In year of chaos, COVID and change, small-town SC football rivalry holds on to magic
“Go to Webster and look up the definition of a rivalry,” Jimmy Wallace, a former Lewisville coach, said over the phone. I called him this past Friday morning, a few hours before the latest matchup between Lewisville and Great Falls to hear some stories about one of South Carolina’s best rivalries.
At one point in the conversation, Wallace laughed: “I don’t know, I’d say it’s more like a war.”
I’m not going to pretend like I know anything about war. Because I don’t.
And full disclosure, I set out this week to learn what this 1A football rivalry — between two towns that have less than 5,000 people in them combined — might mean in 2020. I figured it must mean something special to the people it serves. An escape from chaos. Or a temporary return to a recognizable world — one that didn’t have coronavirus shutting down businesses, or local elected officials not being who they say they are.
But really, I soon learned that the people who care about this rivalry never thought that the Great Falls-Lewisville game wouldn’t happen.
I learned that the rivalry is like war, maybe: That it’s always going on, even when it’s latent. That it’s a fight as old as time. That it started generations ago, so long ago that no one cares who threw the first punch or why.
That the players who played on Friday night had Dads who played in the same game and who work together now. Same goes for grandpas. And great grandads.
That the shared, learned dislike on the football field — or on the basketball court, or the baseball field, or in a band competition, for that matter — isn’t so much intentionally taught, but passed on. That the magic is there because that’s just how it’s always been.
“A lot of things change in this world,” said Ben Knight, a Great Falls graduate who somehow married a Lewisville graduate, he jokes, and who now lives in Fort Mill. “But there’s one thing that’s going to always be true: Great Falls and Lewisville are going to play. And they ain’t going to like one another the day it happens, and then everything is going to move on.”
The stories, like any rivalry, are endless. And they’re remembered by their storytellers as if they happened yesterday.
From Rob Scott, a Lewisville graduate and Lewisville Middle School football coach: “In 2014, Great Falls jumped out early. They were 7-0 on the season, and then they lost two games late. And we were real young that year. And had had some pretty tough competition, and we roll in there 2-7. ... And we roll in there and come in there with a — I think it was a 12-10 victory. Our quarterback, who was a sophomore at the time, threw a touchdown pass on like a 4th and 12. On paper, we shouldn’t have won. But because of who it was against, our kids were up for it.”
Knight again, on the 1988 season game: “It was the last game of the season. It was for all the marbles. They had lost a game, and we had lost a game to North Central, so we were tied for the conference, and we came rolling in. ... Paul Rice scored on a fullback pass to tie the game. And then we kicked the extra point to win.”
From Leon McFadden, who wears a blue Lewisville hat everywhere he goes, has all the “big” Lions games since the 70s on tape and, with his church, has helped feed the team before each of its games for years: “They played in a hole, Great Falls. ... Half of it was baseball field. I remember falling down when I played and got skidded up on the baseball field. It was a pretty place, and it’d be packed with people.”
The rivalry has changed slightly, of course. Like everything does. The textile mill in Great Falls, once the town’s primary employer, closed decades ago. And because of that, some stories of the past — of ones about thousands of calloused, working hands having to clutch a chain-link fence around a 1A football field because the game was standing room only — probably seem further away than they are.
And the prospects of change, perhaps more than ever before, are unrelenting.
But on Friday night, at the Lewisville-Great Falls game, there was still magic. After the game — like I had to a lot of fans who were willing to tell me their favorite rivalry stories but weren’t willing to give me their names — I asked senior running back Jayden Barnes, the star of the latest matchup, what the rivalry meant to him.
And he responded like generations before him probably would have.
“It’s big,” Barnes said. “I mean, that’s what makes the community really. Every sport, it’s us and Great Falls. Us and Great Falls. Everything else, it’s us and Great Falls.”
This story was originally published October 11, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
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