Neighborhood bragging rights are on the line Friday when Bryan Adams and Woodrow Wilson face off in the Battle for East Dallas.
The decades-old rivalry has its share of close games, shocking upsets, heartbreaking losses and its very own pair of star-crossed lovers. But don’t worry. This story has a happy ending.
Despite going to rival high schools, Gary and Jackie Griffith fell in love and later married, Gene Davis reported for The Hub in 2015.
Gary was a Woodrow football player. Jackie was a Bryan Adams cheerleader. That didn’t stop Gary from asking Jackie out when he saw her at a Southern Methodist University cheerleading camp, Davis wrote.
(Photo courtesy of Gary Griffith.)
“My friends always joked with me that I dated girls from Bryan Adams because I couldn’t get a date at Woodrow,” Gary told Davis. “I’d never hear the end of it.”
When the two state-ranked teams — located only 6 miles apart — faced off in the 1960s, thousands of fans packed the stadium and watched from the grass in the end zones as Woodrow beat Bryan Adams after the Cougars missed the extra point, Davis reported.
Woodrow and Bryan Adams didn’t play each other during the late 1990s and early 2000s because they were in different classifications, but the rivalry renewed in 2008. The latest installment roars to life again at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Forester Field as the teams compete for the “Lady of the Lake” trophy.
A Dallas Morning News computer model, which correctly selected the winner of 81 percent of high school football games last week, predicts that Bryan Adams has a 52 percent chance of winning. But here’s the thing: The neighborhood showdown is one of the closest matchups the Morning News analyzed. Which team will emerge victorious is still anyone’s guess.
