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!
