ANTIGO — Vern Cahak had been working as a sports reporter for the Antigo Journal for three years when, in 1959, the Antigo High School football team went undefeated.
The team, Cahak noticed and noted for readers, was an outlier. The average weight of the team’s linemen was just 167 pounds — on paper, the 8-0 season never should have happened.
By 1996 when Cahak retired, the team had given him ample success — almost an inordinate amount — to document.
To Antigo football fans, it’s already well-known: under Coach Gordy Schofield and his defense-first, smashmouth philosophy, the team became a juggernaut, rattling off unbeaten seasons what felt like every other year.
“We won three state championships in 1976, ‘78, and ‘82, and those were all important to me,” Cahak said. “We had a lot of great teams to cover. When you win most of your games, it’s enjoyable to write about them.”
Cahak enjoyed writing about these great teams so much, in fact, that he literally wrote the book on them.
The book, titled “Antigo Football: A Sports Legend,” details the entirety of the program’s history.
Its first state championship in 1976, the first year the WIAA’s playoff system for high school football was established, in which Antigo’s defense held a favored Racine Horlick team to 86 yards in a 6-0 victory.
The 1982, 13-0 team, which overcame the loss of its star quarterback Matt Shinners to injury and an early deficit in the final game against Cudahy on the way to a state championship and becoming, as Cahak called them, “the greatest football team ever assembled at Antigo High School.”
Even the team’s first overtime game ever in 1975 against Marshfield, which was eventually decided by the unlikeliest of characters: the equipment manager.
Antigo had scored two touchdowns in the last five minutes to even the contest, leading Schofield to send the boy, named John Lombardo, onto the field, where he kicked a 21-yard field to give the Red Robins a 24-21 win. Cahak still remembers what led up to the dramatic night.
“When they had practice, Gordy Schofield saw the manager was fooling around kicking the ball around. They called him Lumpy Lombardo, and he noticed that he was kicking pretty well for a non-player, and so he recruited him to be the placekicker, and he wound up being pretty good,” he laughed.
According to Scot Peterson, a guard and linebacker for the Red Robins in the mid-70s before eventually becoming a coach himself, the fact that Cahak (who also covered high school wrestling and track) possessed such intimate knowledge about what transpired behind the scenes in the Antigo High School sports world was not surprising.
“It was his life,” Scot said. “He’d go to the freshman games — that’s pretty dedicated. You had to send the stats into the league, and he was actually the official statistic guy for the team too.”
Dale Peterson, Scot’s father who also worked as an assistant on the team for roughly 35 years, confirmed this.
“He actually came down and watched us practice a lot, so he saw what was going on. He rode with us on the bus to games so he was right on top of everything,” Dale said, before going on to praise Cahak’s professionalism as well. “He just wrote down what happened. He was very honest with what happened. He didn’t make up anything. He actually talked to the kids and I think he got more information from the kids than he did from the coaches.”
“He knew them all because he was at the practices,” Scot laughed. “He knew the good athletes. If there was a kid that he thought should be out for a sport and wasn’t, he’d try to get them to play.”
Cahak remembers one of those good athletes with particular clarity: his own son John, an all-conference receiver and kicker on that aforementioned 1982 squad that won their state championship at Camp Randall in a game Cahak called “one of the most emotional” he ever covered.
“When you have your son playing, it’s different. You don’t want to brag him up or anything,” Cahak said. “But we won that game 22-7. My son injured his knee in the game, but he came back to play and he kicked a field goal and he was one of the leading pass receivers.”
John Medo, a defensive end on the 1976 title team, said Cahak’s dedication to the team was appreciated by county residents.
“People just enjoyed reading his articles. On a Thursday or Friday, he would always have a pregame describing who was going to play, what positions, what they were up against, what their record was. I think people looked forward to reading how he set it up and then there was a postgame of all the details and who ran the ball and how far they ran and who caught the ball and how many tackles. It was just very well done,” Medo said. “Back then, in the 70s and 80s, the Antigo Journal was thick, it was two sections for a while, and then young athletes so enjoyed reading about the game and seeing all the coverage — it was just a wonderful thing.”
Scot went as far as to credit Cahak for some of the program’s pre-WIAA success, when sports writers across Wisconsin routinely voted Antigo the best team in the state, or the “mythical state champions.”
“He put us on the map,” Scot said. “The United Press International and Associated Press would get some of his articles once in a while. Before they had the playoffs, we won the mythical state title about four times.”
Scot said he believes that in his extra-curricular activities as well as his work for the Journal, Cahak wanted to support the Antigo community.
“He was my little league coach when I was 10, and everybody got to play. Somehow, he got you in — maybe it was just for one at-bat — but I don’t ever remember sitting on the bench a whole game, and I don’t think anybody on our team ever did. So he was there for the right reasons,” he said. “In his articles, I think he was very fair and very supportive. He never second-guessed the coach and he was always positive. He was for Antigo.”
Note: Cahak extended special appreciation to the coaches from Antigo High School that he worked with and to fellow Journal sports reporter and editor Gene Legro, who mentored him when he first started there in 1956.
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