[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelly. Shelly is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our castmates.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. All right, thanks so much for being with me today. If you don't mind just introducing yourself, your name, pronouns, and who you are.
[Chris Murphy]: My name is Chris Murphy, he, him, and then I am the president of the Medford Football Association, which is the booster club that supports the Medford High football team.
[Danielle Balocca]: All right, thanks, Chris. So I'll ask you the question that I ask everybody on the podcast first, which is, what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[Chris Murphy]: I'm gonna give you two. I'm gonna give you like a fast and I'm gonna give you like a sit down. So fast, I would say Ronnie's. I've been going to Ronnie's since I was nine. I love his pizza. Kids love his pizza. He's never failed me since fifth grade when I started going there. Sit down. I'm gonna go Razo's Chicken Pie.
[Danielle Balocca]: Hmm. Good choices. Yeah. I think, well, I did meet you at Ronnie's.
[Chris Murphy]: I met you at Ronnie's. You see each other every Thursday. Yeah. You were going to soccer and I was going to football.
[Danielle Balocca]: Exactly. Yeah. Ronnie's is a very reliable pizza place for sure. Awesome. So, you know, I think we, we plan to talk today about, um, the football team and the Thanksgiving game. So I was wondering if you could give me a little bit of the history about that and yeah, just give it, tell us a little bit about the game that you all play on Thanksgiving.
[Chris Murphy]: So we, the Medford-Malden rivalry, this year is gonna be our 137th game. Not the 137th year, 137th game. There have been some, they did skip a year and there were two games played in two years. So the game started in 1889. That was actually the first year Medford High had football. And you know, being so close, Malden, from what I've read, Malden challenged Medford to a football game on October 25, 1889. They played that first football game. As is on our trophy, Medford won 34 to nothing. Malden complained and set because Malvin believed that Medford was using kids from Tufts on the team. So they played again on November 30th, which is a Saturday after Thanksgiving. And Medford still won, but we only won four to nothing in that game. So I don't know if Malvin was right. You know, maybe they just had a bountiful Thanksgiving. So they were, you know, they weren't playing well, but you know, I wasn't there, but, and then back, and then 1890, they didn't play. And then back in 1891, they played another two games, Medford won both games. So we started off good with 4-0. And then every year since 1891, both teams have played. It became a Thanksgiving rivalry for the first time in 1897. And then in 1899, it became an official Thanksgiving rivalry. So with the exception of a couple of years due to weather, and then due to when we played in Fenway Park, the game has been played on Thanksgiving every year since 1899. And to give people an idea, like 1899, you're talking two centuries ago, you're talking Medford's only been a city for less than 10 years. Medford High School was still just one building on Forest Street and hadn't expanded the way it has. Yeah. Where did they play football then, do you know? They played, from what I've been able to catch, it was called the Medford Polo Grounds at Brooks Playstead. So it was Playstead Park. And then some other stuff I found said there used to be a field on the corner of Salem Street and Otis Street, there was a field. And then if you know where Gillis Park is now on Fulton Street, before 93 was there, that was actually called the Fulton Street Grounds, and then later became Gillis Field. Gillis Field was named after a John Gillis, who was a big Medford baseball and football player, actually played for the Red Sox. So we played at Gillis Field, I think from like the early 19-teens all the way up till the 1960, 61, if I'm not mistaken. And then we've been at Hormel since 1965. And then they did play the game at Tufts a few times from what else I was able to find. And then Tufts, they did play at Tufts a few times when we had like a really bad weather. Tufts was able to, I guess, get the snow off their field a lot better.
[Danielle Balocca]: So we played that on. Fenway Park was like just a couple of years ago, right?
