Fan Voices: What Cam Ward’s success means to Brazoria County

I still remember the first time Cam Ward started a college football game.

It was February 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when FCS football games were pushed to the spring, and I was on Facebook when a friend from back home posted that his younger brother was the starting quarterback for Incarnate Word.

I had nothing else going on that day so I put the game on.

The Cardinals were facing a ranked McNeese team. Ward threw for 306 yards and four touchdowns, leading UIW to the upset victory.

You could tell, watching that game, that Ward was a star. Despite coming from a Wing-T offense in high school, Ward looked immediately comfortable in UIW’s spread attack. He routinely looked to make plays down the field and for the most part, those passes connected. Of his four touchdown passes, three were over 25 yards, including a 56-yard strike to Darion Chafen.

I’m not sure how many people streamed that game, but I can bet you this — a number of those people were from West Columbia, Texas.

The whole idea of a hometown is complicated to me. I grew up outside of a town, in a neighborhood called Holiday Shores. Our address said “Brazoria.” I went to elementary school in Brazoria. But Brazoria’s a small place, the kind of town that doesn’t have a high school and didn’t have a junior high until after I’d already finished junior high. For those things, I made the 30-minute trip to West Columbia every day, to Columbia High School, home of the Columbia Roughnecks football team.

I don’t need to go into a lot of cliches here about the importance of high school football in the state of Texas. Everyone already knows how much football matters in that world. Friday nights in the fall spent in the bleachers at Griggs Field, the glow of the new McDonald’s in town visible over the back of the visitor side. Terry German’s voice over the loudspeaker. 

Our team was good, sometimes. Bad sometimes too. My junior year, we had a team that could have made a run at state, but our star running back blew out his knee. Came back from it for the playoffs, but he wasn’t the same, hobbled by that injury. He still dragged the team to the third round, and the whole town drove up Highway 36 toward College Station for our game at Kyle Field. For miles past town, the booster club had placed signs along the roadside — Go Necks Go.

Everyone knows who Cam Ward is these days.

The University of Miami quarterback is one of the favorites to win the Heisman. If not for the unfortunate timing of leading the Hurricanes in a year where there’s an elite two-way player and a running back having one of the greatest seasons of all time, Ward might be THE favorite for the award.

Before that, he spent two seasons at Washington State.

Before that, two seasons at Incarnate Word.

And before that, Ward was under center for the Roughnecks. For the team I spent every Friday night watching, the team I would get in fights about on internet message boards — I used to get to school early so I could go to the computer lab and log in to the 3A Downlow, the go-to place to trash talk about 3A football.

I never got to see Cam Ward play for the Necks. I haven’t been to a game since 2009, when, as a freshman in college, I came back down for homecoming. I can close my eyes and still taste the sausage-on-a-stick that the band boosters cooked up under the bleachers, but I haven’t physically been in that space for so long.

Small towns are full of cliches. One of them: everyone knows everyone.

It isn’t true, of course. Maybe every time I went to the Walmart — one of those small ones that might not even exist anymore, not the supercenters that dot the suburbs — with my grandmother we’d run into one person she knew, but we’d run into plenty I didn’t.

Still, it’s a small place. You might not know everyone, but you aren’t that far removed from them.

I’ve never met Cam Ward, but I went to school with his older brother, until he moved to the town across the river, a town where one of Ward’s sisters is currently the head girl’s basketball coach. The Ward family’s roots extend all over the area we call the “West of the Brazos.”

I’ve never met Cam Ward, but the guy who called out his name on the PA every Friday was my drama teacher, Terry German. “When talking with friends about college football,” German told me, “I’ve made sure that they know I used to call his name when he was playing in WC. He will continue to shrink my six degrees of separation, which I also think is pretty cool.”

I’ve never met Cam Ward, but my sophomore-year English and History teacher, Laurie Kincannon, is now the mayor. Mayor Kincannon says that “having someone from our small Texas town associated with the Heisman trophy is exciting beyond words.” She’s watched the ceremony for years but says, “This year’s ceremony will be especially poignant. Seeing Cam on the front row and his inspiring story told to millions of viewers will inspire countless young athletes.”

