On Football (Part 5)

NSP Meditations, Sports

Let me now consider something else about football that I noticed a couple of years ago, something vexing and quite revealing about American culture. It is the now widely accepted practice of college and professional (high school?) football players of celebrating routine plays, such as making a first down on a running play at midfield early in the second quarter, or making a special teams tackle while trailing by 28 points in the fourth quarter, or scoring a meaningless touchdown with seconds to go in the game. You see this all the time and you used to never see it. I doubt coaches allowed it, but more to the point, players would have never conceived such absurd self aggrandizement for something as trivial as making a first down on a seven yard run with nothing at stake on the clock.

Why this shift?

I see nothing wrong with orchestrated celebrations after exciting touchdowns, although I much prefer the simple spike or nonchalantly handing over the ball to the official, like the way Barry Sanders always did. It was no big deal—he’d be back.

Again, why the change? It does coincide with the rise of social media and the general self aggrandizement of all aspects of American life, but there has to be more to it than that. I wish announcers would talk about this habit and call it out or ask about it. But nothing is ever mentioned, not even in passing. Maybe they don’t even notice. Maybe we’ve become nearly immune to this sort of beating on our proverbial chests to get people to notice us and our accomplishments, like tackling a punt returner for no gain. I fear in the past I may have been like this in my creative life, but never again. I like the Barry Sanders way of celebrating.

On Football (Part 4)

NSP Meditations, Pioneer Pride, Sports , ,

My fifth and sixth grade flag football coach at Mt. Pleasant Elementary in Oregon City was the best and kindest football coach I ever had. What an innovator! It was from him that I got the idea to run the same gadget play twice in a row. We had so many things going on offensively that we bedazzled our opponents and were 11-1 in those two seasons. This coach taught me a lot of football and about sportsmanship. Other coaches taught me football but very little about sportsmanship. It’s a strange thing as a kid to see an adult running up the score on another team. I had coach in junior high who was particularly notorious for doing that, and once ran up the score on my father-coached team at a crosstown rival. I scored three touchdowns in that game, against my Old Man! We beat him 50-0. On one of the touchdowns, I ran right past him on the sideline and sort of nodded in apology.

I am ashamed of my participation in bullying a player on my eighth grade football team. He was too poor to afford cleats and played in hand-me down black loafers! This bullying was aided and abetted by a coach. I never allowed this sort of harassment during my tenure as a football coach. I intervened aggressively to stop it.

A couple of years ago, when I was in extreme crisis, I returned to a football field of my youth to try and makes sense of my demolished life. On this field, I grounded myself, and figured out a football metaphor to employ to get back in the game of caring and creating.

I see flag football is coming back for youth. It should have never left. It’s way more fun than tackle and no one ever leads with their head. None of us ever got hurt. I imagine pro football going that way in the next 25 years.

One of the more curious cultural developments in recent years is the meteoric rise of American women becoming serious football fans. I dated two football cheerleaders in high school and they both dumped me in short order. One of them has the distinction of being the only person besides myself to write in my journals. Decades later, we read her entries together and laughed. I’ve written a lot about her and plan on writing more. I don’t think she’ll ever know how large she loomed in my life. The uniform may have had something to do with it.

As a preacher’s kid, I had access to the big lawn in front of the church. It was shaped like a football field and my friends and I would play there for hours, with Dad quarterbacking for both sides, tackling, stiff arming, huddling, running, scoring touchdowns, all under the watchful eye of a huge metal cross affixed to the front of the church. My friends and I also played football in the spacious basement of the church, on carpet, tackle. We once tried to make coffee in one of those towering church percolators and failed.

There was something else interesting about being a preacher’s kid. I often skipped the Sunday sermon because I wanted to watch the Dallas Cowboys play and this was long before ESPN an endless replays. If you didn’t see the game live, you never saw it. My parents were perfectly fine with my absence and I look back today and think that was pretty incredible. I never had to lie and say I was sick. I just said I wanted to watch football.