[Chris Murphy]: Yeah. So in the 135th game every year, Fenway hosts either anywhere from like four to six games every year. A few years ago, we were, you know, offered like a once in a lifetime, I guess you would say, type of deal to play at Fenway. It was and we were the home team. So it's kind of cool that we got to use the Red Sox locker room. We got to dress in there and hang out in there and it was cool. We did when we did the entrance onto the field. We went through the way the the that the Red Sox go do like do the warm up and I still have that video on my phone. I haven't deleted that video or moved it over. I keep carrying it on my phone. It's still kind of cool. I still watch it from time to time. I'm going through videos to delete. I'm like, eh, OK. But that was it. It didn't have the outcome we wanted, but the experience was really cool. The only thing I had that was I would say negative about that was it wasn't on Thanksgiving. It's like when the game was over, I'm like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do Thursday? No, I've been doing this. The same thing for 30 years. It's like now I gotta help. I guess I guess I gotta go over and help my dad cook or something like that. So that was my only qualm about the Fenway game, but it was definitely a really a really cool experience. And I'm glad the kids got to enjoy it. But yeah, that was just another really cool thing that we were able to add to the history of this game.
[Danielle Balocca]: And so what can we expect this year? How's the season been going? What do you think?
[Chris Murphy]: Season's been going really well. We're five and four right now. We have our last game before Thanksgiving tonight against Waltham, who actually used to be a team we played Waltham was in the greater Boston league, which is our league for about 20 years. And then they switched over. I think it's the old colony league. Um, we, we started off a little slow on three and then we went on a nice five game win streak, which was great because we haven't had a five game win streak since 1981. So, um, it's bad. You know, we, we, we did get, we have had, uh, You know, we did have a tough several years for decades. But we have an amazing coach now, John Curley. Those who don't know John, he runs the rink. He's been the coach for the last six years. He's really had brought a great kind of swag about the team now. They're more confident than I've ever seen. They're well prepared. put in that offseason work better than I've seen in a long time. And it's really paid off with this five game win streak. You know, we've had more GBL All-Stars this year than we've ever had at seven. Justin Marino is our quarterback, is the league MVP. He's on pace to get the league's school scoring record, which is only 178 points. He's about 18 points away from the record, which is good. We have some other great seniors who are looking at, you know, who are looking to go play at the next level in college. So it's just been an all-around great year. Did have some other records broken this year. We broke our single game scoring record by Justin, six in a game, which actually was a record that was set in 1973 at a Thanksgiving Day game by a guy named Mike Colonna. He had five touchdowns and 266 yards. So we broke a nice 51 year record that stood and Justin's grandfather actually played on that gate in that team with he was a captain acting team. So it was kind of cool that like Justin's grandpa got to text his old teammates. And we also have, you know, something I've always been pretty proud of in my tenure is we had the first female varsity football player a couple years ago, a girl by the name of Tess Morrow. And this year we had our first female score points in a game. Brianna Cerullo, she's got a two point conversion against Chelsea on senior night. So that was another nice accolade. So it's been a great year. They said start off a little slow, they caught their feeding, but then they've gone, they've just had a nice run and You know, hopefully these last two weeks we can feed off that run and still, and then strong, which is, would be great.
[Danielle Balocca]: Do you have a prediction for how the Thanksgiving game will go?
[Chris Murphy]: I think we'll win. Um, I, I don't want to give, I don't like to give the score because I did that once and it wasn't great. So I don't want to jinx it.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Um,
[Chris Murphy]: It's interesting, because to go back to the game a little bit, I wrote actually some things down. So the only time we've ever gone into this game undefeated, both teams, was 1951. There have been 31 total times during the 136 games our league title was determined by this game, and 18 times the Eastern Massachusetts Championship has been, was settled on this game. So it's kind of like, when you read like some of like the old box scores and like, I've read like a lot of Globe articles from back in the day to like kind of get ready for this. There are a lot of times like a team will come in like boys to win the league and go undefeated and they'll lose. Like that's a really cool thing about the game is like, it's almost like, your record goes out the window, everything you've done before that goes out the window, and it's kind of like a new season, new, you know, it takes on, there have been times where we have probably, we should have gone in and won this game, and we didn't. And there are times that they've gone in, should have won this game, and they didn't. So that's the other really cool thing. And, you know, like last year, we started off a little slow, we went into, halftime six and often they came back tied at six or six and then we just went on a tear and I think we forced like five into five turnovers in the second half and end up winning the game 3036 to 12. So it's going the way I have the confidence that they play the way that they've played and continue to do what they're supposed to do that they'll yeah, we'll keep the trophy. So we haven't we haven't won back to back games in a while. So it'd be good to get that'll be another great thing that we can just add to like, I said, I said to them, it'd be be your goal is to check boxes this year, things we haven't done in five years, 10 years, 15 years. And they've checked a lot of boxes. So it'd be nice to, to check a couple more.
