Stuff that I Have Noticed #46: What is it About Football?

• Posted on 4th September 2021
• in entertainment books, Hollywood High School, Whittier College Football
• by Ben

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NOTE: This piece is somewhat similar to one I did about two years ago but it’s September. The NFL will soon be in session so football is, again, on my mind.

As mentioned it the previous essay, American Football is the most popular sport in the USA. In 2019 the NFL had an average attendance of well over a million fans at each game (spread across thirty-two teams). That is more than any other sports league in the world. And TV? Fuggedaboutit!

That popularity is not what this essay is about. This is about the extraordinary experience of actually playing the game. It’s a cliche that “the older I get the better football player I was” and I will admit that there is a modicum of truth in that old chestnut.

It is my opinion that American Football is the greatest team sport of which I have ever been aware.

I will elaborate.

My first two years playing in high school I became known as the “gutless wonder”. I was fast and powerful at 190 pounds but I didn’t hit hard enough in practice to be the starter. In my mind I knew no fear but my actions on the practice field caused the coach and some of my teammates to think me cowardly.

An excerpt from Three Stages: “My senior year … in our opening game the starting fullback was out with an injury and on our first possession the second stringer got hurt and had to leave the game. Ernie [Coach] came over to the bench where I was sitting next to a 135 pound half-back. He asked this kid if he knew the plays for fullback. The kid said he didn’t and Coach sort of shrugged and said, “Okay, Bryant.”

“I ran out onto the field and was not greeted with enthusiasm by my teammates. It was second down with short yardage and the obvious play was a fullback up the middle so I got the ball. I ran straight ahead, leveled both the linebacker and defensive back who tried to tackle me and, after about fifteen yards, was tripped by the safety. After that run there were looks of astonishment on the faces when we huddled up. Cobb [my best friend] had a big grin. Without going into a play-by-play suffice it to say that I was a holy terror on the field. When I wasn’t the ball carrier I made my assigned block then knocked down another opponent or two. When I carried I ran over people, knocking one guy out cold. We scored and when I ran off the field Ernie Nauman grabbed me by the shoulder pads and said, ‘What the hell was that?’ To which I replied, ‘Gee, Coach, I don’t know those guys so I’m not afraid that I’ll hurt ‘em.’ It was an epiphany for both of us. I wasn’t gutless after all. I was afraid that if I went all out I’d hurt my friends! I was now the starting fullback.”

That last season in high school is why I was recruited in 1953 by (the then not-yet-famous) Coach George Allen at Whittier College in Southern California.

Why he addressed me as “Benny” remains a mystery since my Mom was the only person who called me that. But I digress.

My first year I was one of two alternate starting fullbacks on the freshman team even though I still wasn’t “mean enough” in practice I proved myself on the field. I was on the varsity for the next two years before temporarily dropping out of college for a year and a half and accidentally getting into showbiz. (This of course invalidated my athletic grant.)

I didn’t get into games much except for being the holder for extra points and field goals since there was a different senior (very good) fullback both years. This relegated me to the bench most of game time.

But I did practice, practice and practice! I don’t know how it works in college these days but we had full-contact scrimmages three out of five practice days. That was when I experienced the violence, pain and exhilaration of – as I posited earlier – the Greatest Team Sport.

As the number three fullback I was called on to play defensive end during these “live meat” drills; facing the first string offense then the second string in alternating assaults on my physical well-being. There was one play we ran and practiced often: 109 right. The tailback had the ball, the blocking back, fullback and a pulling guard led him around the right end. And there I was facing three blockers who attempted to flatten me while I tried to either overpower or evade them and make a play on the tailback. Most of the time I’d get knocked down and trampled by two of the blockers but once or twice per scrimmage I would get to the ball carrier and put him on the ground.

Coach Allen (while seemingly attempting my assassination) egged me on: “Get ‘em Bryant! Don’t quit, you can do it!” and suchlike. My “opponents” would help me to my feet then knock me down again and again.

How I survived three days a week of this brutality I can only attribute to the indomitable genes I got from my tough-as-nails Mother. In six seasons of football I never missed a game or a practice because of injury.

I fucking loved it!

No, I am not a masochist I simply loved the combat. And I was proving to the Green Arrow (our nickname for the narrow shouldered Coach G A) and my teammates that I was a player with guts and determination.

This story is told not so much about myself – any real player would have done the same as I did – but to illustrate a point about the exhilaration in the rigors of football.

My wife Elizabeth (who grew up with two brothers) was a jock herself and also loved the game. We were watching the Jets and late in the fourth quarter they needed a TD. Broadway Joe was ferociously sacked on three consecutive plays. On fourth down and long, with defensive linemen ready to rip him limb from limb he threw a fifty yard strike for the winning touchdown. Elizabeth said something like: “This is what makes football so fascinating. It’s a game where the indomitable human body and spirit are made visible.”

True. And it is much more that that. Football, to the same degree as the physical, is a game of intellect and strategy with twenty-two unpredictable moving parts. Okay, okay I can feel you, dear reader, saying that there is strategy in all team sports. This is undeniably correct but, come on now, as complex as football? Gimme a break.

Football is a full contact game of Chess.

NFL Quarterbacks’ wear an arm-band on their wrists. It’s a list of plays that are planned for use in a given game and most of them also contain information that helps a QB quickly sort through those plays via colored or highlighted indicators of formations and related nuances.

The defense is reactionary by nature. It has to wait to see what the offense is presenting and then adjust, which it is doing constantly. Defenses have formations and plays, too but not in the same sense as the offense. They work with a scheme or concept, which lines up the players and assigns roles to each. One player – usually a linebacker or safety – becomes the “quarterback” of the defense and can essentially call “plays” audibly.

In addition to football I played water polo, ran track (100 and 220 yard dashes) and was a (lousy) diver. In all my years involved with sports nothing I ever experienced on a track, in a pool or on a springboard is as deeply satisfying as carrying a football, lowering a shoulder and running over a would-be tackler. The sense of physical dominance is intoxicating. And the pain of hitting and being hit, except in the rare case of serious injury… you do not feel it. You get up and run back into the huddle hoping that you get the ball on the next play.

A young man learns more about himself, physically and emotionally, playing football than in any other pursuit I ever experienced. One of its un-sung life lessons is teamwork. You learn, in the literal School of Hard Knocks, to both support and rely on a group of men sharing a singular goal. In short, a team.

That is a word that has been often abused – a golf team, a gymnastics or diving team? These are not teams. Each of these is a singles game. A water polo team? Yes; a swim team? No.

And to mis-quote The 2,000Year Old Man, this is eighty-six years talking to you.

I loved every minute of playing football! And I miss it to this day.