I've got this old football injury from high school that still nags me on cold, rainy days or when I work out particularly hard. It throbs a little or stiffens up, making me think of the old days on the football field, when I craved the rush I got from knocking a guy on his back or sacking the quarterback. My shoulder reminds me of the brief moments of glory that I shared with my teammates on my high school football team and all the fun, and pain, that went along with those small victories. I think of pre-season football camp, with two-a-day and three-a-day practices in full equipment on hot-as-griddle August days, when we players would lie on our bunks in between practices and gasp for air. I fondly recall the lacerated hands, black-and-blue forearms, and the occasional broken finger that we all suffered. And I'll never forget the headaches that often didn't abate until the Monday after a Saturday game.
Lately I've been thinking about those days more often because of the new film, Friday Night Lights, which is set in Texas. I'm not likely to see the movie, though it's supposed to be good, because I'm a little biased. I like to think that our region has the proudest, and longest, football tradition, since it is the birthplace of football and home of the Super Bowl Steelers. So I prefer to remember my family's tradition of Friday night football games.
Dad would bundle all of us younger kids in caps and scarves. He'd load us down with a couple of pairs of binoculars, while he carried coffee, hot chocolate, munchies like Ginger Snaps, and a few Mexican ponchos that were thick as horse blankets and a welcome buffer from the cold, splintery wooden bleachers at Bellevue Field. We'd head up to the field and grab a seat, Dad talking with the neighbors and joking about the other team's poor prospects of beating the home team -- first the scrappy Bellevue Bulldogs and in later years, the Northgate Flames. The cool autumn air and the bright lights illuminating the field, coupled with the jumpy and loud high school band and cute cheerleaders, made for a festive atmosphere. Even now, when the leaves start to change and there's a certain clean crispness to the air, I inadvertently remind myself that it's football weather.
It was intoxicating watching my older brothers excel on the field, catching the proud look in Dad's eye and the joy on everyone's faces as they cheered for the perfect block, tackle, or catch that my brother had made. It inspired me to want to play as well, or better, than them. As I got a little older, Dad would let me run around with my buddies during the game. We'd play pick-up tackle football games in the grass near the end zone; little squirts mimicking a game we didn't fully understand, but still loved.
My first year in peewee football, where you played on a team according to your age and also according to your weight, I didn't get much playing time in games. I was 12, I had not yet reached my big growth spurt, and I didn't really know the game yet. I was just learning to get used to crouching down into my stance. Partly because I wasn't a standout player and also because I wasn't related to any of the coaches, I hardly played a down during my first year, and it shamed me. I would walk home from the game in my sparkling white football pants and shirt, embarrassed that I'd obviously been sitting the bench the entire game. I'd grab a couple handfuls of grass and rub them on my pants and shirt, to make it look like I was falling in the grass during the game. My older brother Clinton called me on this one day.
"So how'd the game go?" he asked.
"Good. We won," I said.
"How many tackles did you get?"
When I failed to respond quickly, he knew I was lying to him -- he read it on my face.
"What'd you do, rub grass on your pants to make it look like you played?" he asked, and burst into laughter. I hung my head in shame.
But just a couple of years later, I was playing all the time in the games. I was in middle school, in eighth grade, one of only a few eighth graders who saw playing time on the junior high team. I played nose tackle, because I had a savage streak that made it fun for me to knock centers onto their backs or into the quarterback.
We were playing an away game on a Saturday afternoon, which was when nearly all of our games were played. The game was into the first quarter, but I hadn't seen my dad on the sidelines. He said he'd make it to the game, but it was far out in the country, and when I didn't see him on the sidelines, I thought maybe he couldn't make it for some reason or another.
So I concentrated on my task of knocking out the lineman in front of me and trying to kill the quarterback. I had been taught to "kill" the quarterback since I first learned a football stance a few years before. In the Bellevue Colts peewee football league, our coaches tenderly molded our young minds with clear direction. They pointed out the finer aspects of what to do during an "Oklahoma" drill:
"When he gets the ball, you try to kill him!" they would yell at us, their rage-filled voices echoing across the fields, like Spartan coaches of old.
Our team, Northgate Flames Junior High football team, was making progress after a lackluster possession and a punt. We'd pinned the opposition down behind their 10-yard line, and they were failing to get out of their territory, so they started to pass.
Next thing I knew, I was chasing the quarterback, bull-rushing my way through a couple of lineman, and then I wrapped my arms around my prey and tackled him. The crush of my shoulder pads against his mid-section and the low thud of us hitting the ground all flowed together gracefully and felt like winning. A bunch of my teammates piled on top of me, and being at the bottom of a dark pile of players, I couldn't see what they were yelling about until everyone had peeled off of me. As I got up off of the quarterback, I saw that I had tackled him halfway into the end zone.
"Yeah! Safety! Two points!" my teammates all cheered, pointing at the end zone line.
My teammates all clapped me on the back and things seemed to move in slow motion. I looked over to the sideline and I saw my dad and my brother-in-law, cheering and clapping for me, wild grins on their faces. I felt lightheaded and tingling with the unexpected praise, and every little pain I'd suffered to get that point was forgotten.
I was always a lineman when I played football in school and when I played for a year in college at Carnegie Mellon University. And though I made some good plays over the years, that safety in junior high was the only time that I ever scored for the team.
I hurt my shoulder in my final year of high school football, probably from sheer abuse. I played the entire game at that time, with the exception of kick-offs, so when I initially hurt my shoulder, it didn't really have a chance to heal, because I kept banging it up on the field. The fact that I lifted heavy weights throughout the season also aggravated the injury, but I felt I had to lift because I didn't want to lose my strength, which invariably happens as the football season progresses.
The shoulder seemed to have a will of its own, and I'd be knocking over some benchwarmer lineman one moment, and the next moment my shoulder would just give out, and the scrub would get around me. When it first happened, Coach Wachter called me out of the game and our physical trainer, a guy who'd been an assistant trainer for Notre Dame, took a look at the shoulder and asked me a bunch of questions, quickly ascertaining that I probably had some kind of ligamentitis. From then on, whenever the shoulder acted up during a game, he'd pull gently on my right arm, explaining that he was stretching out the ligament. My shoulder would immediately feel better, and I'd head back onto the field.
At Kiski School, the boy's boarding school I attended outside Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, we didn't have lights on our football field, and we had no band and no cute cheerleaders. We didn't have thousands of fans -- usually barely hundreds, or far less than a hundred. And they generally weren't the raucous variety that you find at games closer to the city of Pittsburgh. Almost all of our games were played on sunny or overcast afternoons, with the rare exception of a Friday night away game at a public school. But we played tough, and we won a lot.
Back then I felt that the game was somehow purer without all of the hoopla that surrounded the typical Friday night high school football game. Part of me still feels that way. Without all of the distractions, the game was just clean, hard-fought football. No Friday night lights -- just a Saturday afternoon contest of muscle, brains, and will.
