Gridiron Suffering Builds Bonds, Character

Gridiron glory is about to unfold on high-school fields across the land, and anyone who has put on a pair of shoulder pads and a helmet in his bygone youth cannot escape the annual rush of nostalgia that accompanies the arrival of football season.

Coaches, now as in every previous autumn, are exhorting their young players to measure up to the stern test of body, mind and heart in pursuit of excellence, victory, the triumph of the human spirit and so forth.

It’s the “so forth,” however, that is the essence of the game for the kids. Although at heart, every coach is a rough-hewn philosopher of sorts - “The game of football is like the game of life” - metaphysical ideals usually are lost on adolescents. The path to that existential awakening first must pass through the valley of the shadow of suffering.

Kids can grasp the rhetoric of simpler philosophical truths such as “pain builds character” or “play hurt” or “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Along that trail of tears, the suffering usually takes on the character of the coach.

Donald Rickey, my seventh-grade coach, took great delight in conducting practices on a field infested with goat-head thorns. He bellowed to his players to ignore the bleeding puncture wounds in their knees, elbows and hands.

By the time I reached high school, I was being introduced to a new dimension of character building. Two-a-day workouts in August burned under a 98-degree western Texas sun. Water breaks were for sissies, and because we had no sissies on the team, we spurned such indulgences.

Seniors Curtis Rexrode, Ronnie Gillespie and Jimmy Fields bludgeoned us sophomores with the deft precision of street fighters. We grew up fast - and very alert for blind-side hits during scrimmages.

The world, according to the coaches, was inhabited by two species: hitters and non-hitters. We enjoyed numerous opportunities in bone-jarring, bloody-nose drills to demonstrate our worthiness to inhabit the realm of the hitters, while the unworthy slunk into exile.

Memory, it is said, does not retain pain, but it cannot help but retain the image of the wicked gleam in the eye and menacing smile of a coach when, after you had thought the torturous workout was over, he announced: “Now we’re going to die a little.”

After an especially disappointing 16-0 loss to Odessa Permian in the fall of 1961, the grim-faced coaches apologized for their having let us down by not getting us sufficiently prepared. We shuddered at the thought of the corrective measures that lay before us. That week, the “suicide drill” was conceived (it wasn’t pretty), and poor Midland Lee suffered the next Friday night for our suffering - 48-0, as I recall.

But character building didn’t end with the final game of the season. A week later, off-season drills began and continued until spring training in May. Each day, we would advance through several “stations” - climbing the curved I-beam girders of the gym with our fingers; traversing the horizontal ladder until our palms bled; doing isometric exercises, speed sit-ups, rope-skipping and agility drills; and running, running, running.

When foul weather forced us indoors, we repaired to the “monkey room,” a stifling enclosure where we wrestled until exhausted or practiced with blocking dummies until our legs were limp and, after we had driven repeatedly into the canvas-covered bags, blood dripped from split ears.

Yet, throughout the ordeal, certain almost inexpressible bonds were being forged among those who endured. They had struggled and suffered together in a common purpose. They had been tested together, experiencing triumph and disappointment, both personally and as a team. They became part of a tradition which had come before them and would endure after they were gone. They learned things - about their own limits, about shared adversity, about collective joy and sorrow - that they would not have known had they not passed through that valley together.

Yes, the pomp of pep rallies, the tingling excitement stimulated by the band playing the school fight song and the cheers from the stadium during the game - yes, and the adoring attention from the girls - all contributed to a sense of a special time in the bloom of youth.

But it was the passage through the valley that most stirs the memories of those who were down there on the field once upon a time, with bands blaring, crowds roaring, communities united in the sporting defense of their respective traditions.

They remember what it was like, and it was wonderful - now that they don’t have to go back and develop all that character again.

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Tommy Denton Fort Worth Star-Telegram