Football

Football

As I explained in the intro, I have never been the man’s man. I was never the captain of the basketball team, nor did I want to be. I’ve never known much about football except that it reminded me of the futility of war. This brings me to this next story.

Football….

So there I was, maybe 12 or so, putzing around the house with not much to do. My relative comes up with the bright idea that we should go play football. This relative is older than I, and so were his friends, so this was the first piece of discomfort. Now I was at that strange area of preteen life where I wanted acceptance as much as I was rejecting society and all that good stuff. So, I had to weigh the pros and cons of this proposition:
Pros:
I get to hang out with the older kids. (Not so interesting in my book, since all of my friends were older than me.)
If I went, then I wouldn’t be in the house to do any chores. (To a 12 year-old, this is the closest thing that we could get to a high.)
And last but not least -
I would probably get the chance to eat at a fast food place and order what I wanted, or at least hang out at somebody’s house for a while, prolonging that sad drive back home. (When you are 12, going back home is a depression that very few people could understand.)

The Cons:
I hated football. (I don’t love it now, but I wouldn’t necessarily throw up or become violently disturbed if anyone asked me now to play it.)

I really hated football. (To me, it was the last bastion of machismo in my life, and I refused to give in to its pervasive ardor and deceptive team spirit. One day, I planned to once and for all rid the world of its evil ways, but for now, I had to settle for loathing it, silently.)

I really hated being around people that like football, especially events that glorified the game. (I have been to maybe one live football game, besides the ridiculous attempts at it in gym classes in school, and the one that you will read about here. I went to one because I won Homecoming King. That was only because as part of the responsibilities of the crown (somehow I wrote that with a straight face) was to be announced at the Homecoming game. There is more of this in the chapter called – hold on to your seats – Homecoming King.

The jury returned the verdict that I should go, despite the haunting feeling that this was a big mistake and that I may never be the same after this wretched experience. I was not so right, not so wrong.

Well, it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but that has to do with just my natural reaction as opposed to knowing anything about the game. When the ball was thrown to me, I ran, and knowing that there are 18,000 burly and somewhat ill-cultured men running behind you, thirsty for blood, the best thing to do is to run like fire. And I did. I actually surprised most people there because, except for my relative and his best friend, no one knew that I am pretty quick. I ended up dragging like 4 guys with me as I crossed the touchdown line.

As for the other parts of the game, trauma might be the best word to use. Someone told me to be nose guard. Immediate stop signs were raised in my head. Nose guard? I don’t want to do anything requiring me to guard anyone else’s nose, or my own. I reneged on this position, citing the obvious – “I don’t know what that means”. So the genius of the group suggests that while playing the game, I should observe the other nose guards to see what they were doing and do that. Now, forgive me if I am wrong, but what was I supposed to do in the meantime? I consider feigning a seizure to rescue me from this situation, but I feared more my parents’ anger at using insurance unnecessarily. So I pretended to do something while everyone was busy doing whatever they were running around doing, until someone noticed that I was doing the equivalent of busy work on the football field. I had to do Something, of course, this is football. I should have been grateful to be able to participate in America’s pastime. What was I thinking?

So, I grabbed some guy who had the ball and threw him to the ground. Problem solved.

He argued with me that I had ripped his windbreaker. I retorted that he shouldn’t have worn something that he didn’t want ripped to a football game. This bit of male bravado that I exhibited salvaged the rest of my sappy performance in this game, and my touchdown actually propelled me to some type of respectable status. Moreover, the windbreaker incident became my new way out of future games – of course, I didn’t want to repeat this incident, so I would just keep my anger out of the football arena.

I still hate football.