Westlake Picayune

By Thomas Jones, Sports Editor

Hopefully, the drive back from College Station for the hundreds of Chap fans that made the midweek sojourn to watch Westlake face A&M Consolidated featured nothing more dramatic than a deer grazing on the side of a country road.

The heavens know neither school should endure any more.  

In a setting tinged with tragedy, Tigerland Stadium has served as a backdrop for heartbreak when the Chaps face Consol.

Westbankers will never forget that last trip to Tigerland Stadium in 2006, when promising Westlake football player Matt Nader suffered a frightening heart arrhythmia that stunned the crowd of 10,000 into silence and halted a game between two state-ranked squads. Nader, a team captain and a future Longhorn, recovered after doctors and medical personnel – including Matt’s parents – administered CPR and helped revive Nader with a defibrillator.

Chap fans may not realize that a dark cloud had already drifted across the Consol community before the game kicked off. Ed King, a popular 2006 graduate of the school and a scrappy starting offensive lineman on Consol’s 2005 state semifinalist team, died on a rainy stretch of highway southeast of town earlier in the evening. The news of his death merged with the uncertainty of the night as an ambulance rushed Nader to the hospital.

Fans looked at the field in bewilderment, then at each other as if searching for an answer. 

Five years earlier, such incomprehension filtered throughout the country. The twisted ruins of the World Trade Center towers still smoldered, and rescue crews searched tirelessly for survivors. Chaos had come to the streets of New York City, and the turmoil rippled all the way into the heart of Texas. 

Just three days after the terrorist attacks, however, football fans from the Westbank and College Station gathered together and fought back against the sense of grief that threatened to overwhelm the nation. Buoyed by an emotional National Anthem and emboldened by a sense of patriotism, the fans in the stadium shoved the images of the attacks into their rightful node – a recess of our memory that sometimes reminds but never overwhelms. 

The entire stadium celebrated more than a football game; the contest celebrated a return to normalcy and a sense of endurance.

No one will ever forget those two nights at Tigerland Stadium, but no one ever wants to again bear such a memory.