NC man can’t get enough of Friday night football. His friend helps him ‘see’ the game

“We lost 5 yards, Tom,” Hayden Shackelford says.

Shackelford and his friend, Tom Husketh, stand inside the fence at South Granville High School football games, a little ways from the sidelines where the players sit. South Granville’s varsity football team, dubbed the Vikings, are playing the Southern Nash High School Firebirds. The teams are red and blue under the floodlights.

“We gotta kick it again?” Husketh asks.

“Yes, we do,” Shackelford says.

The Vikings’ marching band begins its drumroll. The noise rolls into a crescendo as fans call out to the team. The tension is palpable.

“Here we go, here we go,” Shackelford says.

The referee blows the whistle. The drumroll reaches its peak, cutting off abruptly.

“And there’s the kick,” he says.

For fans who regularly attend South Granville football games, Husketh and Shackelford are a familiar sight. If one were to get closer to them, however, they would realize two things: that Husketh is blind, and that Shackelford is narrating the play-by-play to him.

In the 1950s, doctors were unaware that an excess of oxygen in incubators could result in blindness. This can cause retrolental fibroplasia, found in infants who weigh less at birth, but most commonly in children who are born prematurely.

Husketh’s retinas were damaged, leaving him unable to see shapes and most colors, though he can distinguish between day and night.

For more than 20 years, he and Shackelford have attended South Granville’s football games, and Shackelford’s descriptive commentary helps him “see” the game. Decades of memorizing plays, options, offensives and defensives informs him of a player’s, or team’s, next move.

When Shackelford asks Husketh what he thinks will happen next, he’ll run through the information he knows and come up with an answer.

Most of the time, he’s right.

Longtime football fan

“Nineteen seconds left, Tom,” Shackelford says. In the next week, South Granville plays Hillside High School, which has a strong quarterback and offensive plays. “Quarter half. Shotgun position. One back to the backfield. Split-wide and left, goes back to pass, and he throws to the — oh, intercepted, Tom!”

South Granville is doing poorly on one thing: “No blocking,” Husketh says. Hillside is doing well on containment and receiving, and the quarterback is throwing with pinpoint accuracy.

Husketh began attending football games when he was 17 in 1969, when his oldest brother, Bill Husketh, joined the South Granville football team. Their mother was a teacher at the school.

“My mom asked, did he want us to come out to away games,” Husketh said. “He said, ‘Yeah, but, Mama, if I get hurt, don’t come out there on the field.”

Standing on the sidelines, Husketh and Shackelford have had a few close calls. A stray ball will fly in their direction, coming too close. A player or coach will retrieve the ball and speak with Husketh, who is called their “No. 1 fan,” according to Shackelford.

Michael Hobgood, South Granville’s football coach, first started coaching at the school in 2005.

“When I first started coaching at South Granville, he was the first one that called me — and I had no idea how he got my number, but he did when I got the job — and say congratulations,” Hobgood said.

During the call, Husketh mentioned that he was blind and asked if he could stand on the sidelines, which is how the arrangement was set up.

Since 2005, Hobgood and Husketh have talked over the phone extensively about the team. Who’s starting at quarterback this week? How’s this player’s ankle injury?

“We don’t have a lot of media coverage, we don’t have a lot of newspaper articles written about us or anything,” Hobgood said. “He really does his homework to find out all this information, to even ask about it. So, it is pretty amazing how in-depth he researches it all the time.”

Husketh is also an avid North Carolina State University fan. He has been the annual holder of three N.C. State football tickets for almost 45 years and has only missed one game. Shackelford has attended some of these games with him.

Five years ago, there was a hurricane during the season, and other schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference canceled their games. N.C. State did not.

“I told Tom, and Tom said, ‘Are we gonna go?’” Shackelford said. “I said, ‘No! I’m not gonna get out with them fools!’ It was on TV. And, man, there were people out there with nothing on but a pair of shorts. And the wind was going so bad that it was hard to see the game, because the rain was going sideways.”

Very little can be done to hold Husketh back from watching a football game, other than dangerous weather.

Husketh likes hearing the audience scream and cheer for their respective teams. The excitement in the air exhilarates him as he yells along, “Go, go, go!” for South Granville.

Experiencing the game in a different way

But, there is a difference between experiencing the game as opposed to analyzing it. Saying that he “visualizes” the game is incorrect. Husketh memorizes the numbers and names of key players, but he does not have a grid in his mind of where the players stand.

Hobgood will watch his team play, for example, and has a visual perspective on how players should block, move or throw the ball. But, if something doesn’t happen the way he expects it to, he can figure out the error before watching the recording later.

“I’m sure we have different takes on different things, but I think it’s a lot more similar than one would imagine,” Hobgood said.

There are other aspects that help Husketh understand how football works, too.

When Shackelford first met Husketh, he says that Husketh knew what football was as a sport, but was unable to conceptualize how it was played and what the players were doing.

“So, what I did was I brought some shoulder pads and a helmet and I put them on and I beat on them for a little bit,” Shackelford said. “I said, ‘This is nothing compared to if you hear those big clashes out there — this is what you’re hitting.”

Shackelford also guided Husketh around the field to help him approximate how far the players travel. 10, 20, 30 yards. If a player snaps 30 yards, that’s how far players need to travel for the first step. Shackelford guided Husketh from the 20-yard line to the 30-yard line, cementing in his memory how far the players needed to travel to score.

That tutorial, though, was at Husketh’s request.

“Tom has a tendency — if he doesn’t remember something, he’ll ask,” Shackelford said. “He’s not shy about that.”

Husketh’s prized possession is an Amazon Echo Dot, which comes installed with Alexa. A gift from his nephew, he uses it for football radio broadcasts, ‘50s music and more.

“I wouldn’t trade it for nothing,” he says.

But even though he could rely on radio or announcer commentary for football games, Husketh remains full of questions for Shackelford, Hobgood and anyone who knows the sport. He calls Shackelford before a game to make sure they’re still going together and calls afterward to talk about what happened — why South Granville won, why they lost, why certain players did certain things.

“And then the week until the next game, we continue to talk about what Coach Hobgood needs to do to get ready for the next team, and the weaknesses and strengths,” Shackelford said. “That’s his dialogue. That’s what he wants to talk about.”

The tradition continues

43-0.

In an unfortunate game for South Granville against Hillside, players line up on the sides of the field, ready to part ways.

Shackelford stands up from his makeshift seat, dusts himself off and tells Husketh that the game is over. He guides Husketh’s arm around his, preparing to walk away from the field to the rugged gravel parking lot.

In some ways, the atmosphere is bittersweet. For these high school students, this is one step closer to graduation, adulthood and a world outside of those moments on a football field.

Husketh and Shackelford, however, will be back for the next home game, just like they have for the past 20 years.

UNC Media Hub is a collection of students in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media who create integrated multimedia packages covering stories from around North Carolina.