I sorely miss Howard Cosell’s commentary on Monday Night Football. You won’t hear the words “scintillating” or “pejorative” coming out the mouths of contemporary announcers. You’ll also never hear sophisticated analysis of civil rights issues as they pertain to players, which Howard could provide at the drop of his hat. Howard would have loved Colin Kaepernick’s stand and become his fiercest advocate, just like he was with Ali.

Woodsmoke is the smell of football. I just caught a whiff of it wafting through the neighborhood and wanted to go out and throw the pigskin around.

I long to see my foolishly discarded football card collection. They were good friends to me. I once chose my “All NFL Name Team,” which was a lineup of the best football names at each position. Dick Butkus made the team every year. He probably had the best football name of all time.

On Football (Part 3)

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I coached junior high football with my father for two seasons back in the 1980s. We often reminisce about this experience and consider it one of our best times together. I coached the backs and he coached the lineman. I called all the offensive plays and defensive sets. My greatest joy came from rolling out gadget plays on offense and the players loved the bravado even more. Sometimes they even worked. I frequently would call the same gadget play two times in a row, provided the first take didn’t result in a touchdown or disaster. That’s unheard of in football coaching.

We finished 3-3 and 4-2 and had several memorable victories, including one over a Woodburn team whose star player was a girl, undoubtedly a farm tomboy. She played fullback and middle linebacker and in the first half, ran roughshod over us. None of my players wanted to hit her and we trailed 6-0 at halftime.

At halftime, I gave the only fiery speech of my brief football coaching career. It just wasn’t my forte and I never responded to them as a player. But this one time, as my players knelt in the end zone around me, I delivered the Hollywood goods. It basically came down to this: YOU HAVE TO TREAT HER LIKE A BOY AND HIT THE HELL OUT OF HER! RUN HER OVER, THEN PICK HER UP. It worked and we won the game 12-6.

I was once knocked out during a football game. I caught a punt, started running right and got smashed out of bounds by three tacklers. I was revived by smelling salts and went back in the game. I was an eighth grader. No concussion protocols then and coaches rarely allowed the drinking of water during games or practices! They thought it made you soft.

I once separated the shoulder of a player I tackled by swinging him out of bounds and into the pole vault pit.

Football on the beach where the incoming tide serves as one sideline makes for some novel playcalling opportunities that can utilize the retreating tide for huge advantage. Moreover, you have sand at your disposal to draw up the perfect play and everyone in the huddle can see how it will work.

I have the distinction of scoring a touchdown in every way a touchdown can be scored: running, receiving, kickoff return, punt return, fumble return, interception return. I also threw a touchdown pass.

It used to shock my students when they learned I played and coached football. Several refused to believe it. I suppose my personality, dress, cultural interests, personal mannerisms, writing life, and room décor didn’t match their image of what a former football player might look like. I always won points from the athletes for my football credentials and talked the jargon with them on game days.

I recall some really great dates where all we did was throw the football around and talk. You get to know a lot about someone doing this.

In 1993, I watched the Super Bowl in a deserted hotel bar in Bodrum, Turkey, on the Aegean Sea. It was three in the morning and my Turkish girlfriend I was traveling with arranged with management to allow us to watch the game. There we were, freezing in the unheated bar, drinking beers we had brought along, and we watched the game and I tried to explain the rules and objectives. She thought American football incredibly boring but liked the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. She told me she wanted one of the outfits!

I often used the football fields at various teaching jobs as a place for writing instruction. Sometimes we just went out to the field on a nice day, spread out, sat down or splayed on the grass, and wrote in our journals about clouds or whatever floated through our minds. Sometimes I gave specific football-related prompts, such as moments attending Friday night games or, far, far more interesting, non-football stories related to the field. It was fascinating to later read how so many students (the non football players) used the field for late-night hi jinks that involved everything from sex, stripping, drinking, poetry, vandalism, witchcraft and forbidden meetings. I could have published a scandalous literary review of these stories!

