Spork and Football

Okay—now I am ready to talk about football.

It took me a little while to learn to love football. I really hated it as a kid, but like most prejudices it was because I did not understand it. This is possibly due to our never having a unit on football in PE. We had units on basketball, soccer, and softball, as well as playing games like dodgeball and kickball, but we never had football for some reason.

Still, even if they had never taught us anything about basketball, I think I could have picked up the basics from watching. If you have the ball, you try and get it in the hoop. If you don’t have the ball, you try and get the ball, and keep the other team from getting it in the hoop. There is a definite logic to it. I’m not sure that there is any way of intuitively grasping first downs and point conversions. My brother would watch a game, and I would be noticing the flowers on the line markers, or the colors of the uniforms.

There was an attempt once to get together a powder puff football match for a field day when I was in high school, and I got on that team, but we only had a few practices and it got called off. My positions were alternating between nose guard and right tackle, and frankly, you don’t have to know a lot to do those positions right. Don’t let anyone past you—that’s it in a nutshell.

I have already mentioned that my friend Sid was the resident advisor for my dorm my first year in college, and we spent a lot of time together, and occasionally took classes together. That spring, Football Coaching was one of the classes offered.

That whole slew of classes was going to be going away due to budget cuts, so although basketball coaching would have really been where I could have excelled, I took what I could get, football, and then baseball coaching a couple of terms later.

After all, I figured, I would have friends in the class (Jack and Lani were taking it too), and I was sure that I would come out of it understanding football and maybe even appreciating it. I was right, as far as that went.

I did come out of the class appreciating football, and understanding it. It’s just that everyone else in the class came in with that sort of understanding already, and you needed to understand a lot more to do well in the class, where you could understand various plays and strategies and, oh, things a coach would do. I was so lost.

I really set myself up for failure, though I did not know it at the time. I completed a lot of AP credits in high school, which is good because money was a big issue. I worked through summer and fall term, and started in January of 1991. I was not sure of my major, or what sorts of classes were even needed to move towards graduation. I did meet with a peer adviser, but without my realizing it, I ended up with a very wimpy schedule of twelve credits, all lower division, and one of the classes canceled out some of my English credits.

My grades were pretty good that term, despite the fact that I did not study much or work very hard, and this left me with a false sense of confidence. Spring term, I initially started with twenty-one credits, and they were largely upper-division. I did drop the science class because the professor was quite boring, and that left me with eighteen credits: Accelerated Italian (6 200-level credits), French Short Fiction (3 300-level credits), French Novel (3 300-level credits), a Spanish Conversation and Composition class (3 300-level credits), and Football Coaching (3 400-level credits). So, I was essentially taking four languages, mostly at junior level, while I still had the study habits of a lazy high school student. I was soooo lost.

Well, the Italian class was the second part of one I had taken my first term, and I continued to do pretty well in that. As my grades for the others started to slide and I started trying harder, I also began to see that I did not know enough about sex to understand French Literature. An unfulfilled woman is staring at the stars and it’s so overwhelming she falls off the porch—how I am supposed to know that was an orgasm? There was a language barrier all right, but there was even more of a mindset barrier.

That leads back to my problem with football. One of our assignments was to attend one practice and write about it, but I found myself out there almost every day trying to grok this thing. And I did get to understand the sport, but I could never coach it and I barely passed the class. Put all of those classes together and my cumulative GPA never fully recovered. I just wanted to get it above 3.5, and I ended up in the 3.4 range. Again, with the AP credits, I only attended eight terms total (spread out from ’91 to ’96) , so I only had six terms left to get it back up, but I felt that.

Now, I don’t regret this at all, because I have good memories of the class and of football. I just wish I had gone in better prepared. Anyway, this is where I begin to care not just about football but about football players. Remember, high school was largely about caring for athletes, be they soccer, basketball, or track. I was already doing things for the basketball team at college, it was only natural to start caring about the football team. You can’t do as much, though, because there are so many of them.

For me, it was mainly that I would keep track of them, and congratulate them when they made honor roll or got elected captain or things like that. At one point, I did think of making a football mural. I had made a basketball mural two years running, where I did cartoons of the team members and got them to sign it. When, after working through summer and fall again, I came back to school in Winter ’92, I picked up a press guide (a collection of player stats and bios that the press can use as a reference) to practice sketching them. After going through all ninety of them, I realized I was not going to do a poster, but hey, I got some more drawing experience.

I am not a great artist, but every now and then a face will come out just right. If I really applied myself, I could probably become skilled, but you only have time to pursue so many things, and right now that is not one of them. Some came out horribly, some pretty well, and the one that I thought would be the most difficult of all came out best. The one I cared about most came out looking like a pirate. I’m not sure how it happened. His photo in the press book was not at all pirate-like. There would be a lot more to tell about that in general, but I will share a couple of different things.

One is that the press book also had birth dates, and so I would also often know when it was someone’s birthday, and if I saw them I would wish them a happy one. No baking, because there were just too many of them, but I would at least wish them well. Although it should have been strange, no one ever acted like it was strange. It didn’t occur to me until years later that they may have recognized me from practice. I rarely knew whom I was looking at because they were wearing helmets and there were a lot of them, but it is possible that the girl with the notebook stood out.

In addition, as I was taking the class, Bill Musgrave was graduating and there was some question about who would take his place as starting quarterback, with four main candidates. The one who ended up winning out was Danny, who was my least favorite. I knew Brett from church, and liked him and his wife a lot. Doug was Bill’s brother, and very smart, and Kyle was fairly good looking, and all I saw with Danny was that he was young and cocky. I believe he admits to having been cocky now, so I feel okay saying it. Anyway, I was kind of resenting him, even though starting order really had nothing to do with me.

Anyway, the morning after I realized I needed to go on a mission, I was walking to the Institute, and I felt great. A weight had been lifted, and I was really happy, and things were good.

The Institute is on 16th and Alder, 16th being a one-way street. The drive that goes into campus is a little to the left of Alder, and I was walking down the sidewalk on this drive. At 16th, Danny pulled up to the corner the same time I did, him in a truck, me on foot. He was waiting there, and I sort of wanted him out of the way, and there should have been no reason for him to be waiting, but he was, so there I was irritated again. I decided, Whatever, I’m going, and as soon as I was across he illegally turned right, making the quick cut down Alder instead of going all the way around. It just stuck me as funny and I have been fond of him ever since.

On a final note, my favorite thing to happen in football is getting an interception and taking it all the way for a touchdown. Either one is good on its own, but put them together and that is an exhilarating play. I think Ricky Whittle had the main one I remember, but it’s been a long time.