[Danielle Balocca]: Hmm. Yeah. So, um, one thing that I'm always interested in is kind of like how your work with football, you know, it's, you know, it sounds like you played football for Medford high and you're still, you know, now you're president of the booster, still involved with the team. What are you hope like, what, or what do you think you've taken away from playing football and what do you kind of hope that the current players, what do you think, what do you hope to get from there?
[Chris Murphy]: So I, I grew up in a, We were, you know, my dad was a union guy, my mom, you know, worked part time. My dad went to Medford High, my uncles. So when I was like, I think I was nine years old, the first time my dad would say, All right, we're gonna go watch Medford Malden. And it was kind of cool. You know, we would go went to the Irish American on Malden, they had like this dollar breakfast, which I think it's like still like a $2 breakfast, which you still is like you go there and there's still like 1000 people and they're all going to the game and we go we'd have breakfast and then we'd go over to the game and there would just be all these people and yeah, I you know, being a little kid and I see what my son now like, you know, when I when I get older, I want to I want to be the people that are watching. So when I became a freshman, first thing, I'm going off of football. I played four years, I graduated in 2004. I would say football is, everybody has a job. Everybody has a different job. When your margin of error is low, you're forced to work together, you can't, one person can't just determine the outcome. Football gets you, and team sports in general, gets you ready for life in ways that you can't teach. I think, and you know, I'm not knocking people that don't play sports, but I think people that play sports definitely have an advantage going into work, like, because, again, you have a job to do, your margin of error is low, you're forced to work as a team. It's got me, and then the relationships you make, like, I've made friends in football that I still have today. I had guys in my wedding party that I met playing football. If I look at my group chats, like my three big group chats, I guess you'll say two of them involve kids that I played football with. So I think the aspect of learning how to be, you know, how to take criticism, how to work as a team, how to work toward making yourself better are amazing things that I would totally suggest to people. In team sports in general, I think that there are a lot of any type of team sport is going to help you too. I, I, I don't have a kid in the program, which is kind of like, like most of the time, like the booster club president has been a father. I was helping out. And then it came time. We had a, a big group of parents that were leaving because their kids had already graduated like two, three years ago. And they're like, you know, we stayed on it's time to move on. And then it's like, all right, well, nominations for president and like, we kind of hooked around like everybody's got their hand out. And I'm like, I'll do it for a year or two. Um, there I am 10 years later. Every year my wife is kind of like, but it's, you know what, it gives me a chance to keep busy. I got my kids involved with it now, like my kids love going to games. It's funny, like I have a picture of me and my daughter at every Method High opener since she was a month and a half old. So that's like our annual, it's like, the only tough thing is she's like, well, you helped me in the first ones, you have to help me now. And I'm like, seven and like, you know, not as as light as used to be. But it's, it's just, it's, it's definitely like a great thing to like, take my mind off, you know, the hectic things in life. And, and then I get to meet so many great kids, boys and girls now, who, you know, give you a lot of faith that but you know, humanity is going to be fine because we have these amazing kids that come out and I see and it's and I'm at the point now where like I'm seeing kids from 10 years ago now who are getting married having kids and it's making me feel old but um well like again um it's nice to like pass on like what I've learned and have like a great experience with their lives and making for like I'll bring up like John Curley, like I was when he came on, we had just lost, you know, our coach had just resigned. And I was like, and you know, maybe it's, this is my chance to kind of get away. I get a text message two days