The 1975 Woodruff Wolverines were an Afterthought to all but Themselves Until they Laid the Foundation for South Carolina’s Greatest Football Dynasty of the 1970s
By: Garrett Mitchell, Staff Writer
Frankie Walker, Keith Littlefield, and the rest of the 1974 Woodruff football team trudged into the locker room, heads low in lamentation of what could have been, after longtime play-off nemesis Chapin had ended yet another season without a championship for the Wolverines.
Woodruff had been so close for so long, yet following consecutive titles in 1956 and 1957, and a lone championship in 1965, the Wolverines had not won it all in nearly a decade. They had still only claimed the ultimate prize three times during the 20-year tenure of Coach Willie Varner’s career.
The chances had been there. Woodruff made it to within sight of the summit in 1963, 1968, and 1972, only to fall just short of the peak all three times.
A consistently good program, and one on the cusp of true greatness, but without a bevy of hardware to show for the efforts.
As Walker and Littlefield joined the procession of the 1974 season’s wake, they made a promise.
Walker, the Wolverines’ promising up-and-coming quarterback, and Littlefield, a burgeoning star on Varner’s offensive line, vowed it would be the final time they felt this feeling.
1975 would be it, they told themselves. As the calendar turned, so did their’s and their teammates’ thoughts of climbing back to the top and setting up camp among the true bluebloods of high school football in the Palmetto State.
“Coming off that loss to Chapin, of course they had the great I.M. Hipp, the great running back who went on to play at Nebraska, but nevertheless we were that close,” remembered Walker. “We had this little taste in our mouths of that, guys. We have the team to get there. So, the next year, when we went to camp, we vowed we would take this thing to the top.”
Admittedly, said Littlefield, the 1974 team had not been particularly dominant. Rather, that season the Wolverines resided in the neighborhood of average and survived more on guile and heart than talent.
But they were also young with room to grow and Littlefield perhaps had an idea that the 1975 Wolverines would be in a bit better position to make more noise in the band of 2A behemoths.
“I’m going to be honest,” Littlefield said. “Everyone thinks their team is this or that looking back, but our 1974 team was really not that good of a ball club. Our B-team would go out there and work on (the varsity team). Anyway, we were 6-6. We won one play-off game (against Blacksburg), then we went and played Chapin. We played them close that night, and Frankie and I were sophomores. We had a lot of pushing from the seniors (in 1975) and a lot of talent coming up from the JV team.”
That 12-0 defeat to Chapin had, on the surface, caused despair and dejection. In reality, it had added combustible mental fuel to a smoldering fire just waiting to burn out of control and raze the rest of the state.
In 1975 the Wolverines were loaded with talent with an attitude to match.
Walker and senior Rusty Lanford shared quarterback duties, Littlefield anchored the offensive line, Turk Watson (Gist) and Vernon “Squeaky” Browning shared carries at tailback, Keith Garrett was a monstrous wide receiver for his day at 6-feet-4 inches tall and almost 220 pounds, and a young sophomore defender named Stan Watson was starting what would be one of the greatest careers by a Wolverine ever.
Coach Varner, as he so often did, threw his team right into the flames. Varner loved to schedule larger and talented teams, postulating that the tough competition would help his players down the season’s stretch and in the postseason.
The Wolverines fell to Clinton in the season’s first contest by a slim 3-0 margin before topping Belton-Honea Path in a close game and defeating Byrnes 17-13.
“The Clintons and Belton-Honea Paths and Byrnes were high-powered schools back then,” Walker stated. “We were just a little ‘ol 2A school that had a great coach who scheduled those teams because Coach Varner wasn’t scared of anything. I think playing that caliber of teams really helped us out, and it prepared us for a run at the 2A state championship.”
With a 2-1 record to start the season, Woodruff encountered its first adversary of the same classification, the Newberry Bulldogs. For the first time, in a game they were probably expected to win, the Wolverines crashed into a stumbling block.
“Just a physically huge team,” Littlefield recalled of Newberry. “Willie Scott, who I played in the Shrine Bowl with, picked up a fumble and returned it about 70 yards. He went on to play at the University of South Carolina and for (the) Kansas City (Chiefs) and was a real athlete. They were very tough, athletic and big. It was a tough night. Randy Pollard kicked a field goal, and after that, you know, they just took it to us.”
Newberry won the game 14-3, leaving the Wolverines sitting at 2-2 and still trying to find an identity. However, as they had done following the previous season’s loss to Chapin, Woodruff reached down into their own souls to find that competitive flame they vowed would be the courier of a renaissance.
Woodruff regrouped the following week, blanking Liberty 21-0, before demolishing Cowpens 56-0. The Wolverines recorded their third consecutive shutout victory in the season’s seventh game, trouncing perennial punching bag Westminster 48-0.
A game against Wren would end with a hard-fought 17-14 Wolverine victory before Woodruff capped an 8-2 regular season with drubbings of Pendleton and Blue Ridge to claim the region title and set the stage to claim what they had long sought after, a state championship.
“The Newberry game, I think that’s where the turning point came for us,” Walker said. “Hey, we had a wake-up call that we were going to have to buckle down. I think that following week of practice with Coach Varner might have been the roughest week we ever had, but we woke up after losing to Newberry.”
Walked added, “Once we realized what we had, the town’s backing, it enabled us to take the field on Friday nights and give everything we had. That’s just the bottom line.”
Woodruff cruised through the first two rounds of the play-offs, dispatching Chesnee 38-7 followed by a 21-0 blanking of Ware Shoals. Then, in the semifinals, the Wolverines drew a talented Fort Mill team and found themselves in a fight to the final seconds.
