Prep Star Puts Gridley on the Sports Map

There are a thousand stories in the naked city. And Joe Hughes figures he ought to try and dispel some of them.

Each December for 37 years, kids from a number of naked cities have descended on Gridley, which isn’t a city at all but a town of 4,300 that proclaims itself the Kiwifruit Capital of the World.

They come for the Gridley Invitational Basketball Tournament, a curiously prestigious event that draws slammers and jammers from such prep basketball powers as Skyline High of Oakland, St. Mary’s of Stockton, Aragon of San Mateo and Kennedy of Sacramento.

And typically, the city kids want to know if Gridley is as homespun as they’ve heard it is.

“Some of those guys say, ‘Yo, you guys ride horses to school, or what?’ ” Hughes says. “We tell ‘em, ‘Hey, have a clue, meat.’ ”

That having been established, Hughes and his Gridley teammates are likely to pile happily into Hughes’ candy-apple red GMC pickup, the one with the bug shield bigger than a peach orchard, and head off to show the city kids how to shoot a hunting gun.

In these ways, small-town roots have both nurtured and tethered Joe Hughes. To achieve athletic success at this level, as Hughes has, is to make yourself a curiosity to anybody who lives anyplace bigger than Mayberry.

It’s like that when you play off-Broadway, beyond the city lights and removed from big-time high school competition. It was like that when Hughes’ father, Dave, was a two-time all-G.I.B.T. selection more than 30 years ago.

“The city kids had no concept of what life is like here,” says Dave Hughes, a large man who addresses you with one boot propped on the back bumper of his own pickup. “A lot of them didn’t know where milk came from. A lot of them thought it just came from cartons.”

Like his father, Joe has had an opportunity once a year to show city kids a thing or two. A 6-foot-4 senior with strong, dark features and an amiable demeanor, Hughes has been an all-G.I.B.T. pick for four consecutive seasons.

He also has quarterbacked the Gridley High Bulldogs to a section football championship, led the basketball team to two straight section titles, led the once-forlorn baseball program to the playoffs, has been named all-state in football and basketball, earned 10 varsity letters, and -- most important -- defeated the despised Corning Cardinals in five of six major-sport encounters this school year.

Outside of Gridley, those accomplishments have resulted in a little publicity, an inquiry or two from college recruiters and one scholarship offer. In town, his feats have earned him lots of back-slaps at the Gridley Ice Burgie but no familiarity that he didn’t already have.

Understand, the one problem with being a household name in these parts is that you’re in fast company.

“People knew who he was before he ever started playing sports,” Gridley baseball coach Ron Souza says. “He’d walk down the street and they’d say, ‘There goes Dave Hughes’ son.”’

To most locals, Joe is simply the strapping lad who drives John Deere tractors in the fields and fastballs to the gap; who unloads peach crates in the summer and on ballcarriers in the fall; who shoots ducks and pheasants on the weekends and game-winning jumpers on Friday nights.

“He’s just like everybody else here,” one town youth says, shrugging, “except when he’s playing ball.”

Which Joe Hughes almost always is, in some form.

The Yuba-Sutter Appeal-Democrat covers 13 high schools in Butte, Yuba and Sutter counties; Hughes was its Player of the Year in football and basketball this year and might have a shot in baseball. He set the North Section career scoring record in basketball, at least until someone re-added the totals and found he was 12 points short.

Some have called him the best all-around athlete to come out of this area. Talk like that tends to produce a genuine country-boy blush.

“You hear people talking about you sometimes,” Hughes says. “It’s just talk, I guess, but I’m not too comfortable with it. I don’t like that stuff.”

Athletes just don’t preen and posture much in Gridley.

One reason Hughes doesn’t is the influence of his father, who accepted a basketball scholarship to Oregon in 1958. He later transferred to Southern Oregon and is believed to be the last three-sport star to play for the school.

“I always wanted Joe to be a good citizen first and a good student second,” says Dave Hughes, who doesn’t mention a priority for athletics. “Around a small town, people know what you’re doing just about all the time, so you’ve got to set the example. The boys kind of respect that, and that’s one thing I’m proud of.”

Joe and brother Tim, a freshman who already is nearly 6-foot-3, also soaked up the value of hard work at an early age. Dave Hughes sells farm equipment now, and both his boys learned the workings of field machinery by the time they were 11 or 12.

“There’s nothing for you to hit out in those fields anyway,” Joe says with a grin.

Now Joe and Tim are regulars in the fields and on the loading platforms. The boys and their father are currently involved in what Dave calls a “family project”: cultivating about 150 acres that the family has leased in preparation for the rice harvest.

Since before Easter, Joe has worked another weekend job, spending 8-10 hours a day leveling fields for the planting of rice. That task requires the use of a laser leveler, a machine in which one can program in the desired slope of the ground.

As for the summer, Hughes will spend it as he did last summer -- loading and unloading crates at one of the local peach stations.

“In the summer, we’d practice football in the evening,” says Souza, a football assistant. “Joe and a lot of our kids had to come in from the fields and take a shower before they went out to practice.”

Gridley’s football team had gone 1-8 during Joe’s junior season, thanks largely to a rash of injuries that began when Joe’s hand was stepped on and broken in the season’s first game. A plate and five pins were inserted in the back of his hand, and he didn’t play another down the rest of the year.

