The last week in July of '78, right out of high school, I walked into this dumpy little pizza place in Sugarhouse looking for a job. My hair was down to my shoulder blades, I was dressed in old Levi's and I can still remember Jo in cutoffs, standing on a chair putting a pizza in the oven. I asked her for an application, she grabbed a paper menu, flipped it over and said "here ya go." I can't remember what I wrote on it, but it must have included my name and phone number, because a week later I got a call from one of the owners who asked "Can you work tonight?" Thus began my career at Free Wheeler Pizza, which has spanned 3 decades (I still do their payroll, although for 3rd generation of owner). During those first few years we were the only pizza delivery place in the valley, and despite business being slow we didn't have to worry about our market share. This led to Free Wheeler Football. Football intramurals at the University of Utah took place in the afternoon, usually ending around 5:30 or 6:00. Avid football fans, the owners of Free Wheeler signed us up for the league, hung a sign out on the front door of the store every Monday that said "Gone Footballin'", had us put on our "Twisted Brains" t-shirts and the whole crew went up to the "U" to either play or watch the game. Customers got used to it, they had no choice and we had a lot of fun. Except when we played the "Austin Animals", a group of students who lived in Austin Hall (dorms). You know the type of guys, ones that are good enough to play in the expert league, but choose the novice league so they could kick butt. The first 15 minutes of our first game against them, one of our players was sent to the emergency room to get a dozen or so stitches under one eye. We called them the "Austin A-holes". Here's some of my many pictures from those games, I'm not going to go into too much description because without names it isn't going to mean much anyway, just suffice it to say my team is wearing red:
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