Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle (R) has achieved national notoriety for her sprinting skills, if not her creative initiatives to introduce sweat-boxes to Nevada’s prison system. You can add to those impressive credentials a Mushnickian phobia about black athletic jerseys, as the Pahrump Valley Times’ Bill Roberts recalls in an August 3  missive about the 1991 Tonopah (NV) High School football season.

Mired in a dismal season, the Muckers traveled to Laughlin that fall. To nearly everyone™s surprise, the relatively-new Clark County school defeated Tonopah. It was Laughlin™s first-ever football win.

Tonopah coach Randy Jones was so incensed that he told his team in the locker room following the game it was the blackest day in Mucker history.

Springing ahead, Jones came up with an innovative idea to fire up his charges for their 1992 homecoming game against Laughlin. Utilizing the œdarkest day theme, he suggested the Muckers could wear black jerseys to remember the previous year™s debacle.

With no resources for his plan, the coach asked his players to buy their own black uniform shirts. Not all complied but many did and they mostly their parents ponied up the cash to buy black jerseys.

Enter the detractors, coming with two platforms ; the first were longtime THS supporters like Bob Frank father of school board member John Terras and alum William Tomany of Las Vegas. Their group argued that red and white were the Muckers™ colors and no other would do.

Also opposing the black jerseys was another group including Sharon Angle, a member, if not its leader. They argued against our charges wearing black on religious grounds.

I cannot quote scripture as they did to justify their point but the gist of their argument was that black as a color was thoroughly evil, invoking the supernatural and especially the devil my take from dictionary definitions and not from scripture .

In the end, the Muckers wore traditional red and white for the homecoming game, which they won, avenging their previous loss to the Cougars. It also was a benchmark for two dozen young men as it was their only victory that season.

But they went away from the affair knowing Angle™s group used religious arguments to deprive them of their innocuous and youthful black jersey statement. Administrators held onto the jerseys and refused to either turn them over to the athletes or to return the money they had paid.