“Tough game,” recalled Littlefield. “Fort Mill had a good ballclub. They drove the ball on us all night, and we had to stop them down inside our 10-yard line several times. Heck of a ballgame.”
Walker admitted there were moments against Fort Mill when the team harkened back to the Chapin game the year before and reminded themselves of their promise during that long walk back to the locker room that night.
This time, in this game, it was not going to slip through their grasp.
“We were determined not to let this game slip by,” continued Walker. “We were too close. We only had this game to get to the finals, and that was it. That’s when we stepped on it and buckled down, and everyone did what they were supposed to do.”
Woodruff held on against Fort Mill, winning 21-16 over the Yellow Jackets and punching their ticket to the big game where awaiting them was an always-fearsome Bamberg-Ehrhardt team. But this time, the Wolverines held the right cards. In Woodruff, the Red Raiders would be making the long drive to Spartanburg County where they would have to face the Wolverines on their own field, in front of a rabid throng of fans who had waited a decade to celebrate another championship.
Still, best-laid plans did little to put that penultimate game to bed early, and once again, Woodruff found itself in big trouble with time slipping away.
“It was Thursday night before the game, and Coach Varner called me in and told me, you know, this is Rusty’s last game, we’re at home, and I think I’m going to have him to start off (at quarterback),” Walker explained. “It wasn’t any big thing for me, and I knew sooner or later I would get in because we had been sharing duties throughout the year.”
He continued, “Unfortunately, Rusty didn’t have his best game. The fans weren’t very happy and they kind of saw it slipping away.”
Woodruff trailed 14-7 with just under seven minutes to play in the ballgame, and Bamberg-Ehrhardt had the ball. The Wolverine defense stood up the Red Raiders, and with the straits growing ever more dire, Varner called to his junior quarterback.
“I was on the sideline staying focused, making sure I was ready,” said Walker. “Fans were yelling, ‘Put Frankie in! Can’t you see the score?’ I can still hear it today. So, Coach Varner came over, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘Ok buddy, this is your time. Let’s go ahead and do it.’”
Two minutes later the Wolverines had a 21-14 lead and went from the brink of unimaginable heartbreak to the precipice of football immortality.
“Best game I have ever seen,” laughed Littlefield. “Of course, I played in it. Bamberg had been close for several years just like we had, and it was an unbelievable game.”
The tying score came on a pass from Walker to Garrett, a Shrine Bowl selection in 1975. Then, following a fumble recovery, Walker went to the air one final time, finding a wide-open Bruce Hayes in the endzone for the go-ahead touchdown.
It was the only catch of the season for the seldom-used Hayes but the biggest of his life.
“Bruce was small and the son of a preacher,” quipped Littlefield. “Only pass he caught all year.”
Maybe, then, it was appropriate that a young man with a direct line to the man upstairs caught the pass that answered 10-years’ worth of Wolverine prayers. Because this time, Woodruff could not, and would not, be denied.
“It was something else,” Littlefield said.
Bamberg-Ehrhardt was quickly snuffed out on their final drive. As the clock wound down to zero hours, the crescendo of sirens, from the assembled police cars and fire trucks parked outside of the endzone, blared the news of the Wolverines’ victory deep into the December night for the rest of the state to hear.
The Woodruff Wolverines were back.
“It was one of those feelings you remember for the rest of your life,” said Littlefield.
And little did anyone know that, as Woodruff’s players and Coach Varner hoisted the championship trophy aloft among their legions of fans, that they had just laid the cornerstone of one of South Carolina’s greatest sports dynasties of all time.
Walker, Littlefield, Watson, and much of the 1975 team returned for the next season and 1976 produced, by many people’s estimations, not only the greatest team in Woodruff history but probably one of the best in the history of South Carolina high school football as well.
But that is another story unto itself.
Riding the momentum from their state championship, the Wolverines won it all again in 1976. And they just kept on winning.
By the time the decade had turned, Woodruff had played for six consecutive state championships and won five. Wins in 1977 and 1978 completed a historic four-peat of titles. Following a loss in the 1979 championship game, the Wolverines won it all again in 1980.
Add back-to-back titles in 1983 and 1984, and Woodruff football won seven state championships in the 10-year period from 1975-84. It was a remarkable feat of sustained dominance that was rarely seen before or has been seen since in this state, and the first laid stone of that dynastic ascension can be traced back to 1975.
To a team that refused to believe they were anything but the best.
“I credit it to the athletic program that Coach Varner had in place,” Walker said. “Again, from the midget league up to the varsity team, that all played into that success. You grew up with your teammates, played with one another as a team, and shared a lot of things off the field. We didn’t ever want to let each other down.”
Walker and Littlefield would both be enshrined in the Woodruff Football Hall of Fame in the years following their careers, joining Keith Garrett and many others who took part in the historic dynasty that was Woodruff Wolverine football.
Appropriately, 1975 was also the first season that the stadium bore the name of the man who constructed it all. The house that Varner built was renamed ‘W.L. Varner Stadium’ in May of 1975 in a ceremony following the annual Maroon and Gold spring game.
Just maybe, it was all meant to be.
“We felt like we had laid the groundwork for the kids that were following us,” Littlefield added. “The standard had been set. If you weren’t a part of it, then it’s hard to describe. Setting and uplifting the standard of Woodruff football that Coach Varner had set, it’s just something that you never forget.”
Author: Tracy Sanders