after he's hired, like, Hey, you know, I'm john Curley, can we meet, you know, meet it. And, um, you know, for lunch at john brewers, I just want to talk to you. And I'm like, all right, I'll, I'll give him, you know, I'll take the meeting. I sat down, we talked. Uh, at first I was like, yeah, we're going to hire this guy from Somerville. And then I left that meeting and I texted a bunch of friends and I said, I think we found the guy. I go, I just had lunch with this guy for two hours. And the thing he said to me, he goes, I'm looking for a guy who can help me and be a partner. And that's what he's kind of, you know, he doesn't, he hasn't looked at me as like, just like the head of the, like the, the parent's club. He's actually allowed me to come in and be with the kids, help him out coaching, be around. And, you know, he's now to the point where my wife doesn't even like, she's like, all right, let's football stop. But it is great to like, you know, we have some great kids to see them go off to college. Last year, we had three kids go off to college. I think we're gonna have a couple more this year. to see them from like when you get them as freshmen to see how they built themselves up. And I always say to parents, our goals are to make your children good athletes at the bottom, good students, and good citizens. Those have been the three things that we always say. These are our goals. If we can, if we can leave here and your kids are those, those three things, they're going to be great.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. That sounds, I agree. I feel like team sports are a great setup for kind of just like learning how to work together, learning how to kind of push yourself, learning to care about something with other people and sort of take care of each other. Right.
[Chris Murphy]: Like you also, you also get to meet people from like different walks of life. Like I played with, kids from all different walks of lives. Like I played with a kid who immigrated from Russia, I played with a kid who immigrated from Haiti, kids who have immigrated from like Puerto, who have, you know, came from like Puerto Rico and other Latin, you learn their traditions, you learn, learn cool things about them, you learn, you know, I always say like, we don't, we don't have any males, we don't have any females, we don't have any white kids, we don't have any kids, we have mustaches. We all believe blue and white. We're all Mustangs. We're all while each other's equal and they treat each other great. I love that.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's great. Yeah. So for the Thanksgiving Day game, what are the details that we need to know? What time is the game?
[Chris Murphy]: So the game is at Malden this year is at 10 o'clock in the morning. I believe tickets believe I'll find out for you. If you can buy tickets, I think you can buy tickets in advance at the athletic department, you're Mr. Maloney in this Perry. And it's gonna be great. You know, get there early because parking, parking is always that's the thing that stinks about like these places is like parking is never our field and Maldon fields aren't at the like our high schools. So like parking isn't always the best. So I would say get there early to get parking. I want to tell you another funny, quick story about that I wrote down that I found really cool. So in it's about another day with with a claim about your two games. So I found reading about a story in 1917, in France during World War One, the 101st Division, which had a lot of guys from Massachusetts. So apparently, Medford had this former captain named Ed Larkin, who was a sergeant in the army, who organized, they found enough guys from Medford and Malden in this army division to play a football game off a battlefield in France. While the war was going on, while they had like a ceasefire during Thanksgiving, they played this extra game. And that was something that I really didn't know about, that I found out doing some research that I think was really cool that I wanted to, throw in there for people to find out about. They claim that there was no score due to the, they didn't want to, they didn't want to publish the score due to morale, but I would like to hope to think that Mythic won.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's like very Massachusetts to me like people wild about their sports, their rivalries, they're like that even like during wartime enough in another country, they find a way to it's crazy.