Last fall, Hughes’ return made a difference “like night and day,” says Souza. The team steamed to a 10-1 season and beat Corning twice -- the second time in the North Section AAA championship game, halting the Cardinals’ string of seven straight section titles.

Hughes’ running ability and sprintout passing skills keyed the Bulldogs’ offense, and his defensive play resulted in 12 interceptions and numerous games with double-digit tackles. He impressed a lot of folks around here, but not many recruiters.

On the assumption that Hughes wasn’t seeing high-caliber competition in the Westside League, only a few Pacific 10 Conference recruiters bothered to drop by. Those who did decided that Hughes was too slow to play defensive back and too suspect as a dropback passer to play quarterback.

“It’s amazing that in a small town like this they even found out he exists,” Souza says.

The one basketball scholarship offer Hughes received was from Cal State Bakersfield, which sounded an awful like the college version of off-Broadway. He turned it down. And despite Hughes’ .440 batting average and six home runs in 21 games, there has been virtually no interest in him as a baseball player.

So Hughes will do platform work this summer, then enroll for the fall semester at Butte College, a two-year school just 20 minutes up the road in Oroville. There, he might be able to coax a two-year scholarship out of a major university in football or basketball, the two sports in which he was named to the small schools All-State team by Cal-Hi Sports Weekly.

“I’d kind of got my hopes up about the football recruiting,” Hughes says. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. If (sports) don’t work out, I might look to coach basketball some day. I’d probably go somewhere bigger, though, where there’s more opportunity. Gridley’s kinda frowned upon as far as competition goes and probably always will be.”

With one exception: the G.I.B.T. Those letters spell opportunity to a kid from Gridley High, enrollment 502. It’s one place where you can prove you’re more than just a farm boy who has been corn-fed on small-school competition all your life.

Dave Hughes was all-G.I.B.T. in 1957 and 1958, Joe Hughes from 1986-89. Dave’s nephew, Doug Anderson, was all-G.I.B.T. in the early ‘80s. Tim Hughes, who was brought up to the varsity basketball team for the playoffs this season, seems destined to be next.

“It’s really a great opportunity for our kids to show what they can do,” Bulldogs basketball coach Chris McIntire says. “And for the city kids to show us what it takes to be great basketball players.”

Hughes and the Bulldogs have learned quickly. Gridley’s basketball team went 22-4 this season, with three of the losses coming in the G.I.B.T. They then won 20 in a row before losing to Robert Louis Stevenson of Pebble Beach in the NorCal Regional playoffs.

That game made Hughes at least moderately famous, though the fame was a bit ill-founded.

Chico TV stations and area newspapers reported that Hughes’ 36 points against Stevenson had given him the North Section career scoring record. Former Gridley star Alex Austin, who went on to play at Arizona State, held the standing mark of 1,903 points. Hughes was credited with 1,912.

But McIntire double-checked the statistics and found that Hughes had finished with 1,891 points. And immediately everyone remembered the one game Hughes missed because of illness. “Somebody said coming into the season that if I averaged 25 points a game, I’d get it,” Hughes said. “But I didn’t get my hopes up. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t average 25 a game.”

He averaged 21.6, which along with his other feats was enough to make his name familiar in Yuba City and points beyond.

“People can identify Gridley now because of Joe Hughes,” says Dave Lake, who retired as Gridley’s football coach after the 1989 season. “And in a small school like this, he’s the name everybody knows. He’s the one they’ve always looked to, ever since he was a freshman.”

You can come to understand Hughes’ stature in just one afternoon at the Gridley High baseball diamond, in the shadow of the Butte County Fairgrounds.

He steps into the on-deck circle, and a barefoot little girl in the bleachers hollers “Hi, Joe!” at the top of her lungs. He steps into the batter’s box, and an old codger sitting in a car two feet behind the backstop leans out the passenger window and offers him batting tips.

He is called out at second base on a close pickoff play; the umpire who makes the call is an old friend of his father’s. “I don’t feel anybody treats me different than they used to,” Hughes says.

Baseball is where Hughes actually has the most potential, Souza says, though his inexperience hurts him with major-league scouts and college recruiters. His work in the fields prevents him from playing American Legion or other off-season ball.

Still, he is the key offensive and defensive cog for the Bulldogs. A sure-handed shortstop with the power to clear fences and the speed to steal bases, he led Gridley to its first winning season in 12 years as a junior, when the team went 11-10.

This season, with Tim joining the varsity as a right fielder and catcher, the Bulldogs are 15-6 and have made several appearances in the Cal-Hi state Top Ten for Class A schools. They open the North Section playoffs at Delta High in Rio Vista next Tuesday.

That game, or one soon thereafter, will mark the end of Hughes’ athletic reign at Gridley. In this town where cowboy boots are worn in the same ensemble with belt beepers, it is a reign that will be remembered as much for the modest, down-home atmosphere in which it took place as for its success. “It would be very easy for your ego to be inflated, particularly in a town this size,” Lake says. “But Joe’s not that way. He’s handled it very well, and he’s still very down to earth.”

It’s a homespun attitude, to be sure. And if he can get a chance, it’s one more thing Joe Hughes would like to teach the city boys.