Footfalls

Upon reading the report, “EX-NFL players face greater risk of ALS, Alzheimer´s.” How they´re four times as likely as other men their age to die of those diseases…

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-nfl-concussions-death-20120906,0,842879.story

Well, I played NCAA football, not NFL, which makes it maybe half as dangerous to my health, but this came into my fading brain about playing college ball circa 1977: Got my ankles shaved and wrapped, my wrists wrapped, elbow pads tucked up, helmet with one of those full cages of bars because my nose´s been broken since 7th grade when I had only one bar and tackled a kid like this: MY FACE INTO HIS THIGH PAD, “OOOF!”

But now I got the whole face cage protecting me, I got a bunch of stickers all over the helmet, I got skull and crossbones, little footballs for interceptions, plays made, and of course the MOST CRUNCHING tackles made. Yes, we REWARD those in the game doncha´ know?

But it´s not all dangerous and evil this game, there´s also the smells in the air, the green, the first sweep my way: Here comes a fullback, a big wide load wearing number 30-something, 30´s always make them look wider and bulkier, I don´t know why, something to do with the curls of the 3 versus the stick figure 2?

Me, I´m number 41 in your scorecards (although at my level of the NCAA, DIVISION III, you may get just a sheet of paper identifying what uniform under which you can find me: I like 41; a big wide 4 may make me look bigger maybe. Yeah right, I´m 155 lbs. in pads. But I´ve got that lamp black under my eyes, burnt cork smeared on my cheeks that doesn´t do anything but look cool…

I played at Wesleyan which is not to be confused with Ohio Wesleyan or North Dakota Wesleyan or West Virginia Wesleyan, this is (said like an intro on “Monday Night Football”) THE Wesleyan University, located in the middle of Connecticut. This is “The Little 3.” Wesleyan, Amherst and Williams. We don´t play Army, Navy or the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs; we play the COAST GUARD, okay? Down on the southern coast of the state – we call `em “The Coasties.”  At Wesleyan we have music majors at wide receiver, pre-meds in the backfield and middle linebacker, longhaired centers and Jews! Jewish football players, who are lucky and get to miss practice for a couple of high holy days which always come in the fall, causing Coach Kosty Kostacopoulis to call me out on it: “Christ Rosey,” he says, “You Jews got more holidays than the Greeks!”

Why did I do it? Well I been playing since I was a kid in Detroit my Dad used to throw us the football out back. And even though my team the Detroit Lions have only won ONE playoff game since 1957, I´ve always been a serious fan.

Now I got a permanent back problem and a bent right finger tendon that will never bend back, that makes my handwriting look like chicken scratch, but otherwise I got no complaints except as I read that article about the NFL Players I thought of HAL the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey how he said: “MY MIND IS GOIN…I CAN FEEL IT…”

And here comes number 30-something through the hole and I go into my low crouch tackle I´m getting ready to roll into his ankles  –that´s my usual move, at 155 lbs. you just throw yourself at whatever comes your way – a pulling guard leading the ball carrier around the corner, or roll myself up and cannonball to take out said blocker…but BOOM!

This time I feel like I´ve been hit head-on by a Volkswagen…and I´m sliding off the hood now, and next thing I know I´m smelling the grass…up here in sweet Middlebury Vermont…way up north in the good ol´ USA, practically to Canada but if you can play them in September before the first frost well you can just smell the grass and lying on your back see the Green Mountains through the end zone, past the other team´s huddle and through their goalposts…

I love the smell of grass in football season, fresh cut grass like on a summer morning. On the sidelines it can get sticky, there´s Gatorade spilled all over the place and yellow jackets coming for the Gatorade can get inside your helmet and that can be very distracting…

But here, “down here on the field” it´s pure smells and touches and sights and if we play Colby you get the pine forests of Maine while taking a long walk from the Bowdoin locker room to the sidelines and of course there´s the Berkshires in Massachusetts when we play Williams College, in the stands the fans, the parents and alumni wave pennants and eat peanuts and….

WHEW. I must have been feeling really nostalgic after a workout the other day; because the smell of my sweat doesn’t usually take me back to the way it smelled inside my football helmet, circa 1977.

That smell after you take the helmet off, I mean.  Lemme try and draw you a picture-picture me, smallest guy on the team always, weighed down in grass-stained football pads on my shoulders and thighs and knees.

But I guess its not enough is it?

“The heightened risk of death from neurodegenerative disorders” as was published in the journal Neurology about repeated blows to the head becoming THE major safety issue in former players.

