Football offers lifetime of escape
is my older brother Tony, being a star high school lineman at 135 pounds. He did it twice. First, before he enlisted to fight in World War II and then when he returned to finish his education. I was 7 at the time. He was my hero. I started smoking because he and our brother Tom, who played end and kept getting knocked unconscious, smoked Lucky Strikes. I quit 36 years ago. The cigarettes killed both of them.
Football is rising early on Saturday, walking 2 miles, part way with my buddies, to the Methodist Children’s Home where we played tackle and full blocking, townies vs. home kids, for five or six hours with no referees, no adult supervision and a set of mostly unspoken rules that respected everyone on the unlined field.
Football is high school practice twice a day in the hot sun where drinking water was forbidden. It would make us sick, we were told, a piece of medical ignorance that proved fatal at times.
Likewise, Friday nights under the lights, where we aimed for a winning season (winning more than half our games), but failed to do so for four straight years.
Football was lying on our bellies on Saturday afternoon listening on the radio to Ohio State versus the rest of the Big Ten, following the action by moving the toy marker in a cardboard football game from yard line to yard line as the announcer directed.
Football was ignoring the fledging professional teams, which had rules we couldn’t understand anyway, there being no teams within four hours drive.
Football was gradually broadening our interests to the pros, because damn those guys were good, while never abandoning the real football, the big-name colleges.
Football was Sunday afternoons before the TV and then, too, on Monday nights, then adding Thursdays, and then, something we thought would never happen, we became football weary.
Football was Bill Belichick taking over the Patriots, then being excoriated by the know-it-all Boston sports writers for handing the ball to an unknown, untested mediocre college player named Tom Brady rather than give it back to an injured and fading Drew Bledsoe, who had a great arm but just couldn’t win consistently.
Football is the legend of Brady and Belichick, a combination that has an extramundane quality, or does it? Is there something about the chemistry between the two that makes the Patriots perennial Super Bowl contenders?
Or are they simply separate great talents, one on the sideline, one on the field? Questions for the ages.
Football is not politics, regardless of what a kneeling player and a bombastic president say.
Football is a diversion from politics. The season couldn’t have come soon enough.