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Downtown Immune To Pirates Fever

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: December 5, 2008

DADE CITY - Spent the better part of a long afternoon in the county seat Wednesday, hoping to catch a serious case of old-fashioned small-town state-playoffs high-school-football fever. Came away without so much as a sniffle.

Based on virtually all outward signs, Pasco High football and its bold, historic shove into the Class 3A Region Finals is little more than a rumor. The latest chapter in one of the best Pasco County stories of 2008 unfolds at Edwards Stadium tonight - the winner barges into the state semifinals - and all of a sudden our All-American City has communal attention deficit disorder or commitment phobia, or both.

Tour the downtown commercial/governmental complex. Prepare for a letdown. As of sundown Wednesday, exactly two marquees devoted any space at all to the surging Pirates, and the owner of one of them has a financial stake in an extended and happy conclusion to the hometown team's season.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. And not that it makes the owner's support any less sincere. It is the gladdened entrepreneur, indeed, whose vocation and extracurricular passion dovetail so precisely.

Once upon a time, however, civic pride was sufficient to motivate public displays of affection for the local high school eleven. Whether it ever put a single buck in the pockets of local chamber of commerce members, small-town prep teams that made the regional-by-god-finals would become the subject of elaborate, obsessive and possibly downright embarrassing tributes in the display windows of every self-respecting business operator.

Ah, but what do you expect when, even by studying the chamber's headquarters, you'd never guess whether Pasco High was 0-10 or 11-1? It's no better at the corner offices of Downtown Dade City Main Street Inc., City Hall and the police station.

The Hugh Embry Branch of the Pasco County library boasts a marquee nearly the size of a sheet of plywood. It is entirely devoted to promoting a teen poetry contest and this weekend's book bazaar.

The Woman's Club? The county courthouses? The American Legion hall? Not so much as a peep.

Tina Batchelor doesn't get it. As half the spousal ownership team of the year-old Beef O'Brady's, Batchelor measures Pirates fever on a nightly basis. Inside the Seventh Street sports pub, she says, the temperature is high and rising fast.

"You hear customers talking about the team all the time," she says, not only because Beef's is the post-game destination of first resort for the players, their families and friends. "Monday, I heard a lot of people saying they hadn't been to a game in years, but they were planning to go tonight.

"The community is really coming together for this."

If there is a fever, it's a stealth outbreak. Besides Beef's modest message on the second line of its south-facing marquee (beneath "Happy Hour 4-7"; its north-facing side is silent on the matter), only the Tropical Breeze Cafe, flying a banner with a leering skull in a tricorn hat, and General Home Development, whose south-facing sign devotes all four lines to Pirates well-wishing, have embraced the cause.

Good for them. Awful for the rest. Deplorable. Embarrassing. Pathetic.

Listen, if the Pirates prevail tonight, and if I'm the owner of one of those vacant storefronts on Seventh Street - one of those boring, depressing storefronts - I'm buying a crate of glass paint, rollers and brushes on Saturday and Monday I'm calling Pasco High.

I'm asking for the head of the art department to send me a team of volunteers to turn my blank, sad windows into vibrant red-and-black murals, endorsements of what would then be the Region 2 champion and state semifinalist Pasco High Pirates.

I'm hoping to summon them back in a couple of weeks to add a state title trophy to their masterpiece. And I'm triple-dog-daring my downtown partners to bow up, hunker down, dig in and match my rediscovered enthusiasm for small-town virtues.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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