On Football (Part 2)

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Football was by far the favorite sport in my youth and I was very good at it. I loved to hit people during football, and if that sounds bad, then chalk it up to atavism, the cave, the fire, the hunt. I never cheap shot anyone.

I wasn’t very big. I used my brain to be a great football player. It worked.

We played football every month of the year but of course, preferred it in rain, mud or snow. Those snow games in the parks and back yards were the greatest. Football on a dry sunny day is a remarkably ordinary experience for a kid. Most of my football was unorganized, meaning adults didn’t organize it. Almost all of my best moments came from unorganized football. Do kids get to experience that anymore? I haven’t seen kids playing football in a park or field or street or on the beach in 20 years.

In every unorganized football setting in my Oregon City youth, I designed every play when my team huddled. My friends never contested my authority. They knew I knew football and trusted me. I quarterbacked us until the organization came. The systems of coaches and the oceans of cliches. That’s when football began to suck.

As I kid, all I read were military and sports biographies. I read about all the football greats, but only pro: Bart Starr, Bronco N, Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Gayle Sayers, George Halas, Jim Brown (they left out the activism), Ray N, Joe Willie Namath, Vince, you name it. I accrued an encyclopedic knowledge of professional football history and draw upon it all the time, like right now!

My favorite childhood toy was an electric football game, where the metal field vibrated, and the players went everywhere except where they were supposed to go. I never completed a pass. I used to sprinkle baby powder to simulate snow. I never once played with another person. It was always me against me and the Dallas Cowboys always seemed to win. My pet beagle used to chew the heads off the players if I left them out and wasn’t around.

Note to self: I’d love to bust Paul Ryan up in a “touch” football game. He’d reveal his true character after he came across the middle and I was waiting for him with my cousins ready to coverage. We’d go Jack Tatum on his ass. The return of the clothesline.

I never had a romantic, sexual, or vandalizing experience on a football field. These have become the staple of books, movies and TV shows since football has been played. Think Dazed and Confused or The Virgin Suicides or Catcher in the Rye or Friday Night Lights.

I quit playing organized football my sophomore year in high school. I broke my ankle in a JV game and that was it. A short time later, I started writing a novel about my high school football experience. I never finished it and don’t think it had a title. This fragment was lost decades ago, but it had a Holden Caufield kind of narrator, a defensive back, who loathed everything associated with high school football, except for the actual playing of the game and the chess of being a smart defensive back and trying to outguess the opposition quarterback.

My first regularly paid professional writing job was covering Nestucca High School football for a Tillamook newspaper. I truly enjoyed it and loved roaming the sidelines, finding the little epiphanies here and there. I’ll never forget the season-opening game after 9/11. For a moment, it was America the Decent. That all vanished, though. We punted that unique opportunity. Three downs, loss of 25 yards, kick. I learned how to write on deadline and in the active voice as a sportswriter. I also loved supplying the headlines that offered subliminal conservation messages ….such as Bobcats Clearcut the Loggers.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing a NSP book.)

On Football (Part 1)

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It’s football season in America. Football tackles my mind. I want to write about it. I want to tackle the subject and then give it a helping hand up so it can return to the huddle. Wait, they don’t huddle in football anymore. That says a lot about the country these days. In huddles, players confer, encourage, and yes, excoriate. I’ve been in huddles where I witnessed the gamut of human emotions and intelligence. I’ve been in huddles where players cried. Not huddling anymore is sort of like the way we mostly communicate with each other these days—signals, not face to face.

Recently, I drove by a practice football field, an abandoned one, with an ungodly, absurd crown (you have to really know football to know what that means), a crown practically three feet in height, (this is where the phrase running downhill comes from, now lost for all time because of flat artificial turf surfaces). The field once belonged to a now-defunct school district, a bumpy, dandelion-ridden gridiron, where sons of farmers, loggers, roofers and fishermen once drilled.

The goal posts were rusted, peeling and tilting. Blackberries had engulfed ancient blocking sleds. Someone was still mowing the field, but why? Perhaps it was for a secret dog park. The dogs had taken over and thundered their shits with glee where padded and helmeted teenage gladiators once tried to damage each other, but rarely did. That came later.