They´re still trying to “determine the long term effects” of course because that may take…a long term of time. But the authors of the new study: ” A team from the Nat Institute for Occupation Safety and Health, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (which is NOT part of Homeland Security is it?). They have done the research on CTE, which stands for “chronic traumatic encephalopathy”, which is “a buildup of proteins in the autopsied brains of former athletes who played a wide range of contact sports.”

The “groundbreaking” new research, “now suggests that CTE may have been the true primary or secondary factor in some of these deaths.”

The ones they did the autopsies on.

MFX: Billie Holliday, from Verve Jazzmasters 12

“Autumn in New York
is often mingled with pain
Autumn in New York
it’s good to live it again”

So every Autumn, when the leaves turn, I go back to My college days playing defensive back – NO, back further – I’m with my dad and my brother, we´re out back of the house in Detroit…. going out for passes in the backyard, running football plays: Go long, down-and-out, button-hook, post-pattern, which was cutting left between the Dutch elm trees, before they all went down from Dutch-elm disease.

I liked to backpedal on the balls of my feet and try to bat the ball away as it came spiraling in the air out at us. Yes!

My father teaching me how to punt, pass and kick too. Ford Motor sponsored a “Punt Pass & Kick” competition every year and my dad signed us up, we’d work on our skills for the PP & K with the winner getting to compete at Tiger Stadium on a Sunday when our heroes the Detroit Lions played, even though the Lions were always a bunch of bums who broke our hearts every year and we´d end up throwing snowballs onto the field by the time the never crucial Bears game came around in December (I remember one time a player shielding the coach Harry Gilmer with his rain poncho as we fired away from the upper deck bleachers at him)

But your father is your first football coach, and what a great one mine was – Norm was on the squad in Ann Arbor, he tackled the likes of Tom Harmon, or missed him mostly, as a member of the 1938 University of Michigan Wolverines (oh yeah, there´s a website with the team picture).

In our microcosm of the game, my brother Jimmie liked to GO OUT and I liked being on Defense, backpedalling on the balls of the new cleats I got over on Livernois – the Avenue of Fashion-at Olympic Sporting Goods, located next door to my father’s shoe store.  My game was knocking the ball away as it came spiraling in the air from my dad trying to connect with Jimmie; no better feeling of accomplishment in the world when you do something like that – or sometimes I even picked it off: “BINGO!” shouting out the magic code word that coach Vince Lombardi gave his Green Bay Packers back in their glory days, which I read about at around that same time in his book, “RUN FOR DAYLIGHT” about the days when  Willie Wood or the great Herb Adderly  (numbers 24 and 26) would intercept a pass, the entire defense  reacting to the cry “BINGO,” and turning around the other way, now on offense moving down the field, blocking for the lucky DB or safety who got the pick.

My brother Jimmie turned out to be a great halfback, fastest in our high school’s history in the 100-yard dash. He scored a buncha touchdowns for the Yellowjackets, and so did his sons eventually, my nephews Ben and Harrison, both playing quarterback there 30 years later, going through their own concussive events (keeping it from the grandparents, of course). I kept playing “D” — first for the DCDS Yellowjackets and then the Cardinals, in intercollegiate ball, in Middletown, Connecticut.

As I said, smallest on the team, I weighed 144 pounds, which kicked up to 155 in pads, with the “Game Day” program sheet listing me at 165 lbs.  What my father taught me paid off. I don’t mean exactly a payoff, but he schooled us well I think we had skills, well coordinated enough to play well with the pigskin with others. I mean, I overcompensated for my size, I guess all little guys do over-achieve just to make it to the level of normal-sized youths-the great Kirby Puckett said pretty much the same thing, upon entering the Baseball Hall of Fame.

At 21, during my senior year, I made a trip in late October with the Cardinals up the 91 turnpike into Massachusetts to a “tilt” (as the easterners on the team called games). Against our rivals, the Ephman from Williams College who were good, every year it seemed. We could beat the Lord Jeffs of Amherst, the Bantams of Trinity, the something-or-others from WPI (Worchester Polytechnic Institute, aka “Whoopee”) and the Coast Guard Academy´s (coached by the former NFL great, Otto Graham who let a baby bear out of its cage onto the field during halftime)—but rarely rarely did we ever beat Williams College.

Don´t ask me what an Ephman was because I couldn´t tell you. Or a Lord Jeff.