[Chris Murphy]: Like I met like a bunch of people from like, like I used to play semi pro football. And I played for this team in Charlestown called the Townies. And then we went to I went to a game in Vegas mostly because it was an excuse to go to Vegas when I was 22 years old, but I'm talking to guys from the Midwest, from the West, the South, and they're like, let's play Thanksgiving football. What's with the Thanksgiving football thing? Because it's really not like if you go outside of like, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, it's really not a thing like like Maine. they're done with football next week, football's over, like their stage. So it's like a very, like you said, you're right, it's like a very Massachusetts thing like this. And it's sad, because there are teams that have actually like, moved away from the whole Thanksgiving football thing, like, and they play on like, Wednesday, Tuesday, Wednesday night now. And I'm like saying, like, I hope that never happens to us. Because that whole like, waking up, you know, so, so we always have route, we had a pep rally on Wednesday, you go into your last practice, then you go, you have a dinner, we call it a tradition dinner. Um, but we have the team, the cheerleaders, there's some like, you know, the principal comes and invite guests and you know, you shake your last pump up and then you wake up early because you really haven't slept and then you go out, you're freezing cold most of the time. I feel like every time it's in Medford, it's pretty nice, but every time we're in Malden, it's torture, which is weird because we have that river right there that usually flows like this whole, and then it's just a whole nostalgia. And I can't imagine like playing it any other day. It's weird to say, like, it's an experience like no other. And I say to the kids, like, especially like our seniors, every time you do something, it's the last time you do it. And then like you, it's really like, I remember, you know, we didn't win my senior year, but I remember every, and it's still kind of like haunts us, like, because we'll sit around and do the, you know, back in my day, we'll sit like, we'll always talk about, like, I might hate my 20th reunion the day after the game. And sure, we'll get there, we'll talk about, we'll laugh about some things. And then somebody will say, yeah, but if we had beaten Malden, it would have been them all. And that's how it is a lot of people like you, you, you remember, you may not remember what your score against some of them was, you may not remember what your score against Everett was, you may not remember, you remember what your scores against Malden were. And I was lucky, like the first two we won, last two not so well. And I said to the, I always say to the kids, like, you don't want to feel like I felt for like, for after that game, you want to, You know, you want the turkey to taste good. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And also, I saw that you guys are selling some raffle tickets for the yes, yes, we are doing a we do every year we do a raffle where we raffle off some cash prizes, as well as our right now, who's great to us, donated a authentic Patriots throwback helmet. That's one of the gifts. So they're $10 a ticket. If you go to our Facebook metric Mustangs football, it's on there, just reach out to us, let us know and we'll we'll tell you how we can get your ticket. It's a it's a great it's a great raffle for the team. I think that's another thing that like people are like things are expensive. We have a lot of great businesses in the city that have, you know, support us through like, you know, advertising banners sponsoring dinners as well as a lot of a lot of people. So but it does take like a lot because like, where did you look at like the golf team might have like a dozen to 15 kids a soccer team might be like 20 kids. We got over 50 miles to feed. We do a team dinner for them every week where they're able to sit down the night before the game and, and just relax, talk to each other learn stuff. We take their phones away. So we like they walk in, they put their phone down. on a table and then they sit down, they talk to each other, they laugh. It's really great. So, you know, then like everything, you know, costs money and everything's expensive. So anything that we raise, you know, really helps out and getting the kids shirts and jackets and awards. And so we really, I want to thank everybody that's, you know, that's helped us out and bought tickets already and been great to us.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, thanks, Chris. Is there anything else you want to mention before we wrap up?
[Chris Murphy]: No. Again, I thank you for letting me come on here and talk about the team and I hope that we'll see everybody there at Malvern. It's going to be a great, it's going to be a great game. We're going for our second winning season. We haven't had back to back winning seasons in over 30 years. So that's going to be, that'll be a great thing. Hopefully we can get it tonight. So we don't have to worry about Thanksgiving. Yeah. And just like I said, it's a great team with a lot of great kids and an amazing coach. Come on out to a game and go Mustangs.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah.
[Chris Murphy]: All right. Well, thanks, Chris. Thanks, Daniel.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bytes podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Kisherman. Music is made by Hendrik Idanese. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Never Bites!