Finally Football

Well, it appears that my quest to become a paid fantasy football writer has fallen short, and that is rather disappointing.  Fortunately, that disappointment is blunted by the fact that this is the official first day of a new football season.

There is nothing like the first day of football season.

Even though the temperature is going to top out in the mid-90s, and most folks are looking forward to one last extended weekend at their lake cabins, today still marks the true beginning of autumn. For the first time in what seems like forever, we get watch football games that count, thank whatever lord it is that you believe in. Each weekend for the next twenty or so promises more of the same; a blissful thought after spending the last three months bobbing along with only a terrible baseball team and the occasional golf tournament as distractions.

I read a very interesting piece of writing yesterday entitled “Football is Dead. Long live Football.” by J.R. Moehringer for ESPN The Magazine. Not only is it the first interesting thing that I’ve ever read in ESPN The Magazine, parts of it were tough to take for your average football fan. It’s a bit lengthy, there’s no disputing that, but it is one of the few things I’ve read that highlights the good and bad of the sport equally, a difficult task for any subject that enflames such passion.

It’s been tough to enjoy being a football fan at times these last few years, and not because of anything that’s happened on the field. The stories of mental and physical ruin brought on by this game should leave even the biggest diehard wondering what we can do to better protect those who play the game. The problem, as with most things, are the extreme attitudes of some people. The “Ban Football” argument is as useless as the people who shrug off brain damaged players by saying “they knew the risks”; neither attitude is going to get us to a sustainable place with this, or any other contact sport.

Of course the comeback is to ask why bother sustaining these games at the cost of people’s health? The reply is that while they aren’t required for a functional society, the collections of behaviors they teach are things we can't afford to lose. Teamwork, sacrifice, courage, overcoming adversity, where are these learned more often than the athletic field? Take away any setting in which a kid risks injury, you also take exercise, friendship and a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves. I know it isn’t worth the price paid by some. I can’t honestly say if I’ll feel it’s worth the price I will eventually pay, when the arthritis finally shows up in my surgically-repaired knee. But I have a feeling it will be, and know there are millions more who already know that for sure.

Toward the end of Mr. Moehringer’s 120 points on football, there are several that connected with my own experiences playing the game as a kid, in particular these two:

101. I remember, when the silver dried, putting on the helmet, looking at the world through the steel face mask, feeling powerful.

102. I'd never before felt powerful.

Growing up, I was also always the biggest kid in the neighborhood, which wasn’t the most fun. Awkward on skates, couldn’t run fast, I could hit a baseball (not a complete spaz here), but the early years of hockey and soccer were not what I was cut out to do. Stepping onto a football field was a revelation, the first time I felt at ease in my own skin. I was no great athlete, never got to wow anyone with bullet throws or acrobatic catches, but every time my hand went into the grass, I was in my element.

Because the guy making the block mattered as much as the guy running the ball. You were part of a unit that rose and fell together.  There was nothing greater than knowing something good just happened because you and 10 other guys did their jobs to perfection.

This feeling isn’t unique to the game of football, but it is the place I’ve felt it most strongly in my life.  That probably explains why I can sit down, anytime, anyplace, and enjoy two teams squaring off. Many of my friends feel the same way about hockey, but the sport being discussed is immaterial, the sentiment is always the same. It’s the feeling of team, and at the risk of sounding like someone’s grizzled grandfather, it seems like something today’s kids could use more of.

So tonight, as I sit down to watch the Minnesota Golden Gophers, in all their typically inept (and occasionally infuriating) glory, I am going to savor the beginnings of another football season. It seems almost useless to try and prognosticate how the maroon-and-gold will do this year, every season lately has been more confusing than the last. The schedule looks soft, you begin to talk yourself into the possibility of “a strong start, then who knows?”, only to be slammed back to Earth by a drubbing at the hands of one of the supposed creampuffs.

This year we’re once again talking baby steps. We’re talking about the first Jerry Kill recruiting class, about a senior QB maybe reaching his potential, about beating the teams a member of the Big Ten should beat.  Most importantly, we’re talking football again, and that feels pretty damn good.

There's one other item from the ESPN piece that I thought was fantastic, a quote from linebacker Takeo Spikes:

"You can lock me up in solitary confinement for a couple of years, never tell me the date, never tell me the month, anything, and I could tell you what month it is, and I could tell you when it's football season, that's how much it's been embedded in me."

Couldn't have said it better myself, ditto.