I could see faint traces of yard-lines on the forlorn field, from decades of applying lime. Oh for the return of lime on a football field! I want to write a book about called, “The Last Limed Football Field in America.” It might the one in Elkton, Oregon. Or Eddyville. Or Alsea. What football fields they are! The elk come right out onto the field during a game! They’re great defenders for the long passing game.

These fields are also known to receive the occasional salmon washed up in the end zone if the rivers adjacent to the fields flood at precisely the right moment. I’ve heard stories of players taking them home after practice and frying them up for supper. That means something in Oregon.

Recent news reports have documented a dramatic decline in the nationwide participation in youth, junior high and high school football. What does that augur for the sport, the business, our popular culture? I’ll let others sort that out and either lament or jump for joy. I do find it interesting to witness up close when a once-popular cultural pastime begins to fade, ultimately to near or total extinction. Drive-in movies, bowling, record stores, mixed horny doubles, writing postcards, fondue, jello desserts, crocheting doilies. Is football going the way of fondue in the next 25 years?

I have fond and unsettling memories of football, playing and coaching it. Let me revisit a few of those memories during football season and I will write about football in non-linear fashion and as if I were play calling a long offensive drive, slyly mixing run and pass, and perhaps throwing in a gadget play—or two. Gadget plays are fun! More gadget plays in our lives! Non digital ones. Sometimes gadget plays succeed. But the point of a gadget play in football is that you are willing to call them and must go deep into the creative mind of the players and coaches. Timing is everything.

The drive begins. Here’s the snap. First play—power sweep, both guards pulling. It’s starting to rain. They’ll expect us to stick to the ground. Sure we will.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing a NSP book.)

Truth at the Tideline

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The League of Intertidal Writers has released its second publication, Truth at the Tideline. The publication was the result of a truth-themed writing workshop I taught in Astoria. It was an honor to work with these fine writers and guide them toward truth or wherever they wanted to go. We are building something special with this organization.

How timely a topic for these truth-challenged times on the Left and Right. No one has the market on truth. It does surprise me how pleased people seem to be with themselves with their surety. They just know. They expend no effort to test their conventional wisdom. They recline in a soft easy chair with their laziness. They are watching TV while doing so.

In the past two and a half years of my life, I challenged every assumption of truth I had for myself, my friends, my family, my country. After doing so, new truths emerged. I believe they were formed on a much stronger foundation, but that doesn’t mean I won’t continue to challenge them. I want to keep learning, keep probing the truth of received myths, including the State ones. I am not above it all. I am right there on the ground, soaked and permeated, in the willows, in the culverts, under the bakery, on the beach, on the river, out there, observing, not judging, trying to understand, trying to ascertain what I think is true is true. It often is not.

Below is a piece from the publication. It certainly challenged some time-honored notions of truth about finding love late in life.

The Truth About Love

Is there ever absolute truth in love? In my frivolous youth, before the crushing blows were delivered to my already sketchy heart, I believed in it all. The love at first sight, the soul mate, and of course, the forever diamond. But now I see love as a drug that I don’t mess around with anymore. While I fondly recall some great highs accompanied by laughter and seemingly endless joys, the memory of those bad acid trips with frightening anxious nights and morning regrets are at the forefront of my mind. Love which once was as sweet as the apple that tempted Adam and Eve in the glorious garden, is now rotting fruit on the ground. Certainly nothing I would even think of as tempting. While the pool of eligible people grows through the access of Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid and Farmers Only, promising easy love, I know that in the end there will be heartache and hardship. My days of Love and truth are as worn out as the Velcro strap of my heart, too old and used to attach to anything. So I leave the game of love to those naive, brave souls whose hearts still skip a beat when an attractive person gives them a smile at the grocery store. I will just buy my frozen fruit that, like my heart, is immune to life’s unpredictable elements, and be on my way.

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