Football Season
by Bill Simmons
When I was 11 years old my school started a Junior High and, with it, a Junior High Football team. Every boy in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades signed up. My favorite sport! Real uniforms! A locker room! A real, live, paid-for coach! Cheerleaders! Letter jackets! What's not to like, right?
I couldn't wait to get started that August in 1974.
It was a disaster.
We had no field. Fortunately for us, Jackson’s Belhaven College bowl was available. Unfortunately, it was also apparently the site of some sort of fire-ant fertility project. The ground was sun-baked like concrete except where softened by the hundreds of ant hills. There were no yard makers or goal posts. The sparse grass filaments made sad little noises when you accidentally stepped on them.
The new coach was a little intense.
Character Building Exercises and Mental Toughness Drills would suffice in lieu of actual plays and game plans. We ran to practice, where we ran in place, and then ran wind-sprints interrupted sporadically by “Up-Downs” and “Bear Crawls” up the hill. We had one drill called "Kill M" where the entire roster lined up and took the opportunity to "mentally toughen" our contact-averse quarterback.
When I saw the movie "Junction Boys," I empathized, not sympathized, with the Bear's Aggies out in Texas. They had it tough. But we had it really tough. Half the team quit within three days. The remaining 14 of us, feeling as though we had failed some new IQ test, soldiered on. You know, to get to the “good part”—where all the pain and whelps pay off in glory and trophies. I could already envision the season recap in the new school annual outlining our grit and determination crowned with championships.
Well, that never happened.
We were awful. “New” Coke Awful. WorldCom stock awful.
Talent-starved to begin with and now bruised, battered and exhausted, our schedule began. Now real teams with real 9th grade football players were lining up against us. It was like Michael Oher versus the buffet. They feasted.
We had precisely one real player, our tight end and defensive lineman—Moose.
All plays were intended to either run the ball behind him (much as a racecar drafts behind another in NASCAR) or to throw the ball over the wall of onrushing tacklers in his general direction.
To call our line a sieve would insult sieves. Our “game plans” held water only until the other team got a load of us during pre-game stretching and spied Moose among the rest of us wind indicators. Then they would quickly mark him with five or six players and leave the remainder of our hapless eleven to practice our falling down and moaning skills.
Our quarterback had a fundamental misunderstanding of the phrase “Team leader”. Team Cowerer, maybe. His one true skill—his bow-and-arrow arm—was rendered useless by his instinct for the ground when rushed.
In his defense, he had a keen sense of survival. It is not a good sign when your coach installs the “Muffed Snap” play and it immediately becomes your highest percentage offensive play.
We staggered through the season to the year’s last game in which we scored our only touchdown of the year after falling behind by some forty points. You would have thought “Charlie's Angels” had agreed to host the team swim party. We whooped and danced and high-fived the referees. The other team clearly thought we had lost our minds.
And then it was all over.
As young men we had survived something big. I loved it. I loved all of it. The hits, the bites, the sweat, the exhaustion, even the futility. Bonds were formed between teammates through real adversity.
My childhood buddy in Texas who was on that team with me will howl when he reads this. It was Us vs. Coach, it was Us vs. the World and we had finished it—with broken bodies but heads high. I was now a confident—no … a cocky football player.
I knew that no matter what a coach or teammate or opponent threw at me they had never been through what I had. I wouldn't wish it on anybody but for me it was a first real test of myself and I felt pretty good.
These tests are important as we grow up and football is often a great classroom. It doesn't have to be football; it can be most any sport or challenge but you’ll know it when it happens and it is a "Good Thing".
Play on to the last echo of the whistle and please forgive the Presbyterians when they mess up the team Lord’s Prayer. Trespasses??? Huh?
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