Kicking Off The Labor Day Weekend

It’s hard to believe, but Labor Day is coming right up. It means a long weekend, a doorway that eventually leads to pleasant autumn weather and the beginning of football season.

All of those can be very enjoyable, but it’s an added bonus to experience any of the three from the vantage point of Northwest Arkansas.

Arkansas football should have an exciting beginning, with the Hogs kicking off their season on Thursday night in Little Rock against Florida A&M. I’ll be watching.

When I think of the Razorback game, and the fact that the National Football League regular season games start next week, I can get downright excited.

Football became an extremely important part of my life in 1970.

And while I have come to believe that we sometimes place too much of an emphasis on sports, football has always been one of my most enjoyable pursuits, provided I don’t go completely overboard. (For instance, if I know all of the starting players for the Dallas Cowboys and which college they attended, but forget my own children’s names, I would be the first to admit that my football viewing has too high of a priority).

My gridiron interests, to this point, have not crossed that line.

When I was a child in the 1970s, however, my parents may have worried that football was becoming an obsession.

I fondly remember the NFL of the 1970s as a time of great competition and great nostalgia, and a time in which the athletes’ perspective had not yet been altered by tons of money. They were starting to be paid more, but not the multimillion dollar contracts that are common today.

Those were good days. So good, in fact, that I’ve started writing a football book that I hope to publish within the coming year. (That is not to be confused with a book of my columns coming out this fall called, “Learning Every Day”).

The football book is one I have simply titled “Growing Up with Pro Football,” because the 1970s was a time in which both the NFL and I began to come of age.

The book manuscript is one that includes a lot of pro football history, but also much in the way of personal reflection about the game. Here are some excerpts: The National Football League was born in 1920, the American Football League was born in 1960, and I was born in 1962. In 1970, the AFL and NFL merged. And I merged with them. For the first time, I started watching football and appreciating it for all it was. The two leagues were realigned into six divisions, all under the NFL banner, and as a studious 8-year-old I was infatuated with pro football and embraced the new NFL with great enthusiasm. Up until that time I had known what football was, but had never given it much attention.

But in 1970 something happened. I got acquainted with high school football, became very interested in the Arkansas Razorbacks and college football in general, and as a secondgrader in the small town of Corning, Ark., started participating in football games during recess.

My participation in the sport ramped up my interest in football on television.

Almost instantly, I became enamored with the real stars of the game, the ones who played on Sunday afternoons on television. And in 1970, the team that caught my eye more than any other was the Dallas Cowboys.

I can’t tell you any one reason why I gravitated towards Dallas; I just did. … In retrospect, I can see that 1970 was a good time for an impressionable young man to get on board as a Cowboy fan.

The narrative then tells how my football interest grew with each passing year, and how I had to learn how to look at football stars in the appropriate light:

During the early 1970s I looked at football through the eyes of a boy that could be mesmerized by athletic heroism. I could truly look up to the athletes on the field, the same as kids in America do in every generation. From age 8 until about age 14, I was indeed starry-eyed about football.

To this day I appreciate Labor Day and the beginning of football season with a special affection. In 2017, I can look at football through the eyes of an adult but in some ways can still enjoy the game like a youngster from the 1970s. It will be my 48th year as a fan.

As football kicks off another season, fresh stories will unfold and more football legends will be born. And the game can be enjoyed by a new generation of kids.

Or by older guys like me.