In 1960 I was thirteen years old and living in the small town of Cramerton, North Carolina. That fall I played football for the Cramerton Pop Warner football team. I was bigger than the average boy my age, certainly over five feet, nine inches tall, which made me an awkward-looking giant among my eighth-grade peers. Cramerton had a good team. We were 8 and 2, losing only to the Red Shields Boys Club and the undefeated YBMC Little Orangemen, whom we played well, forcing fourth-down punts twice, an anomaly for their powerhouse offense.

As the Orangemen entered the state playoffs, rules permitted them to select two players from the league to join their team. They chose Jim Cozart, a linebacker on the Cramerton team, and me to shore up their defense.

In the year he would die, Orangemen Coach Earl Groves and his great friend, Steve Culbertson, a star running back on the 1960 World Champion team, were referred to me by my friend Art Shoemaker who had worked for Coach Groves’ company and had also coached later Little Orangemen teams. Coach Groves brought me a sheaf of hand-written notebook pages about the teams he coached from 1959-1968. He asked if I could turn this material into a book.

Three years later The Little Orangemen, An Account of the Most Dominant Football Team in America, 1959 – 1968 was published. Though the book is short, it was difficult to mold it into a cohesive manuscript. I did my best to retain the words and thoughts of Coach Groves, editing as lightly as possible while conforming the material into a logical description of the incredible accomplishments of the teams. I’m proud of the final product, and I think Coach Groves would have been very pleased with the outcome. It is my gift to the memory of a great man who did so much for little boys like me.

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