On Football - Part One

I loved football. My first concern as an eight-year-old upon moving away from the suburbs into my little town was to be sure that my father would enroll me in a full-contact 8-man league. On cool days in the first fall in our little town, I would suit up in my white helmet and shoulder-pads, go get my soft, blue-and-yellow Nerf football and trot back-and-forth within our fenced yard like a patrolling soldier. I would run to the end of the field and fall down and run back, eventually launching myself, pads and all into the rope-mesh hammock that hung between the two sycamores in our front yard, staring up through the facemask grill into the sunlight flickering through the leaves. I was in love. What was it that I loved? At that age what one is in love with matters less than that one is in love. As a boy, I was in love with all sorts of things; libraries, brown-skinned girls with high cheekbones, science-fiction, lunch after church, looking out the car window at grassy pastures edged by shrubby Bodark woods and for a few blessed childhood years, a game.

I attribute the genesis of my love of football to my cousin. I inherited most of my interests and hobbies from him and his four brothers. In the years before I moved to my little hometown, we had lived just a few blocks apart on the same suburban street. I would walk across the Dallas grass all littered with knobby acorns to the front door of the red brick house and be instantly overcome with the feeling that life under this roof was vastly superior to my own. The sensation was an aggregate culled from several items that my cousin possessed which, I was certain, enhanced his existence beyond mine: brothers, a second-story room, a bunk-bed, a Super Nintendo, a box full of Star Wars action figures and a VHS tape called “NFL’s Greatest Hits” which we would watch for hours on end. This last item was by far the most remarkable artifact of all because this was no simple highlight reel. There was actually a plot, actors and a script involved. The plot follows. I am not making any of this up: Two janitors, (one Caucasian, the other a dead-ringer for Billy-Dee-Williams) are cleaning up the offices of NFL studios after hours. Their voiced disagreements over which of their favorite players were actually the greatest activate a sentient computer named Felix who proceeds to settle their disputes by showing them the greatest football plays of all time. The film contained highlights from John Elway, Dick Butkus, Jim Brown and my hero Walter Payton.

Until NFL’s Greatest Hits, I knew Payton only as a digital facsimile on my Game Boy screen. The game was Tecmo Bowl and Payton and I were unstoppable. I don't remember how my fondness for Payton came about. I wasn't even old enough to have seen him play. My family had lived in Chicago for a year. I was two years old and though I remembered nothing of the experience, I retained a fondness for all Chicago-based sports teams, though my true loyalty was to the Dallas Cowboys. I was young I when they won the Superbowl in '92 and 93 but I remember it well. "Dad, we're beating the Buffaloes!"

"It's the Bills son, the Buffalo Bills."

After the move, it took me no time at all to understand just what football meant to my little town. I remember distinctly the first Friday in September when the entire elementary school was let out a half-hour early and marched up the hill to the High School gym for the first of the weekly Pep-Rallies. As the new kid in school fresh from the suburbs, I was confused by the term, especially the way the word was pronounced. My peers linked the words with an indeterminate vowel sound so that it was not “pep-rally” but “pepperallie.”

“What’s a pepperallie?” I asked my classmates one Friday. Excited chatter ensued. Clearly I’d touched some kind of nerve.

“It’s really hot!”

“Like, spicy?” I picked up one of the seasoned potato wedges from my lunch tray. “Is this a pepperallie?”

“NO!” Eyes rolled. Okay, so it’s not food. I spied another of my peers looking on with interest, a little blonde girl in my class who had just moved in as well. I turned to my persecutors with renewed vigor, secretly pleased to be shielding her from the embarrassment. I was a fearful child but strangely imbued with a sense of chivalric duty. If I felt I was defending a girl's honor, I would face down any danger, though I was pitiful at protecting my own.

“It’s hot!”

“It’s really, really loud!”

“It’s in the gym!” Hmm. Hot, loud and in the gym. This didn’t really narrow it down that much. It seemed that every activity in my new school was hot, loud and took place in the gym. In fact, hotness and loudness were, I had gathered, necessary properties of the school gymnasium. The industrial hum of the big cooling fans along the south wall raised all audible voices to a yell in their vain effort to dispel the late summer heat which lingered there like a heavy, humid ghost. I, fresh from the Dallas suburbs, was used to a more sterile, controlled kind of indoor space: one that was still, quiet, and usually lemon-scented. Every room in my previous school was like a dentist’s office or an airplane cabin that abruptly canceled the outer world the moment the glass doors closed and the rubber seals slid into place. But here in my little town, going indoors anywhere meant exposure to a new mélange of musks, wafts, and oscillations of temperature. At 3:15 I entered the “pepperallie” and waded into the sensory parade of a full gymnasium.