[SFX: CROWD NOISE/ANNOUNCER´S VOICE: “It’s a crisp October day up here in the Berkshires…just perfect for playing football…”]

The position I play is called “Wide Half” – I know, it´s something you probably have never heard of-I defend the wide side of the field, depending on where they place the ball at scrimmage which is the point on the field the offense begins from, sometimes in the middle, but often times on either hash mark, meaning a chalked yard-marker, a total of one hundred of which outline the field. At Wesleyan it was pronounced, “wide hahf,” because my Coach Kostacopoulis was from Maine. On the short side of the field was my companion back there known as the “shaht hahf” in a defensive scheme called “The Perimeter” and you can figure out how that was pronounced by Kosty, who as I said I had to tell every year (because he seemed to always be shocked by the news) that I can’t make it to practice on the high holy days which always brought back that same response of, “Christ, Rosey! You guys got more holidays than the Greeks!”

(When I took off my junior year to go live on a kibbutz in Israel, I don’t think he knew what to make of it.)

Being small (but quick; quickness in football is genuinely valued. One´s lateral movements may be more important than overall speed because the game is played so much “between the sidelines” with action moving not so much “north-south” from end zone to end zone but side-to-side, so that´s where one´s quickness came in, the ability to rush in and make a play, usually a tackle or a reaction to a passer trying to hit his receiver on the corner)-anyway, little means you dive around on the turf a lot, throwing your body at ankles and knees in order to trip up those receivers reaching for the pass or the halfbacks coming up the field with the ball, or worst: a 300 lb. lineman leading the sweep my way.

A rolling tackle can lead to a great feeling in “upending” someone -although now players are so skilled at running some can simply jump over a defender bulleting himself in a ball to try and interrupt forward progress.

The crowd noise and the crazy band, the glint of sun off the cars tailgating beyond the end zone; many was the time I could just space out back here, except for when another fraternity-fed monster fullback plowed into me like that tender Volkswagen. Late in some games I´m so banged-up, I can’t even bend over to try and make a play in this fashion. Either that, or I’m just way too winded to be very effective. (But of course one never leaves the field, because you never know if you´ll get back out there.)

That´s probably why on this one fall Saturday up in Williamstown, I gave up two touchdown passes in the last few minutes. Even though we ring up 28 points, the Cardinals lose by 7…thanks to me.  A couple of curl-ins, or hook patterns, I guess you’d call ’em today; but no excuses, those are simply very tough to defend – an offensive player running straight at you, then stopping and turning back to the ball coming at him already in the air. And I was, as I say, exhausted. But again, no excuses.

Thanks god, after I took a year off college and lived on a communal farm, I kind of stopped caring about the whole competitive, winning and losing thing. My father once told me something very Samuel Beckett, it was in the team standings, those columns from professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey leagues published in the sports section of the newspaper, how, “You know, you can never make up a loss.”

Which is true, by the way. Although the rise of the “wild card” team means a team has additional statistics now involved in making it to the title.

But I feel awful that I let my teammates down in giving up the two TDs up there in Williamstown, so I don´t even shower, I just leave the locker room before the other Cardinals, and am about to go sulk on the bus before it heads back down to Connecticut. Instead however, I don´ t know why, but I go back out to the field, to just sit the stands and let whatever fading sunlight is left warm me.

The torn-up turf and sod turned upside down all over the gridiron seems to lie fallow and undisturbed, except for a man playing with two kids. They may be his sons, maybe a son and a friend, I don’t know but the man tosses a football with them, sending one out for passes, while the other defends, like my father in a big thick New England sweater. Throwing it in the end zone, my brother catches it. I tackle him.  We fall into the grass.  Touchdown!

That´s when I felt a chill come on, more a shiver in the dusk, because it was actually a warm tingle inside – one of those ineffable moments you get a few times in life if you´re lucky, when everything connects and you learn why exactly you’re doing the thing that you´re doing, no matter how you do it, as long as you get to do it while giving your best?

“Life is sad/life is a bust/you do what you must doooo/and you do it well” (Bob Dylan)

Like on a college acid trip where even though everyone tells you NOT to look in the mirror, you look in a mirror and see your brother’s face and your mother and then your father’s face and the entire history of your family’s face appear like illuminated manuscripts in there, telling you the story of your life…

We had one more game left and needless to say I played the best I ever had in my life, intercepting two passes in a 44-0 win. No brag, I just wanted to thank my first coach, so thanks, Dad. And as I head toward dementia and possible death at a too-young age, never let it be said that football doesn´t bring about wonderful lessons worth living through.