Exchange Club Charity Game : Men Who Battle Bad Guys and Fires to Collide on the Gridiron

Colin Bell stepped from his car into the early evening darkness of Broadway Avenue adjacent to the Hawthorne High School football field. Minutes later, the 27-year-old Terminal Island firefighter greeted several husky men, each, like him, wearing football pants and a T-shirt.

In the glow of a dim street light and a few twinkling Christmas lights on houses, the men donned the shoulder pads and helmets they had brought to the darkened stadium.

Bell, his high school football jersey at his feet, glared across the field through a chain-link fence.

“Gotta get some lights on here,” he said anxiously to his companions, who passed the time by swapping stories about recent rescues they had made.

A school security guard happened by and radioed a custodian to turn the lights on. Thirty men from the South Bay Firefighters football team were milling around in the dark, waiting to begin a practice session for Saturday’s annual South Bay Charity Bowl game against archrival South Bay Police.

In nine contests, more than $100,000 has been raised for Exchange Club centers for abused children, according to club spokesman Manuel Martinez of Inglewood. This year, the Exchange Club hopes to raise $15,000 to $20,000, mostly from corporate sponsors, by the 2 p.m. kickoff at El Camino College.

Players take the game seriously.

“We hope to beat the pants off of them this year,” Bell said.

“A lot of these guys give a lot more than just time here,” said one firefighter coach, Capt. Bill Moorehead of Hawthorne. “These guys work hard all day and don’t get time off to play.”

Players receive little, if any, compensatory time to participate in the game and are forced to swap shifts. Such trades are easier to perform for policemen because firefighters generally work 24-hour shifts, while their police counterparts work 8 to 10 hours a day.

“I’m traded down to the bare minimum,” said firefighter Ray Navarro, who decided to take the final six days off but now must drive to practice each night from his home in Ontario.

But there is a special reward for many.

Said Bell, whose career as a defensive back ended in the Air Force: “I just wanna play ball again.”

Those thoughts were echoed by many of the players as they passed onto the field.

“My body doesn’t respond like when I was 18, but this gives me a chance to test myself,” said defensive back Bobby Harper, 41, an Inglewood firefighter playing in his seventh Charity Bowl.

Reed (Bing) Bingham, a Long Beach firefighter, never played organized football but “I boxed some in the Marines.” This is the seventh game for the burly, crew-cut nose guard, who sports a tattooed dragon on his right forearm.

First-year player John Costley, a Los Angeles County firefighter, said he “is in the twilight of my career.”

“I’ve been wanting to play in this game for a long time, but they wouldn’t let (county firefighters) in,” he said.

This year’s firefighter team has a lot of new faces. Many original players from the South Bay retired after last year’s 21-7 loss. That left organizers in a bind for personnel. Consequently, they went outside the area for many players. Nearby Long Beach provided 15 firefighters, the largest contingent of any department.

Coach Mike Squires explained: “Getting people (to come to practice) is a big problem.”

The firefighters have lost two straight and trail in the series, 5-3-1, but the mood of the team, according to Moorehead, is “one of team unity, something we haven’t had the last few years.”

“We just started to come together three or four practices ago,” added Squires.

Practice, which is supposed to begin at 7 p.m., got under way 25 minutes late with stretching exercises on the elevated field, now lined with white chalk to create a larger field for the high school soccer season.

After a hard-hitting practice the night before, in which starting tailback Steve Islava suffered a broken jaw, the coaching staff decided to slack off for the remainder of the week.

But when the defensive and offensive teams lined up against each other, the popping of helmets on shoulder pads sounded real.

“Hey, are we supposed to be going full contact?” a player asks Moorehead after a particularly hard hit on a running back.

Moorehead, dressed in a hooded red sweat shirt that read “Fire Dept. Football” across the back, signaled in a defense that several players objected to.

“Bill, we can’t be in a zone when we’re blitzing two guys,” said one.

“Hey, guys, if I call something you know is wrong, change it,” Moorehead says.

Later he explained: “They’re the ones playing the game. This is a group effort.”

The veteran of the team is place-kicker Spence Waldo, a fireman stationed in the harbor area. This will be his ninth consecutive appearance in the game.

“I’m the last of the fools,” he joked. His back was to the rest of the team as he solemnly practiced kicking field goals over a soccer goal with a square-toed shoe.

Waldo has never kicked a field goal in one of these games. He’s never tried one. “I’m still waiting.”

Waldo feels he may get his first attempt Saturday. The team will not rely on running as much this year, which he thinks will lend itself to a few three-point attempts. In a kicking drill later, he put his right leg through several 45-yard attempts that cleared the crossbar.

As the hitting picked up again, several players show signs of limping, but, surprisingly, there was little huffing and puffing. The nature of their jobs dictates that both policemen and firemen stay in top physical condition.

Explained Squires: “We’re all in pretty good shape.”

At 9 p.m., Moorehead asks someone for the time.

“Two more,” he said to the offensive unit, and when the plays are done, he calls off the practice. Often the team scrimmages until an electronic timer shuts the lights off at 9:30.

Steam rose from sweaty faces as the players remove helmets and assemble at wooden benches on the sideline. The wind stops but the chill remains. Moorehead invites the team to have a beer at a local watering hole.

Many can’t make it, explaining that they must now pay back trade-off time.

Says another: “Give me five minutes. I haven’t seen my wife all day.”

But Moorehead is insistent: “You gonna be there? It’s a little place, very easy to miss.”

And in the players’ eyes, Saturday’s game shouldn’t be missed.