Most people find it incredible that the entire student body of a public independent school district could fit under one roof with room to spare for teachers and families. Few such meetings occur these days. This was the power of football. Open city council meetings were conducted by a skeleton crew. Church was sparsely attended, but the Friday night football game ritual brimmed with life. The pep rally opened the night’s ceremonies, though showmanship was never the production’s highest priority. The pep rallies always followed the same sequence: two barely audible cheer routines, entrance of team from locker-room doors (cue AC/DC song), more cheers, inaudible speech from coach or athletic director, award spirit stick to loudest class, school song, then open doors and stream back out into the August heat. Though generally unimpressive, the pep-rallies did have the unique quality of awarding screaming and rowdiness. Though all manner of rowdiness broke out regularly throughout the day in my little school, I was timid and wary of breaking rules, so I appreciated these sanctioned ‘spirit sessions’.

The drive into town became, in me, an indispensable piece of the Friday night ritual. I would lean my forehead on the backseat window of our Mazda MPV (later GM Suburban) and peer into the gathering night like a sailor looking through a porthole at seas of empty pasture. The shallow waves of grass rose and fell lazily in easy slopes. The sun, fully submerged below the horizon, dimmed the landscape as it sunk and dark spots of midnight gestated prematurely in the shadowy patches of woods. The hatted cylinder of the water tower, black against the purpling sky, marked our port of call. Beneath its spidery struts glowed the brilliant white halo of the stadium lights. With the windows down I could just hear the announcer calling out on his bullhorn as if calling us in to dock. "Pass incomplete to...on the 45 yard line...third and nine..."

The outdoor stadium was the proper venue for the concentrated energy of my town. Shouts melted into the air and the announcer's voice echoed with authority. The playing field was a good one, bowing only slightly in the middle. The grass was mowed and watered regularly and the yard-lines were repainted before every season. The field was the only part that was well-kept. A few years after I left my little town, a building inspector came and judged the entire complex to be far below recommended standards for safety and sanitation, but the facilities were not uncommon for a 1A school district. The home side contained all of the amenities: the snack bar, field house, pebble gravel underfoot while the away side was just a half-set of bleachers plunked down into unkempt pastureland. The press box atop the home bleachers presided over all like the towering bridge of a battleship. Inside the assistant coaches would pace back and forth, playbooks in hand, chattering to the head coach on the sideline. From their watchtower they pointed out enemy formations and advised the troops on the ground.

The home bleachers were an ascending stack of metal benches, ribbed laterally for tush-friction (cushions are for sissies). I spent most of my time beneath the stadium. I would break off from my family, join my schoolmates and descend down into the forest of steel trunks and diagonal support beams that propped the rows of seats. Those small and nimble enough to navigate the metal labyrinth dove happily in with scuffs and shouts and streaks of rusted metal on white skin. The under-stadium was a city of goblins governed by nothing but the random laws of hormonal impulse and hyperactivity. The seat rows made for a terraced ceiling that got lower and lower as one crept further in. In the inner crawlspaces one's eyes were brought level with the seated spectators' feet. It was an easy task to scan the pillbox-slit of that between the bench and aisle floor for the familiar ankle of one's mother or aunt, reach through the gap, squeeze and then slink away giggling. In the outer circles, fifth and sixth-grade boys, teetering on the brink of puberty, circled and grasped at fifth and sixth-grade girls who, being a little further along the road to adulthood, were just learning the power of applying makeup and tightening their T-shirts by tying them in knots at their waists. Less pretty girls gathered around their lamplight, gossiping tirelessly and advising them on how to handle male pursuers. Altogether, they moved back and forth around the stadium grounds in clustered processions. I too would one day be drawn to the courts of these painted little Cleopatras, (though never in the role of Marc Anthony; I was a jester, perhaps; or maybe one of those guys holding the big peacock-feather fans hoping for even a sideways glance from her ladyship) but in the first few years of my life in my little town I was one of the younger children who scuttled about the inner spaces of the iron jungle like a monkey, enamored only by the dark passageways striped with light from the stadium fluorescents, and the peculiarity of this bright and bustling island of life in the midst of wide Texas acres. What was that strange feeling that filled even the emptiest places with wonder and rechristened the unused backlots and lonely side roads of our little town as new frontiers? It comes back to me sometimes, but fleetingly. Like the fading cry of a whippoorwill or a coyote that trots around in the open until it is seen and then darts back to the shadow of the woods.

Stay tuned for Part Two:

In which a young boy tests his mettle on the mean gridirons of small-town Texas! How far will he pursue his passions? Will he become the star he dreams he could be? Or will he be permanently sidelined due to waning interest, chronic timidity, below-average physicality and late growth spurts? Find out in part two!

A Little Oasis In Texas

By Robert E. Wilgus


The boy looked at the clock as he took off his apron and turned out the lights over the soda fountain in the Corner Drug Store in a little west Texas town. It was 1:30 am. The fountain was “sparkle clean” after he and his sisters worked hard since midnight closing time to make it so. It was a family business, and the whole family participated. When the children finished cleaning they settled down to wait for their mother and father to finish checking the weekly proceeds. Suddenly there came a tapping on the glass of the front door.

