Football Season

 

PoBoy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Hail Mary

Or

Uncomfortably Numb

“Perseverance. Adversity. Triumph. Defeat. We see it all left on the field, as football season is officially upon us” Mandy Antoniacci

        YAY! Football Season. Yay; and what I don’t know about the sport could fill a stadium. My original perspective on the game was curiosity as to why the ‘teams’ were fighting over one ball when they could have easily gotten two and separated to their perspective sidelines, slapped each other’s asses, maybe drank a few cold ones and fired up the Webber.

        But no, they (mostly refrigerator sized gladiators) gotta get out on a field marked with lines and throw, fight, pass, tackle and protect their mates to get that pigs bladder (do they really use pig skin?) shaped lead balloon over to an imaginary goal line. And then they jump up and down over the fallen bodies of their opponents, slapping asses and high fiving each other while thousands of screaming ‘fans’ yell: “KILL THEM!” That doesn’t seem odd to you? “Football is a game of controlled anger. It’s a game of retribution. It’s about will”-Brian Dawkins

        It’s not like baseball where the teams (as it was explained to me) “hit the ball with a stick and run in a circle”; while the “fans sit in the sun, talk and drink beer.” That I can understand, as long as they don’t choose me to be on a ‘team’ (I prefer to play a position called ‘Left Out’).

        Tennis I get: two players with ‘racquets’ try to kill each other with a yellow striped fuzzy ball while sweating and showing off their legs. If you miss bad enough, the other person gets a point and the most points win so that the loser can jump over the net to congratulate the opposing would-be assassin. There’s a lot of sweat.

        Games and contests of adversity and brutality go back thousands of years; some interesting twists occur when the losing Mayan team gets literally executed. Also, in ancient Rome the games may have had scores like: “Lions three, Christians nothing.” 

        The Spanish like to go one on one with a bull that is systematically made to suffer a hundred cuts and worn down until it is exhausted and finished off by some guy in tight pants who receives the dead animal’s testicles or ears, I can’t remember which. Interesting enough, the crowd constantly yells “Ole”, which I think means something of a sexual nature. At times, these wild and crazy Spaniards let the bulls chase them in the streets, somewhere called Pamplona I believe; go figure.

        Now, golf is anybody’s guess. Folks even watch this on television. Everybody’s got to be quiet while players, who have commandeered huge swatches of real estate (that I could have had a picnic on with my dog), hit this teeniest hail sized ball with long sticks called “irons” hundreds of yards to go into a teacup that has a flag sticking out of it. They play this game for hours and there are people that actually watch it. As usual, the winner gets a trophy, a green jacket and choice of the next annual dinner’s menu… or something.

        Now, an American football team has 53 players, not counting coaches, but only 22 of them get to be on the field at any one time (and only 11 in the altercation itself). There’s also kids with towels and drinks (‘energy’ drinks I suppose) and ‘referees’ that throw yellow rags if one or more players misbehaves. The part that I hate (aside from not knowing what the heck is going on) is that they have magnificent ‘Half Time’ shows that they never show on TV (exception being Super Bowl), which is the only place I ever get to be subjected to this melee; that, and, they have these animated, long legged, sparsely dressed women, known as ‘cheerleaders’ that go through synchronized acrobatics, that I suppose is to goad the players into exerting more masculine energy into their physical prowess, mental toughness and myopic focus in order to vigorously annihilate the challenging group of eleven that have their own aerobic cheerleaders charged with the same task; and THAT I never get to see either!

        Sports like badminton, croquet and even volleyball are a ‘no care who wins--it’s all about the form and fashion’-- type activities that I can relate to. Throwing darts and axes seems too dangerous to be done indoors, while archery seems like a ‘something could seriously go wrong’ thing. Bowling I suck at. Chess appears a bit too cerebral while checkers is best on a porch with a “straw hat, a suit of overalls and a worn out pair of shoes” (Shirley Temple); while ‘basketball’ is just that: tall guys in short sweats faking each other out to pitch a ball into a basket (there’s an awful lot of running back and forth). Horseshoes I understand.  

        In football, as I vaguely understand, you draw lines ten yards apart and you get three or four tries to move the ball across that line and if you do, you get three or four more tries to do it again (and again); or you can throw, pass or hand off the ball and if anyone gets in your way, you can knock them down or you can ass whup anyone/everyone on the other team that tries to move that ONE BALL away from you. It’s kind of like West Side Story without the weapons and catchy singing.

        All in all, competitive sports are not high enough on the testosterone level for my lionhearted masculinity; I go for the real thing: the stuff that makes your blood boil; the stuff that continues to amaze you with its brutality, shiftiness, viciousness and sadistic no-holds-barred ferocity: The Evening News.