Crazy doesn’t even begin to describe him
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South Hill‘s Chris Bowden is known to be crazy, and its not hard to figure out why.
Late in a Southern Section Southwest Division semifinal game against El Dorado, Bowden ran up and down the sidelines with his head wrapped in tape. The tape ran from the top of his head to underneath his jaw. It looked like something that took three seconds to do, it didn’t look real, more like a joke.
With the score tied at 10-10 it would take a crazy person to pull of a stunt like that. His teammates thought it was a funny sight also because they began to laugh. It was obvious the pressure of the situation wasn’t getting to them.
Turns out, though, that Bowden wasn’t doing it just for the laughs. After picking off El Dorado’s Kane Wilson to set up the Huskies at El Dorado’s nine-yard line, Bowden celebrated by head-butting a teammate without his helmet.
Blood began to drip from the top of his head. He had a huge gash, about 2 1/2 inches, Bowden said. It’s going to require eight stitches, he added.
Crazy.
‘I just had so much adrenaline going through my body at the time that when I saw my best friend on the team, ‘Moose’ Chavez, we always celebrate with a head butt, and it just...’
Bowden didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to.
‘I’m known as crazy on this team and it obviously shows. I have a big ‘ol gash to prove it,’ he said. ‘They were giving me a concussion check and I told them ‘this is nothing,’’
Bowden’s interception led to a Huskies touchdown, a nine-yard pass from Cameron Deen to Dimitri De La Fuente that put South Hills up 17-10 with 5:06 left in the game.
El Dorado’s quarterback, however, shook off the interception (which was his third off the game) and drove his team 75 yards to tie the score with a 22-yard pass to Nolan Sheldon with 1:08 left. Wilson’s heroics continued in overtime as he scrambled 25 yards into the end zone to end South Hills’ season with a 23-17 loss.
Wilson began running outside of the pocket to his left, but then cut across the field back to the inside and headed untouched into the end zone.
‘He just broke to the outside, man,’ Bowden said. ‘We contained the inside, hit the middle (on a blitz) and there’s nothing you can say. That quarterback had a heck of a night.
‘I was at a total loss (when Wilson scored). We played our hearts out. We left it all on the field and just astonished’ at how it ended, Bowden added.
Bowden is a junior and said this game is going to serve as his motivation in the off-season.
‘I’m going to hit the weights and get bigger, faster, stronger. It’s a lot of motivation. We’re hungry. We want this one. My senior year going? Yeah, we want it.’
- Jaime Cardenas