Joe Board had a nice senior year as a halfback running the football for Christiansburg High School but was nonetheless startled by some news he got from his coach, Buddy Earp.

"Coach Frank Howard is coming up here to see you," Earp said.

Howard was the famously rugged cuss who coached at Clemson University in South Carolina. Board had never heard of the place.

On the appointed day, Board reported to the school office. Howard took one look at the 144-pound Board and spit his chaw of tobacco into a nearby wastepaper basket in disgust.

"I wanted to see a football player, not the team manager," Howard said.

That may have been the last time anybody underestimated Board that year.

That was especially true of organizers of the 1958 state Group II track championship contested on the cinder track at VMI the following spring. Board was the defending champion in both the 100 and the 220, races in those days measured in yards. Earlier that season, he'd smoked through a 9.9-second 100 at the Virginia Tech Relays.

Board had a strong suspicion that the state meet was rigged against him. The order of events had been switched so that the half-mile relay, in which Board would run with teammates Ford Wirt, Mac Mitchell and C.W. Whitlock, had been moved up so that it followed right behind the 220.

Board was the defending champion in both and would make the relay team a decided favorite.

Board blew away the field in both the sprints. He'd hardly had a chance to catch his breath when the call came for the half-mile relay. Setting up to run the first leg, Board false started, loafing down the track for a while after the gun went off the second time.

Most everybody in attendance must have thought it was a mistake by an overeager teenager. The false start was all by design, though.

"I was just trying to get some rest," Board said.

With that, Earp, the founder of the Blue Demons track team four years before and the football coach, changed the running order and moved Board back to the anchor.

With Wirt, Mitchell and Whitlock running as if their eyebrows were on fire, Board closed it out as the Demons outran runner-up Waynesboro for the blue ribbon.

Board would add a winning 22-foot, 4-inch broad jump, now known as the long jump. Spencer Hall, who would subsequently gain an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, chipped in a third-place heave in the discus. And Christiansburg racked up 22 points to outpoint second-place Waynesboro by four. Board scored 16¹₄, good for third in the team standings by himself.

That was the first state championship Christiansburg would earn and it would be many years before the school won another. The 50th anniversary of the happy event arrives next Friday. All five guys who competed in the state meet plus the coach are still alive.

Earp, fresh from a tour of duty with the Marine Corps at the Chosin Reservoir campaign in Korea, had been appointed Christiansburg football coach in 1954. That same school year, he went to the school principal, Evans King, and suggested they form a track team. King promised to find some money for shorts, shirts and sweat suits.

A new track was not in the budget. The new team worked out in the grassy area surrounding the football field. The running oval included a bank at one end and was all but unusable when it rained. So impoverished was that first team that it had no starting blocks in the budget.

"Coach Earp taught us to dig holes with our feet for the starting blocks," said the 69-year-old Board, a retired judge in Pickens, S.C.

That wasn't all those boys learned.

"The first track meet I ever saw I ran in," Board said.

That was at Roanoke College and, in some respects, it didn't go that great for the Demons. Board, for instance, had the 100 won.

"But he turned around to look behind him and the guy ran past him to win," said the 80-year-old Earp, a retired school administrator and principal, most recently at Glenvar.

Board went on to have an outstanding high school career as an athlete and scholar. Coming from a single-mother household, he was also obliged to work in the school cafeteria to help the family, washing 500 to 600 trays a day.

By his sophomore year, he'd win his first race at the state meet. By the time he was through, he'd start four years on the football team, scoring 41 touchdowns in 40 games.

Board would go on to run track and punt for the football team at the University of Virginia, where he would subsequently graduate from law school.

Landing the job as the Cavaliers punter was a straightforward proposition. Virginia was in the midst of a long losing streak. There was plenty of punting to do.

"And I was the only guy on the team who could kick it 40 yards," Board said.

Board had his heart set on an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy to play ball, and things were looking good for that until he took the required physical. With no face mask on helmets back then, he'd had his share of busted noses and the resulting deviated septum was detected in the physical, thus rendering him unfit for West Point.

As it turned out, he was in ROTC at Virginia and was unlucky enough to finish his law studies just in time to serve his obligation in Vietnam.

"Funny, I wasn't good enough for West Point, but I was good enough to be sent to Vietnam."