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Generations have shaped Bell Game
Photo by James Nix
Kannapolis resident and A.L. Brown fan Buster Plummer on his porch, known as "Plummer's Perch" which overlooks Kannapolis Memorial Stadium.
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Published: November 5, 2009
Updated: 11/05/2009 05:53 pm
When the Concord Spiders and Kannapolis Wonders take the field Friday night, the teams will be fulfilling a rite that generations of players and coaches have been passing through since the Great Depression.
The "Battle of the Bell" game — the longest-running football rivalry in the state — has all the pomp, ceremony and history of other rivalries: Carolina-Duke, Michigan-Ohio State, Yankees-Red Sox. And like all great rivalries, Concord-Kannapolis may have tamed a bit from its raucous beginnings, but it has endured and is just as important now as it was back in 1931.
"You would go to the game fully expecting a fight at the end," said former Concord coach George Alley.
Nicknamed "Ick" (he said the story behind his nickname would take too long to tell and most people in Concord just know him as "Ick"), Alley, 80, played for the Spiders from 1943 to 1949 and coached at Concord High School from 1957 to 1984.
During his tenure as coach, he saw the Bell game, and high school football, change.
The godfather of Concord Spiders football watches just about every game — home and away — from the stands now. But he is just as engaged in the high school game as he was when he paced the sideline as head coach. And he has only missed four Bell games in the last 60 years, he said.
"Back then, there were no easy games," he said. "Every game was a battle. You played Statesville, Albemarle, Asheboro ... every game was important."
But the Kannapolis game topped them all — after all, it was about pride.
Each town had its own team, Alley said, back before the days of county and city school systems. Most of the mill towns in Piedmont North Carolina had professional or semi-pro baseball teams (this was the home of the Independent Carolina Baseball League — the "outlaw league") — and the high school football teams played on the baseball fields.
The mill workers were viciously loyal to their city and their team — be it baseball or football.
The Concord-Kannapolis rivalry was especially vicious, Alley said, with each school vandalizing the opposing school.
The year Memorial Stadium at A.L. Brown High School opened, some Concord students went over with gasoline and salt and burned a giant "C" in the middle of newly-planted turf.
"When the Kannapolis boys came out for the game, they were pretty fired up over that," Alley said. "Needless to say, they beat us that year."
The two schools came together and tried to stem the vandalism late in the 1940s, but to no avail. It wasn't until Southern Railways donated a train bell in 1950 that the schools really had something to play for besides pride.
That year, the game ended in a tie, and the two schools, separated only by a few miles, shared the bell, with each school holding it for six months.
Since then, the extracurricular shenanigans surrounding the rivalry — the vandalism, the taunting and fighting — has given way to friendlier competitions, like charity canned food drives and pep rallies.
But the spirit of the game stays the same. At the end of the game, there is still the orderly transfer of the bell to the victor from the vanquished, if the Bell-holder has been defeated.
Concord leads the series, 38-36, with four ties, since 1931, but, like the tides, who wins the game ebbs and flows, back and forth, through the decades. Through the 1940s and the 1960s, Concord dominated, Alley said, with the Spiders winning 10 Bell games in a row from 1961 to 1971.
But recently, Kannapolis has been surging back, and looks to even the overall record.
This year, the Bell Game returns to Memorial Stadium in Kannapolis.
There are traditions that never change at Kannapolis: The kids still fire off the cannon every time the Wonders score.
The all-student team, led by instructor Robert Brantley, shoots off 10-gauge black-powder shells every time the Wonders score.
"The cannon crew is like a NASCAR pit crew," Brantley, a former Army artillery officer, said. "Each student has a job to do."
One student loads the shell, another one closes the breach and one fires it off. It takes less than 30 seconds to get it ready and to fire.
The students have to pay attention to the game to know when to fire.
"Before I joined the cannon crew, I never knew what was going on in the game," said senior Emily Cruse, 17.
Over at Plummer's Perch, the neon "K" still shines over the stadium.
The best seat at Memorial Stadium is not in the stadium itself, but on Buster Plummer's emerald-green, multi-tiered deck that he built on the back of his mill house that backs up to the east side of the stadium.
Plummer, 56, played for Kannapolis from 1968 to 1971 and coached football for the YMCA. That's why he and best friend and fellow coach Barry Earwood built the Perch in the first place — so the kids on the YMCA team could watch the games and dream about playing high school football.
The neon "K" sign, a gift to Plummer from friend and perchmate Tim Erwin, is a staple at Memorial Stadium. So are the fireworks that Plummer shoots off every time the Wonders score.
This year, he took to shooting off big mortars from the top of the Perch.
Wonders fans saw a big fireworks show at the end of the Kings Mountain game this year, one that rivaled July Fourth displays, before a city council member quashed the show out of concern for the
safety of the visiting fans.
Plummer still shoots off sparklers, though, and flashes the "K" sign.
The Bell Game is the biggest game of the year for Plummer and his close group of longtime friends — the Perchers. They deck out in their finest green, have a pot-luck supper and watch the game from the perch.
For his part in Bell Game tradition, Plummer said he is only the keeper of the "K."
"I do this for the kids," he said. "People come and they expect the fireworks and I'm proud to do it."
• Contact Web reporter Ben McNeely: 704-789-9131
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