Hey…Kurt here…and I have a story to tell…and I’ve told it a few times on air…and I tell my friends all the time, because it’s absolutely nuts.

The year was 1993.

I was a sophomore at Libertyville High School up in the Northern burbs of Chicago (closer to Wisconsin, but I’m still claiming Chicago).

I was an Outside Linebacker…and despite being like 5’9 and 150 lbs…I was a wrecking ball. Hitting running backs was something that came naturally to me. Concussions? Oh, I’m sure I had a few. “Seeing stars” was a good thing…apparently. (Note: It’s not).

I played on our sophomore team…and we were fine and good…but our Varsity team was a bunch of unrelenting monsters (and I mean that in the best way).

They were dominant…and they were mean…and they were awesome.

They went undefeated in the regular season, and obviously made the playoffs.

When the playoffs started, the coaches moved up some of us sophomores for “experience”…but I quickly learned that we were just meant to be tackling dummies for the Varsity team. I mean, they put me at fullback and said, alright, go block Todd & Reed (who were about 220 lbs, solid as rocks…and again, mean). And I did it…over and over again…there was one time when I hit Todd with everything i had…he moved back a few yards, I crashed to the ground…and he kicked me in the helmet (not hard, but hard enough)…and said “Hey dude, good job…keep bringing it”. I loved it.

We did practices at 5am in the field house before school…and then from 3:30-6 after school…full pads…always hitting…I loved it.

So, here I am…awesome, right? (note #5 behind me is Todd..yeah, he’s bigger than me).

As you see on the plaque…there’s a loss in our semi-final playoff game vs. Loyola Academy. They beat us up pretty bad in the first half…and we just didn’t have enough to recover.

But…it’s the craziness before the game that I can’t even explain.

So….here we go.

It was a Saturday morning…and before getting on the bus to go to the game, our coach had us meet in our school cafeteria….and we all gathered around the round tables while coaches went over last-minute changes/subs, etc.

Everything is normal… Okay, and let me preface this with…we were a big high school…but there were never really any incidents of any sort that happened like what would happen next.

Then from a hallway around the corner of the cafeteria, we hear a kid shout …

“HEY! Give me my money. Give me my (edit) money”.

Then a shot rang out. Yes. A gunshot rang out.

All of us froze…

Then our coach went into the hallway and yelled “Hey, what are you doing?”

At which point, a few more gunshots were fired…and we saw our coach fall to the ground.

At that point, all of us in the cafeteria began flipping tables and bolting out the other exit of the cafeteria. I only looked back once, and I saw coaches and players diving under tables…I kept running. There were about 15 of us just sprinting down the hallways…we crashed through the back doors of the school….and just kept running.

There was a lake by our school, and we ran about a quarter of the way around the lake…listen, I was running with seniors who didn’t seem to be afraid of anything….and they were still running, so I was still running.

We stopped on the trail, and there we were…15 football players…some of us in full pads (minus helmet)…and I don’t know if anyone really said, “we should go back”…but for some reason, we decided to walk back to the school.

When we walked in, there were a few of my buddies who were on the basketball team, and they were having a practice in our other gym, and they said they heard a bunch of noise, but was more like “what’s up with you guys running down the halls?”

We told them what had happened, and they were shocked (as one would be)…then we started hearing a bunch of talking coming from the cafeteria, and we start heading back towards the cafeteria…

And who do we see…our coach standing there (with a red smear of something on his shirt)…we see coaches and other players turning tables back upright…a few equipment guys are picking up shoulder pads, helmets, and other stuff that had been thrown about.

Police are there…and they’re trying to figure out what happened.

It was then that the coach told us that the whole thing was fake….it was a show of mental toughness to demonstrate how all of us would come together and defend each other. I don’t know if he was expecting us to jump on him or what….but message failed.

Here’s what’s nuts…we went from the cafeteria straight onto the bus…nobody talked.

We rode 35 minutes on a bus…quiet.

Then we lost the game.

Then we finally saw our parents and stuff….it had been close to 5 hours since the failed attempt to “inspire” us.  None of our parents had any idea what was about to hit them when we said “yeah, losing the game was terrible…oh, by the way, do you know what happened before the game?”

It created quite an uproar…as you would imagine.

Coach was fired or resigned…or whatever…….we went to counseling sessions during study halls….Sports Illustrated put our story in their blurb “This Week’s Sign that the Apocalypse is Upon Us”…and there was a rumor around the school that Saturday Night Live had called the school to find out more about it to do a sketch…but couldn’t find anything funny about it. (Note: at the time, this seemed to be true, but I think this was just a high school rumor someone made up).

It was crazy…absolutely nuts.

I tell people about this, and eyebrows raise…and there are many questions that I don’t know the answer to…mainly…umm…”why??”