The year was 1944 and the world was at war. It was a Saturday in August and the weather was hot. The town’s business section was built around the county courthouse. Two drug stores anchored the northwest and northeast corners and various businesses filled the rest. Among the businesses were a clothing store, 5 & 10 cent store, a movie theater, a hardware store, barber shop, jewelry store, coffee shop, grocery store and two banks. Many more businesses occupied the spaces beyond. Saturday was the busiest day of the week because very few businesses opened on Sunday. The sale of alcohol was banned by popular vote. Farming was the primary business and cotton was the primary commodity. The war called for maximum production, and the farmers of that region answered the call.

Saturday was the busiest day for all of the businesses on the square including the fountain business where the boy worked. He was only 12, but he was a real “soda jerk.” He knew his job well. He started learning the business when he was 9 years old when his father gave him a summer job at the drug store he managed at the time. After two years, his father had bought another store, and the boy was able to help in the family business. He even helped his four older sisters learn the soda fountain business. The four older sisters made quite an impression when the family moved to this little town. People called them "those pretty Italian girls.” The boy was hardly noticed.

This particular Saturday was typical for the season. The boy worked until early afternoon, after the busy hours. Then he was allowed to go to the “show.” The show was usually a cowboy movie feature, a news reel, a cartoon, coming attractions and finally, the “chapter.” The chapter was an action packed serial movie, divided into 12 to 15 episodes to be shown once a week. Each episode ended with a scene that left the hero in danger and the viewer excited to see how he would escape. After the show, the boy returned to work, though by that time it much slower-paced as the day wore on and the shoppers began to slowly disappear. The evening time held a relaxed atmosphere, and businesses began to close. The drug store closed at midnight and then it was time to clean up.

The tapping on the glass became louder after the first was ignored. The father went to the door to see who was there. The boy went to the window and looked out, leaving his sisters behind the counter. The street was empty of traffic, but an Army Jeep, with a soldier in the driver’s seat, was parked out front, parallel to the curb and several Army trucks were parked across the street. The father was talking to someone at the door, but the boy couldn’t make out what was being said. Soon his father came to the fountain side of the store and said, “Open up the fountain, these men have been traveling all day and will travel all night. They need a break.” “What men?” the boy thought. Then he saw soldiers getting out of the back of the trucks. He never saw so many soldiers all at one time. He knew what to do. He left the window to get his apron and prepare for action.

The soldiers began to gather around the soda fountain to place their orders. It was very quiet even though the room was crowded. The boy watched first soldier begin to speak, but stop short when he saw the boy's sister. She was clearly one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen. He gave her his order and received her smile. To him it must have been like a breath of fresh air. All of the sisters got the attention of the soldiers. The boy was almost totally ignored.

The soda fountain was as busy as it was at the peak of the day. All of the blenders hummed, making milk shakes and malts. Glassware rattled as they were being filled with ice cream and sodas and coke drinks like cherry coke, lime coke, even chocolate coke. Fresh coffee was brewed and canteens were filled. The jukebox began to play “Don’t Fence Me In,” and the pinball machine started ringing. There was laughter. It was almost like a party.
Soon a loud voice shouted out, “OK men, saddle up,” and the noise level dwindled as the soldiers returned to their trucks. The boy stood on the sidewalk and watched as the men boarded the trucks. Engines came to life and the trucks began to move. “Men,” he thought. These were only boys not long out of high school. They were the paper boy, the grocery delivery boy, the star football player-- the soda jerk. They were all alike. They were GOVERNMENT ISSUE --G.I.’s.

He watched as the trucks drove out of site. A Jeep led the caravan and another Jeep was last in line. Each had a long whip antenna. The boy heard the squelch break on the radio in the trailing Jeep, but he couldn’t understand what was being said. He did hear the man in the trailing Jeep speak into his microphone as it passed him. “Roger. Out.” And they were gone.
The boy returned to the task of cleaning up. His sisters had already started. It would be 3:00 am by the time they would finish. As he began gathering dishes, his thoughts turned to that time earlier in the day when he was allowed to go to the show and see the latest chapter in the serial he was following. This time, his thoughts were on what he saw in the news reel. It reported that our G.I.’s were battling their way to liberate Paris, France. The thousands of G.I.'s in Europe that were were being killed or wounded were just like those that left a short time ago. From that day forward, G.I.’s were his heroes. Could the war last six more years, when he would be eligible for the draft?

He would remember this night throughout his life and wonder how many of these G.I.’s would survive the war. Where were they now and would any of them remember this night? He hoped that those G.I.'s who did remember would not just think of it as one of a hundred pit stops, but as something as special as a young boy's dreams, and the smile of a dark-eyed girl; a little oasis in Texas.