The Best Part Of It Is Not Being There
High school football is under way again, and I am delighted to say that this storied means of building character and self-discipline among America’s youth has provided me with a lifelong benefit.
If it built character or self-discipline in my group of young louts, I never was able to detect any in later life. But the lasting reward of having played the game is undeniable, and I am wallowing in it this month.
I look up at that broiling Texas sun and say it, sometimes even aloud. If there are people around, they look at me funny, but I don’t care. It is my hymn of thanks:
“The temperature’s 100 degrees, the humidity’s 100 percent and the teams are all doing their two-a-day workouts. And I AM NOT OUT THERE! Thank you, Lord!”
To normal people, the annual arrival of football season may bring back adolescent memories of chrysanthemum corsages, cocoa in the jug, pep meetings, proms and school cheers. But to old players, even those who played at the high school level, the August memories are the smell of crushed grass and dust, the high noon glare glancing off helmets and the sound of fat tackles throwing up on the sideline - old Henry Whatsisname never reported in shape, and we always thought he eventually would upchuck a vital organ, but he never did.
The rusty taste of blood, your own in those pre-face-mask days, comes to mind. Which at least made a change from the terrible thirst for water. Back in the 1940s, it was deemed extremely important to your manhood and the demonstration thereof not to drink water during workouts.
Our manhood was a vital concern to us 15-year-old men, and the coaches strictly forbade drinking water, which they contended was a sissy habit. So the water bucket that figured in old duffers’ lies about their great gridiron days never was seen at our practices. We would tank up as much as we could beforehand, but the coaches could run all that out of us in 10 minutes. By the end of the workout, every drop we had drunk or would drink for the next two or three days would soak our socks, uniforms and pads.
Therefore, we spent the too-brief hours between the morning workout and the afternoon version trying to slurp up enough water, orange juice, soda pop, whatever, to replace gallons we had lost. Unfortunately, we never could take enough aboard. To this day, most old football players are required to drink a lot of beer while watching football. It’s a health thing.
Old football players may have bad knees and crooked noses, but they have the cleanest pores around.
I sympathize when I pass a scrimmage field in August and see poor sweat-soaked wretches, the linemen, butting a steel blocking sled up and down the field. Our sled was built of railroad ties and had seven buffers, one per line person. We would butt that back and forth, Coach riding the thing, encouraging us by bellowing derogatory remarks about our determination, courage, leg muscles and, of course, our manhood.
After a week or so of whacking that torture machine and one another, we progressed to running plays, the scrimmage. Which isn’t actually playing the game, because after each play in which you have smashed through - or been slammed back on your rear - Coach would blow his whistle, scream at one or more of us heroes for pointing our toes the wrong way or cocking the wrong shoulder or missing a block, then run the play all over again from the same spot. And again. And again.
Scrimmaging normally isn’t much fun, but we sometimes got a wonderful break - a legal chance to kill our Coach. He would get so furious at our boneheaded blunders that he would rip off his cap, wrap a strip of tape around his bulging temples and leap into the defensive line. Needless to say, every single one of us instantly would focus on running the next play with such crushing power as to destroy, or at least cripple for life, our beloved instructor.
We never succeeded. But, one of the best features of football is that it lets supposedly nice kids do things that, if done in the street, would put them in the hands of the state department of corrections.
Years ago, a reader, a college teammate of Coach’s, urged me to write him in retirement. But no way am I going to let him know I am making light of what is supposed to be a grimly serious business - defending our town’s honor from savages - i.e., the Wilson High Bulldogs or West Memphis Blue Devils. Coach surely would yell, as in days of old, “Wright, five laps for skylarking!” I don’t do laps now, but I probably would try - and it would put me in intensive care. I still do skylark. And at my age, I know you can drink water while skylarking.
xxxx