand:
ANGRY RED!
The rules were pretty simple—mainly because there weren’t many rules.
At some completely random point during practice, I would yell, “ANGRY RED!”
For the next 20 or 30 seconds, practice turned into controlled chaos.
Find somebody close to you and take a shot. Nothing cheap. Don’t hurt anybody. But for those few seconds, you were allowed to cut loose.
Then it stopped.
Back to practice.
It sounds crazy now. It probably sounded crazy then.
But it worked.
The players came alive. Energy returned to practice. Guys were laughing, hollering and flying around. By the end of the week, we weren’t thinking much about being 4-4 anymore.
We were thinking about Portales.
The Rams would eventually go on to win the 1981 state championship. But on that particular Friday night, the Wildcats beat them 11-6.
Angry Red.
If you played Wildcat football during the 1980s or ’90s, chances are those two words still bring a smile to your face.
But Portales week wasn’t finished creating traditions.
Then came the doll.
In 1988, we lost to Portales 22-21 at Blackwater Draw. As the next Portales game approached, I was looking for another way to make the week different—to remind our players that certain losses have a way of hanging around until you do something about them.
That’s when an English lesson found its way into the football locker room.
I told the team about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, the mariner kills the albatross, and as punishment for his deed, the dead bird is hung around his neck—a symbol of the burden he must carry.
Yes, I was coaching football and helping the English department.
Our version of the albatross was considerably smaller.
We made little figures out of red or black yarn, roughly three inches tall, with a long piece of yarn attached so they could be worn around a player’s neck.
And during Portales week, you wore your doll.
All week.
Another tradition had been born.
Somewhere along the way, the dolls picked up a better name. A former Portales head coach once told me how much he hated those “voodoo dolls.”
Perfect.
From then on, that’s what they were.
Looking back, none of these things were really about a sign, 20 seconds of controlled chaos or a three-inch piece of yarn. They were about making the game mean something before the ball was ever kicked off. They connected one year’s team to another. A player who had never experienced the original loss could still understand the story behind the tradition.
That’s one of the great things about high school football.
Traditions don’t always begin with somebody sitting in a meeting and deciding, We’re going to start a tradition.
Sometimes a player calmly walks into the opposing student section and takes down a 6-0 sign.
Sometimes a frustrated young coach suddenly yells “ANGRY RED!”
And sometimes an old English poem becomes a three-inch yarn doll hanging around the necks of a bunch of football players.
Years pass. Players graduate. Coaches come and go. Scores fade from memory.
But the stories remain.
And when Portales week rolls around, some of us can still see that sign hanging on the Fieldhouse wall. We can still hear two words echoing across the practice field. And somewhere, I’m willing to bet, there’s an old Wildcat who still has a little red or black yarn doll tucked away in a box.
6-0.
Angry Red.
The Voodoo Doll.
Portales week.
Fun times.
And the Tale goes on.