Fresh Cut Grass: A “Sunday musings…” Update 10/9/2022
Randy texted me about the exciting finish to an NCAA football game. It made me smile. Not the result, not even the topic, but the excitement. A parent is only as happy as his least happy kid, and at that moment one of my kids was very happy. Randy’s football playing days are long behind him, but the game still brings him joy. Me? Not so much. I can’t shake the image of that young Dolphins quarterback drunk walking off the field after getting his head slammed to the turf.
The FIRST time. He got pole-axed again 4 days later and is now sidelined for who knows how long.
Oh sure, there was a time when football never seemed to be any lower on my list of wonderful things than 2 or 3. I was a medium-sized fish in a puddle as a high school football player, but I didn’t have the game out of my system when I graduated. Accepted at one Ivy League school and waitlisted at another, I turned down both because I was too small to have any chance of playing football at that level. Instead I went to a very old, very small school and played a bit each year all 4 years. Now done as a player I was nonetheless still enthralled by all other things football.
Many of my closest friends were met on the freshly cut football fields of my youth. Wins and losses followed on those fields, most of which I’ve long forgotten. Indeed, I’ve written before that it is only the losses I remember, especially those that resulted from some personal failure in a game. A fumble, perhaps, or a blown coverage. And yet there is no escaping the fact that those countless hours at practice, in the locker room, and on the field are in large part responsible for who I am, the adult I’ve become.
It’s a powerful thing, football. The game itself is exhilarating to both play and watch. At least, it was. I find myself finding all kinds of reasons not to watch football games now. Not consciously finding “big picture” reasons so much as tiny reasons, like Beth wants me to tag along to the barn, or Sasha and Bohdi, the world’s smartest (and most easily bored) dogs, would like an adventure kind of reasons. Football of all sorts played at any and all levels has sunken to a kind of triviality, easily trumped by a trip to the grocery store.
No one thing is responsible for this falling out of love, as it were. This fall is different from the last, and the one before only in that it is now glaringly obvious that football holds for me no essential attraction by itself. Looking back my only surprise is that it took me so long. Why didn’t I begin to turn away as my friend the ER doc buzzed through my son Dan’s shoulder pads with a saw in order to get him into the MRI? Or when I walked onto the field after Randy knocked himself out cold with a helmet-to helmet tackle, his first concussion? I was still young, still sure that the game would bring my sons what I thought it had brought me. CTE had yet to be discovered.
I see them now, both of my boys, face down and immobile, and I shudder. I started to see them each time I saw a player go down in high school, or college, or the pros. I saw them all over again each time I saw the replay of Tua being carted off on a stretcher. I began to see that I valued those young men nearly as much as my own boys, and I started to notice that the game of football had become The Game. Those entrusted with The Game at all levels did not–do not–appear to share my feelings about the players.
The junior high coach carries the star running back to the bench, there to wrap a sprained ankle in the hope of returning him to the game. In a high school freshman game, a rout, the first string defense is still on the field in the fourth quarter, the opportunity to play in a game slipping away for kids who may never get another chance, when the starting safety goes down with a severed spine on a play he should have been watching from the sideline. What was the first string defense learning at that point in that game?
Alumni and athletic directors and coaches at colleges noted for academic excellence openly opine that they cannot win without lowering the admission standards for football players, and just as openly run those kids off the team and out of their scholarships when they are no longer needed to win. The game in the NFL becomes ever more violent, with ever more gratuitous violence magnifying the carnage wreaked upon the bodies of the players. Ex-pros roam the earth as a kind of walking dead.
When did football become The Game? When did the keepers of the game become keepers of The Game? When did football players as young as high school become a modern stand-in for gladiators thrown into the arena for little more than the amusement of the many and the benefit of a tiny protected few? I’d like to think that there was such a time, an inflection point, when it did change, but I fear it has been ever thus. If that is so then I, too, bear some responsibility for what The Game has become. I did not turn away, or turn my own sons away, at the time of my own dawning awareness that The Game and its keepers cared naught for our sons at all, but only for themselves and their respective place and privilege.
Need evidence? Count the number of quotations from college coaches bemoaning the coming doom from “Name, License, and Imaging” money vs. the safety of the players? That kid from Miami is already yesterday’s news.
There was a time when my playing days were long over when I still found myself on edge as the weather chilled and the smell of cut grass filled the autumn air. It was time to get ready to play football. Those days are long past, and I find that I no longer even think about watching, indeed can no longer see myself watching, except as a vehicle with which I can channel the joy of a child, or perhaps foster a friendship. And that is perhaps why: I can no longer watch a game whose keepers have lost sight of the fact that someone’s child plays in The Game.
One wonders about the parents of gladiators past. Did they see then what is so easy to see now?
Today is Sunday. The local team is on and most of the community has tuned in. They talk about yesterday’s game in which the flagship state university defeated a conference rival. The debate a controversial quarterback and the reckless off-field behavior of their best defender as they dine on brats and beer. Me? I’m about to head out into a sunny autumn day and take my dogs and my bionic but balky hips out for a whiff of fresh cut grass. I won’t be thinking about the score or the decision go for it on 4th and 1.
I won’t be watching the today’s gladiators playing The Game.
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