We come from such a hybrid space.

There’s the fact that our school district itself was a hybrid: Columbia-Brazoria ISD. That it took claim to multiple spaces and that we, in turn, claimed both of those spaces as well.

It’s also an area that feels pulled in different directions — back toward a past filled with oil derricks and men like my grandfather in pearl snap shirts and Wranglers and also toward a future where Houston, about an hour away, keeps moving closer and closer.

Rapper That Mexican OT recently name-dropped the town on one of his tracks. A few years after I graduated, 16 students were arrested on campus in an undercover drug sting. It’s not some picturesque small town, though it’s the complications that make it beautiful.

The Dirty Dub — that’s what people used to call it. Maybe they still do. I haven’t been to West Columbia in years now — when I make it home for a visit, I stay firmly rooted in the Brazoria part, or I head to nearby Lake Jackson, a town of about 25,000 people that I also consider a hometown of sorts. After high school, I moved to Houston for college, but when I came back down I’d mostly wind up in LJ, at some friend’s apartment because that’s where people from Brazoria and West Columbia often ended up. After a year in college, I got a job at a Quiznos in Lake Jackson and commuted back and forth to the University of Houston because there was a big part of me that wasn’t ready to leave that place. That still misses it every day, even with all its wrinkles.

Brazoria County. 

It’s the kind of place where if someone gets out, if someone finds a sliver of success, we all root for them. Earlier this year, I published my first book, a poetry collection called Brazos, and a few weeks after it was out, I received a message on Instagram from a girl I barely remembered from high school, someone I’m not sure I ever actually spoke to. She wanted me to know how important the book was to her, how it was a cathartic experience. She wasn’t the only person to reach out.

The Cam Ward story is one of perseverance.

In high school, Ward wasn’t out there slinging the ball around the field. The Roughnecks ran a system known as the Wing T, a run-focused attack that’s fallen out of fashion over the years as teams have become more reliant on the passing game. It’s the kind of smashmouth football that you think of when you think about small-town football.

It’s also, weirdly, a system that’s started to gain a little more relevance recently.

Ted Nguyen of The Athletic recently wrote about the NFL’s current obsession with the Wing T. Nguyen notes that the increase in jet sweeps and the use of wide receivers as runners comes directly from the Wing T.

Now, I don’t think this is happening because of Cam Ward, but it does highlight part of what makes him such an intriguing player: he’s from the Dub, by which I mean he exists in this hybrid world between the past and the present.

When I ask on Facebook if people from back home have thoughts about Cam Ward, I hear from people I haven’t spoken to in years. The Home Economics teacher who was there so long that she taught my mother. My buddy Cody who I haven’t seen since I moved away for grad school in 2012. Go into any of the local Facebook groups or click on any post about Ward that Mayor Kincannon posted and you’ll find a near-endless stream of well-wishers.

There’s something beautiful about the way sports can shape behavior. How many people in West Columbia, Texas would be watching the Miami Hurricanes if their quarterback wasn’t one of us?

Cam Ward likely isn’t going to win the Heisman this season. For months, it looked like he had a great chance, but Travis Hunter has become undeniable, and Ashton Jeanty is right there as well. More than likely, Ward will be invited to New York, he’ll finish third or fourth in the voting, he’ll go on to be a top pick in April’s NFL Draft. Not winning the Heisman isn’t the end of the world.

Mayor Kincannon might have said it best: “From 0 star to Heisman candidate is achievable with hard work, a positive attitude and a “Cam do” spirit.” 

That spirit won’t end with a third-place result on college football’s biggest stage. It won’t end with a fourth. Ward’s got Brazoria County in his blood and something about people from Brazoria County is that they don’t quit. 

And maybe everyone says that about their hometown.

And maybe there’s nothing I can say right now to convince you that my hometown’s any different.

But I can tell you to go watch Cam Ward play football.

I can tell you to read his story, how he rose from obscurity to reach the pinnacle of college football.

And I can tell you how proud I feel every weekend when the Hurricanes game comes on, when I get to see a little piece of home on the television screen.