Knock yourself out, Mom
by David Benjamin
“Each
team will have six to nine players on the field, instead of 11; the
field will be far smaller; kickoffs and punts will be eliminated; and
players will start each play in a crouching position instead of in a
three-point stance.”
— New York Times, 31 Jan.
MADISON,
Wis. — Alarmed by a steady decline in participation by school-age kids,
not to mention all those compound fractures and head injuries, USA
Football is changing its rules. Predictably, there are traditionalists
who fear that this sissification of Pop Warner football will produce
kids untrained, unhardened and useless to high school, college and
professional coaches.
How easily we forget all those gridiron
legends who never played organized children’s football. Jim Thorpe, for
example, and Red Grange, Otto Graham, Marion Motley, Jay Berwanger,
Vince Lombardi, Ray Nitschke, Pop Warner.
Not to mention me.
For
generations, kids like Jim Brown, Night Train Lane and me played ball
on sandlots, in yards and pastures, and in between the parked cars on
city streets. We waged gridiron battles in a parent-free era of
unsupervised sports, long before the first 40-year-old suburban sadist
with a clipboard ever lifted a three-foot, 50-pound linebacker by his
facemask and told him to get out there and kill.
When I was the
newbie in eighth grade, the kids in my neighborhood welcomed me into
their weekly game of tackle on a vacant lot down by the Wisconsin &
Southern railroad tracks. Our rules were a lot like USA Football’s
just-announced reforms. We didn’t, for example, know a three-point
stance from the Peppermint Twist. For a kickoff, we simply heaved the
ball to the receiving team and ran like hell to beat it there. We
eliminated punts by establishing midfield as the “first-down” line. This
gave each team, at most, eight plays to score.
The first team
with five touchdowns won the game. We could usually squeeze in eight or
nine games before it got too dark to see one another.
We had no
actual “teams.” Every week, we chose up all over again. One of our
captains (who took turns picking players) was always Roger Westmont —
tall, handsome, athletic and alpha. After a while, the other chooser —
to my lifelong surprise — was me.
(A brief, apologetic
explanation here: Somehow, I turned out to be the best open-field runner
that fall among the kids of Waunona Way. This qualified me for
“captain,” a weird experience for a wallflower who’d spent his entire
previous recess career hanging on the fringe and waiting to be “the last
kid picked.”)
Our total “equipment” consisted of one football, preferably inflated.
Back
in my hometown of Tomah, a kid once got a shiny new helmet with a
one-bar facemask (think Johnny Unitas) for his birthday. When he showed
up to play, we all told him don’t be stupid. Take it off or go home. He
never wore it again.
We didn’t do penalties, but we had rules,
largely unspoken, all basically covered by the axiom: “Play fair.” You
couldn’t go for another kid’s head and you never, ever, led with your
head. The occasional dispute was settled by arguing.
Our field
was “natural” and not exactly flat. There were a few humps here and
there and a dip around midfield that was mushy after a heavy rain. The
only lines on the field were imaginary. The sidelines were the trees.
The
only spectator we ever had was the odd kid who arrived late because he
had a paper route. Our parents had no idea where we were or what we were
doing. We probably could have been more adept at blocking, tackling,
running, throwing and operating the single-wing option-veer, but we
would’ve needed an adult for that sort of uplift. We got enough of
grownups (and uplift) every day at school.
Occasionally after a
play, a kid would sit still for a moment, rubbing a bruise, licking
blood off his knuckles or gasping for breath after Fat Tony landed on
him. But then someone would say something like, “Hey. You quittin’ or
what?” After which he’d bounce off the grass and line up for the next
play.
None of us ever needed an ambulance. Which begs the
question: Was this serious football? Maybe not. But every Wednesday down
by the tracks, there were a dozen kids pounding on each other and
rolling around on the ground for two solid hours, finishing off with a
pigpile and limping home late for supper, dog-tired, bruised, scraped
and smeared with grass stains. It seemed pretty serious to me.
There
was this one play, for instance. I had just eluded the entire opposing
team, except for one lonely defender. I was streaking down the treeline.
The sun was sinking on the gray horizon, a light mist was blowing on my
cheeks and the world was my oyster. Except for the one kid between me
and the endzone: Roger Westmont. He had a perfect angle on me. I decided
what the hell, I’ll run right through him.
Oops.
We
were both nearing Mach One when Roger went airborne. Leading with his
shoulder, he hit me like a hot-rod Lincoln on an open stretch of
blacktop. The impact drove the ball into my diaphragm and lifted us
together several feet into the sky. We came to earth in the woods,
plowing a path six inches deep into dead leaves and humus, leveling
several saplings and launching a flock of pissed-off chickadees into a
hysterical chirpfest. We ground to a halt ten yards deep in the forest,
just shy of a serious tree.
After shutting down for about 30
seconds, my lungs kicked back in and I was able to speak. “Good one,
Rog,” I said. We helped each other up.
Roger and I, and all of
us, survived collisions like that partly because we were young, lissom
and unprotected. We wore no armor and had no illusions of invincibility.
We had no trophies to win, no fans to impress, no parents to live up
to. Nobody told us to “leave it all on the field.” Nobody was watching.
I
doubt that USA Football, even in its best intentions, could ever
restore that sort of purity and that much joy. Parents have long since
taken the fun out of football.
But here’s an idea: Take the kids
out of football. Give it to their parents. They are, after all, the ones
who really care. Dress up all those gung-ho moms and dads in uniforms,
spend a fortune on pads and jam helmets on their heads. Give ‘em the
ball and encourage them, literally, to knock themselves out.
Trouble
is, I doubt that the kids would hang around to watch their elders
clothesline one another and stagger off the field with pulled groins and
subdural hematomas. Kids, I suspect, don’t share grownups’ tolerance
for watching family members play bad football.
Ideally, they’d all sneak off in search of a vacant lot near the tracks.
Saturday, February 11, 2017
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3 comments:
Another imaginary (or hidden) iceberg...the days of our youth gone by. I love it.
My grandsons remind me how much I miss my sons when they were this age. I think sandlots could make a comeback if we had the time and space to allow them.
THAT was bloody marvelous! What a nostalgic blast. Makes me sad to think that practically no one under 35 will really understand it, especially those poor souls whose childhood was an endless affair of parental micromanagement. I guess you really cannot miss that which you never really had.
Excellent revisiting of youth. While I didn't get to enjoy your sandlot activities, I remember fondly the joys of organized youth sports. We had to obey rules, but we still had fun. There is something to be said about kids not growing up as hardened or with the social skills we learned as a necessity of childhood. Where will our humanity be in just 10-15 years? I fear for my 8 yr old son. The central reason I'm focused on preserving our humanity through a visual art form. Thanks for the memories!
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