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MN: You were telling us that you were very active in student government and sports, so I was wondering, what sports did you get involved in?

KM: I played a little bit of everything. I got involved... on my level, softball was one of my main fun because I played softball from my sophomore year, I think. But I didn't get involved in the high school level on basketball, but on the community, Alexander & Baldwin, we had basketball and baseball. Baseball was, the AJA had a junior and senior league, AJA levels. And my senior year I played football as a senior member. One year... but prior to that I had been playing barefoot football. Maui barefoot football was a very, highly competitive sport. We started out, there was a limit to it. You had a league based on weight. In other words, the size of the boys. You didn't want a hundred-and-fifty pounder playing with a hundred-and-ten-pounder. So we had what is called a hundred-and-five pound league. Day before, I think, the game, the boys had to be weighed in. There was a weighing in, there was a lot of starvation and whatnot to make that hundred-and-five. Because normal weight of 115 pounders would starve themselves the day before to come down to the hundred-and-five limit. And if you were more than a hundred and five at the weigh-in, you were disqualified from playing the particular game either that day or the next day. I think the same day you had to weigh-in, there was a weigh-in. And so the hundred-and-five-pound league, I played, I started going in the hundred-and-fifteen-pound league, I played in that. And then there was a hundred-and-twenty-five pound league. As I grew older, I progressed one level over the other. And the final one was as a senior, I played high school football. Fortunately, I made the team as a right half.

MN: And then what was the name of your barefoot football league team?

KM: Oh, the name was Kahului, we represented Kahului. Whatever basketball, football, Kahului Town Team, Paia Town, or Puunene. We went by the community that we represented.

MN: Were there any age limits to that barefoot...

KM: After a while, it so happened that there was one player who was a small man, build, and he played even though he was much older than the other boys. I think we started off with... what was it? The age limit came into being during my time. In other words, high school, you could have, you had to be below a certain age in order to play high school. I think this was... now I remember. One of the reasons why this came into being was because we had a boarding school on Maui. And I think, even today I think it's, Lahaina Luna High School was one of the early high schools under, I think, federal government establishment. Lahaina Luna was a agricultural extension school or something like that. And it was established as the boarding school and it had students from all over the islands going to Lahaina Luna. And that's why, in my timeline, it was the team to beat. Because they had these elderly boys dorming at the... kids from Hilo who, for one reason or the other, stayed out from high school one or two years. And so they would then enter Lahaina Luna and play even though they, in my case, a good friend of mine who became real good friends after the high school. He was two years older than I was, but the year that I played, he played high school football. This was one of the reasons why when the age limit was placed on... around my time or shortly after my time. And this became true for almost all of the sports.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.