“The fact that you are rich or handsome won’t get you anything in curls;
You’ve gotta be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls.”
Well, in 1933, you did. And it still applies to the younger girlies, as yet unspoiled by the ample seduction of the dollar. Highschool, as we all know, is a Mediterranean resort for football heroes, an insular community with orchards full of low-hanging fruit, supple teenage wenches paving the walkways to the training rooms. The older a girl gets, of course, the more consideration is given to “rich and handsome,” especially the former, and these days a girl can get a little gold with her football. True pigskin heroes exiting college will be jumping right into Uncle Scrooge’s money bin, ready or not. Miss Birmingham, who under ordinary circumstances might not be considering a Samoan octoroon for a mate, suddenly raises an eyebrow. Observers may cast a wary eye but hey, racial integration needs all the help it can get. If money is the root of all evil, it is also the root of many unlikely relationships. What do you think would happen if Donald Trump suddenly went broke? Melania would be on the first train to Novo Mesto, that’s what. But to most of us, football is more than money and madwomen. Football is fun.
Take Me Out To The Ball Game
When we were kids, very young ones, the most important things in life were (1) your family, (2) your friends, and (3) Baseball. My first memories of my father consisted of him sitting for hours next to a radio listening to Red Sox games. Whatever was happening on that radio was obviously of great concern, his moods swinging left to right in an instant, a smile quickly turning into a frown and vice-versa. I was allowed to sit there with him if I was quiet, so I did, gleaning important information with each visit. I learned, for instance, that there was no such team as the New York Yankees, there were only the Damnyankees, vile opponents of Truth, Justice and the American Way. I learned that most baseball managers were dumbheads who could easily have been replaced by orangutans from the Franklin Park Zoo without much loss of leadership. I learned the Red Sox batting order, the likely pitching rotation, where Boston stood in the standings (always second) and that Ted Williams could see the ball as it hit the bat, which even the great Joe DiMaggio could not do. I learned that Fenway Park was the greatest place in the universe, better than Heaven, but don’t tell Monsignor Daly anybody said that.
I started listening to baseball games by myself when my father was working or otherwise occupied. I ingested every morsel of information and my father delighted in regaling his friends with my vast trove of knowledge. “Tell us the American League standings, Billy—how many games behind everybody is,” or “Tell us the Detroit Tigers’ batting order.” Chump answers for me, give me a hard one.
When it came time to play the game, I was the first one out rounding up kids early in the morning. Sleepy parents would come to the windows and tell me Jackie or Mickie or Jimmy would be out as soon as breakfast was finished, shaking their heads in bewilderment over the early imposition. Everybody in the neighborhood played baseball, talented or not. The hallowed B&M Field was the gathering place, the social center, and we took it over like we owned the place, even painting large numerals on the B&M Railroad’s warehouse wall to indicate the distance from home plate. We started playing in the freezing cold when snow was still on the ground and we kept it up until the World Series was over in October. When the last out in the long season arrived, it was like a death in the family, a sudden void in our existence. What the hell would we do now? That’s when we ran across this new thing called Football.
Love Hurts. So Does Football.
The Lawrence Memorial Stadium, where both the local high schools played, was only a half hour from our neighborhood in South Lawrence so most of the kids were allowed to traipse over there to watch the games or even the practices, which were held after school on the rag-tag Lawrence High practice fields behind the stadium bleachers. The LHS coaches didn’t particularly care for anyone watching their activities so they ran us off a few times before coming to grips with the realization that we were like the weather—inevitable—and decided to leave us alone. After a few weeks, they began to learn our names and started asking us what plays they should run against Lowell, their vaunted Thanksgiving Day rival. “Against Lowell,” we told them, “you should run the Clubhouse Sweep—head for the locker rooms and keep on going.” If Lawrence ever beat Lowell in all the days of my youth, I don’t remember it, so powerful were the Greco-American squads from eleven miles down the road. It was the ultimate example of Greeks not bearing gifts.
When we played football in the neighborhood, it didn’t take long to realize how benign baseball was in comparison. Oh sure, you might get zapped by the occasional line drive or twist an ankle sliding into second, but you were never crashed into by a gorilla carrying twice your weight or kicked in the face by a runner you were trying to tackle. Of course, we had equipment intended to assuage these difficulties if only it would fit. I had a loose-fitting helmet which made a bobblehead look steady and shoulderpads your grandmother could punch a hole through. We might as well have been wearing Saran Wrap for all the good it did us. Nobody cared, though, except for the poor mothers who had to put their kids back together again. “Why do you want to play football?” they’d always ask. We’d laugh and tell them the girls wouldn’t let us into the Jumprope games.
When it was time for high school, I eschewed Lawrence High for Central Catholic, which won as often as LHS lost. I tried out for the freshman team as a quarterback, figuring the best of the competition, Hank Koza, would soon be moved up to the varsity. I weighed about 135 pounds and didn’t have a great arm but I did have a good ability to read the defense and move the ball three, four, five yards at a time, first down after first down, throwing short passes only when necessary. When they moved Koza up, I got to start a practice game and we beat a bunch of traveling gypsies, 30-0. Coach Moynihan, the varsity head man, was questioned about the lack of passing yardage and replied, “If we keep the ball for sixteen plays a drive, the other team won’t get it much, right?”
