On one autumn afternoon in Kirtland Park, where East 49th Street ends at the Shoreway, my neighborhood football team was playing another neighborhood team. Both teams were made up of high school boys.
The team that we were playing was on a par with our rag tag football team—except for one player on the other team who was much better than our players. In the vernacular of football announcers on television, “He was all over the place.”
He was extremely active ripping off long runs and smashing people on defense. He was the epitome of how to play football. At one point in the game my team failed to gain a first down and was forced to punt.
I was in the backfield for my team—positioned to block for our punter. Looking out at the defense, I saw that for some unknown reason, Mister Super Star wasn’t covered. He would have a fair shot at blocking the punt.
I saw him in his authentic football stance and couldn’t help but notice that his eyes lit up when he saw 115-pound me back to block for the punter. His look of surprise turned into a sneer, and I knew that he was relishing what he was going to do to me.
The sneer told me he would be running over me like I wasn’t there and crushing my attempt to block him. He would go through me like players did when they broke through those paper circles during the introductions before real games. He knew he was going to block the punt.
The ball was snapped, and he came at me like a raging bull. This whole scenario fired up something in my brain. I wasn’t going to let this guy flatten me. My anger drew something out of me that may have surprised everyone on the field but me. When he came roaring at me, I had become a raging bull too, albeit a small one.
My anger enabled me to muster everything I had in me for what was going to happen next. When our collision occurred, I really blasted him.
I blasted him so hard, in fact, that when he got to me, he was abruptly stopped and his trajectory reversed, and he was knocked down and knocked out so cold that when he hit the ground on his back his feet were shaking violently.
When he woke up, he found me standing over him one foot on either side of him. I was leaning over him, so my face was the first thing he saw when he woke up from his nap.
I screamed at him. “Yes, it was me that did this to you, you better-than-me football player!”
When he got himself together and got back in the game, he just wasn’t the same Mr. Everything he had been. I don’t think his faith in mankind was shaken, but he was very quiet and was not the force that he was before his nap. His placement in the local football pantheon was set asunder for one day.
For the rest of the game, maybe he was contemplating why the football gods had frowned on him on that one play. “Oh why, Oh great Knute Rockne, Oh why Mr. Heisman, Oh why Coach Woody, have you forsaken me?”
He must have been feeling pretty miserable. But I know one skinny blond haired kid who felt pretty good. For a while anyway. When my euphoria had settled down, I realized that my bravado was misleading me. I was dizzy and confused.
Some of my teammates noticed that I was kind of in Lala land and escorted me to the sideline. I played no more that day and as unsteady as I was, I couldn’t stop the smile on my face.
Ah, the manly game of football! Sometimes it brings out the best in men and sometimes it brings out the worst. I will let you be the judge of that.
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