The Weekly Screed (#803)

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.