Unfortunately, at 135 pounds, I was getting killed. I suffered compromising injuries to my left knee and lower back, making it impossible to stand up straight after sitting down for a few minutes. After leaving one class period, it would take me the entire ten minutes between classes to stand erect. We had witch doctors back then and one of them told me I had probably “dropped a stitch” in my back, which is 1950s medical jargon for “I don’t have a clue.” My condition kept getting worse and finally I trooped over to Coach Moynihan and told him I couldn’t play any more. He gave me a pep talk, thanked me for my efforts and sent me on my way. It was one of the saddest days of my life. I was barely a teenager and broken already. Then Moynihan threw me a bone. I could hang around practices with the coaches for another week and view the game from their perspective. I learned more about football in that week than I have in the past 60 years.
The Great American Game
As the years passed, football grew in the affections of American sports fans, eventually outstripping baseball. There were only ten or eleven games a season, maybe just a half-dozen at home, so these few contests were feasts to be savored. Whereas baseball was primarily a professional game played originally in sixteen large cities, football was available at almost every college in the country. And while baseball was played quietly with solemn purpose, football was a raucous circus with its marching bands, pretty young cheerleaders and brutal contact. The National Football League, the first professional organization of any magnitude, set up shop in 1920, playing in the shadow of the colleges for many decades but eventually developing an enormous fan base and great prosperity.
Football continues to evolve, perhaps more than any other sport as offenses conspire to baffle defenses and vice-versa. In the 1970s-80s, the powerful Southeastern Conference was dominated by strong defenses. In 1990, the University of Florida hired one of its graduates, Steve Spurrier, to change things up. Spurrier, an ex-quarterback, had a penchant for throwing the ball. He often lined his offenses up with five wide receivers, fast and elusive ones at that, leaving confused SEC defenses in a shambles. Spurrier won six SEC titles in ten years and in 1996 won all of his home games, scoring no less than 50 points in each. At the end of that season, the Gators won their first national championship in football, routing Florida State 52-20 in New Orleans. Seeking to capitalize on this magic, the floundering Washington Redskins of the National Football League eventually hired Spurrier for a cool 5 mil a year. The UF coach’s offense proved no mystery to the faster, stronger and more savvy defenses of the NFL. After two short years, Spurrier was back in college, where he again excelled at South Carolina. Point and Counterpoint.
In 2007, coach Chip Kelly of Oregon parlayed a no-huddle offense, some very quick backs and wide-receivers and a quarterback who could carry the ball, into a blitzkrieg offense capable of scoring touchdowns in shockingly few plays. The Ducks’ defense was no great shakes but all they needed was occasional success because the offense was going up and down the field, non-stop. Despite historically strong powerhouses at USC, UCLA and Stanford, Kelly’s tomfoolery quickly led Oregon to the top of the Pacific Coast Conference. His opponents were bumfuzzled. How could you stop this runaway train? Was Kelly a legitimate genius? The NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles couldn’t resist finding out, hiring the Oregon coach in 2013. He immediately took a team which had been 4-12 in 2012 and finished the next season 10-6. Things were looking up in Philadelphia. Then, in 2014, he repeated the 10-6 record. Hmmmn. In 2015, Kelly finished 6-9 and was fired. Geniuses, it seems, are tough to come by. It is tougher to stay on top in football than in any other sport. No team has won two consecutive NFL championships since the New England Patriots repeated in 2005. Football is hard, football is mysterious. Football tomorrow will not be the same as football today.
Amazingly, not everybody likes football. Maybe you were in love with the Queen of the Senior Prom in high school and the football player got the girl. Maybe your hackles are up because every time you pick up a newspaper some wide receiver from Baylor or noseguard from Notre Dame is disqualified for smoking weed, missing class or bopping his girlfriend. Try to remind yourself there are 85 guys on a college team, many of them just in from the Inner City where manners are in short supply. And even if you’re the unforgiving type, consider that the player is not the game. One raunchy minister does not a religion make. If an executive of a local charity robs the till are we excused from ever again donating a penny? There are murky operators in all areas of life….thieving doctors, conniving lawyers, dishonest Indian chiefs….but we continue utilizing their services because most people of their ilk are reliable.
So now, it starts again, another season. The band is tuning up in the parking lot, the banquet awaits on the open tailgate. Friends arrive from out of town, the city teems with excitement. Will Old Siwash win the prize this year or will it go to our hated rivals at Diptheria Tech? Will we be transported to Valhalla on the Wings of Ecstasy or cudgeled into the gutter by the Agony of Defeat? Who will be the heroes? Who will be the fools? Week by week, the answers will appear, the mysteries solve, but only to beget further enigmas. Football, like life itself, is an endless succession of ebbs and flows, of advances and regressions, of brilliant successes and blinding failures, of stopgap measures and stalling tactics where Heaven is the end zone and Hell is punting from your own two-yard-line.
But what if it’s a terrible year, you ask, gong-ringing terrible, the kind of year which heaps insult upon injury, a season when it rains all the time, where the quarterback is fractured, where the head coach comes down with Chikungunya Fever, where sinkholes open up on the fifty-yard-line and an errant goalpost falls into the grandstand? Well, there’s always Baseball.
That’s all, folks….
