AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — It should be said at the outset that no one was seriously ill and that the midway operator, who has run the Zipper at this fair for nine years and has seen everything, called it “the most impressive stupid thing I ever watched.”

The Pike football team scrimmaged at home Friday evening, showered, and arrived at the fairgrounds around nine, at which point somebody proposed that the team ride the Zipper ten times in a row without getting off. Twelve players agreed. The operator, told the plan, said he would keep the cars loaded as long as they kept paying and that he wanted no part of the medical side.

Rides one through four were, by all accounts, tremendous. Ride five is when the first player got off. By ride seven there were eight left. By ride nine there were three, and by the end of ten there was one player still in a car, and he was the one everybody watching had money on: Jon Sandbo, sophomore center, six feet, two hundred and change, fifteen years old, raised on a farm four miles out where the day starts at five whether or not you feel like it.

He got off, walked over to the grass by the pole barn where eleven of his teammates were sitting in various attitudes of regret, and — per four witnesses, all of whom have told this newspaper the same version — asked whether anybody wanted to go again. Nobody wanted to go again. He then ate a corn dog in front of them, which several present described as unnecessary.

Sandbo, who was running the fuel can for his grandfather at the tractor pull three hours earlier, offered this newspaper no boast of any kind. “It’s not that bad if you don’t fight it,” he said. “You just go where it goes.” Coach Mattox’s full comment appears in the story above. The fair reports no damage to the ride, the grass, or, ultimately, the team.

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