Last fall I used a blog entry to tell the story of how I came to stop watching football. It actually got more clicks than usual on this shouting-into-the-wind forum, but then the transition to a new state, a new vocation, generally a new life derailed my blogging of any sort. After getting established, at least a little, in the new call, I found that I missed the blog, missed the outlet to cry out and lament against this ongoing damage done by a game I used to love.
Yes, it's true. I really did love football growing up. It was never my favorite sport, to be sure; Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home run record sealed baseball on the throne of my sports-fan kingdom forever and always. Although basketball was actually a sport I played in my teenage years (strictly church league, folks, don't get excited), I never really "got" it until I attended Wake Forest for a year and a half and was thus introduced to ACC basketball. Hockey never took with me, even though I tried really yard for the few years that Tallahassee had a minor-league hockey team while I lived there. Soccer is an extremely recent passion in my life.
But I was like a lot of other people who were raised in small or smallish towns, particularly but not exclusively in the South, whose life actually revolved around football to a far greater degree than I realized at the time or at any time until recently, as I began to dig into the issue of football and brain trauma.
I didn't play. Goodness, no, I've never been an athlete; church-league softball and basketball were the extent of my athletic struggles as a youth, and whenever possible I was the last guy off the bench for good reason. My closest brush with athletic success was as a coach of elementary school kids, where we managed to come in first in a league with all of two teams.
But in some ways my high-school years were governed by football possibly more so than anyone other than a player or maybe a cheerleader. You see, I was in the marching band.
As a result I played four years in the Dublin High School Fighting Irish Band. My instrument was the mellophone (that's what they gave French horn players to march with). As a result, except for the rare open date, my Friday nights from maybe late August into part of November were governed by the football schedule. My Thursday nights became band-practice nights, the one occasion on which the marching band actually got to practice on the actual football field. My mother was involved as well, as the director of the concession stand on the visitor's side of the field (the Band Boosters got to run those to raise money).
I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't).
That four-year stretch of being attached to football also provided one of the most intense experiences of my high school years, at least that did not involve me as more than an observer or spectator. It was perhaps the first time I understood, once I looked back at it, the intensity and total saturation that is possible in being a part, even only a spectator part, of a game, particularly live and in person. It isn't that I remember every detail; I'm not certain even what year it was, and I can only remember that it was a road game against Dodge County High, who was something of a rival at the time.
October 12, 1979 (I think...it might have been October 9, 1981)
The reason I think it was 1979, my freshman year in high school, was that as best as I remember, it was an important game, in a season in which both teams were doing well at that point. Dublin had only one loss at that point and Dodge County was undefeated. (I also seem to feel that the whole marching-band experience was pretty new to me at this point, and this would have been only my third road game. But I could be wrong.)
*It blows my mind that the above website, the Georgia High School Football Historians Association site recording records, results, etc. for all those high school teams in Georgia dating back (in Dublin's case) to 1919 (1919!), exists. But credit to them for supplying what I can't remember.
I won't claim it was the best football game I ever saw; it was in many ways marked more by failures and mistakes than by great plays. By most definitions it was not the most dramatic game ever; the winning (and only) score happened quite early in the game, and was followed by one of those mistakes -- a missed extra point. I can't remember any of the main players' names, even the one who scored the lone touchdown (I only remember that, for some reason, he was apparently wearing another player's jersey).
It was one of those strange plays when the running back, assigned to plunge into the middle of the line on a third-and-short or maybe even fourth-and-short, suddenly found himself all alone on the other side of Dodge County's defensive line, with nobody between him and the end zone but a couple of officials. He did, perhaps after a fleeting instant of shock, run the fifty-plus yards and Dublin had a surprise lead. The excitement was immediately tempered by the missed extra point.
Again, it isn't specific plays or players I remember. What has stayed with me all these years was the sheer intensity of the game and its peaks and valleys. Dodge County had no real reason to despair; there were at least three and a half quarters remaining. And they immediately started their own drive down the field.
It fell short.
Dublin answered with another drive. It got stopped.
And again. And again.
The remarkable part was that for a low-scoring game, I really don't remember a lot of punts. Drives would end on fumbles, or interceptions, or simply on unconverted fourth downs. They also tended to end well into the other team's territory.
Dublin would grind its way down the field. We would get excited, even a little frenzied, and more and more so each time. Finally. We'll score this time for sure. And then the team would fumble or give up an interception or lose the ball on downs.
Dodge County would grind its way down the field. We would get agitated, even a little despairing, and more and more so each time. Oh, no. They're going to score, finally. And then they would fumble or give up an interception or lose the ball on downs.
I remember nothing of what the band did at halftime. We typically had the third quarter off for refreshments or bathroom breaks or whatnot, but I don't remember going myself or seeing anybody else go. I'm sure I probably did, but I don't remember it.
Typically the band would play little punches during the game, the kind of short bursts that accompanied cheers or provided the background for one. I don't remember a whole lot of those either.
I just remember the continuing and compounding exhilaration and anxiety as each drive ground its way down the field only to fall short. It's not as if I can truly capture it in words; the heart racing and then stopping, the primal release of emotion, of one sort or the other, the clinging to neighbors or section mates or total strangers in the stands as each minute ticked away.
And then it was over, and just the way it had virtually started: Dublin 6, Dodge County 0.
The main emotion I remember at its end, if it counts as emotion, was exhaustion. Yes, celebration; yes, relief; yes, something possibly a little like joy, but mostly sheer emotional draining. And none of us had set foot on the field for any play during the game. (No, marching the halftime show didn't count.) One peak after another, one valley after another, one rise and fall and pinnacle and crash after another.
And then it was over. And finally I understood, at least a little, why people got so involved in this.
So let's be clear; I don't at all underestimate the challenge involved for a football fan in turning away from the game. Every sport has its particular passions, and football's are not easily duplicated by other sports. Yes, there is loss involved.
Still, the person of faith who would live his or her life in any kind of mindful or intentional way cannot escape the ethical dilemma of a game that still consumes its players so, whether it be one or ten or a hundred or a thousand.
Other sports have to face this question too, hockey and possibly soccer in particular. Football is the titan, though. It boasts (and I use that word quite intentionally) the largest fan base, the most money, the most corporate clout in American sports. To whom much is given, much is required.
The corporate leviathan that is the NFL, or the exploitative enterprise that is NCAA football, simply will not respond to anything other than financial pressure. No such organization ever does. The corporate sponsors of those organizations likewise will not respond to anything other than financial pressure.
Only people not watching games, not buying tickets, not buying merchandise, not spending money on the whole enterprise will move the needle. And if Christians can't be out front on this, at least asking the hard questions and not ducking away from the hard answers... .
Really, I've got no pictures from back then. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
This is the best I can do from web-scrounging.
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