Dear MOMI,
I'm not complaining, but every once in a while, I like to forget I'm an Irish vampire, ruthless dictator, and limerick mastermind to become a more mundane sixty-year-old paper boy with a love/hate relationship to American football.
My love might have lost its relevance in the world as it is today, but when I was growing up, everything that was good was girls. 'Sugar and spice and everything nice...' was reinforced by parents, teacher, and police officers alike who preferred behavior that girls rather then boys where likely to do. Dress up nicely, please. Don't shout. Be polite. Wait your turn. Raise your hand to speak. These directives seemed so much easier for girls then any of the boys I knew, and in grade school all the kids marked as troublemakers, underachievers, and most-likely-to-earn-damnation ((Catholic school: I used to imagine that teachers in public schools had the same lists but called them most-likely-to-go-to-jail) were boys.
Then tackle football happened. All of a sudden, what boys did was an advantage. Even the few girls that like playing football didn't seem to think that "acting like a boy" was some kind of affliction, at least not while playing football. Even nuns watching boys play never asked during a game, "Why can't you behave like the girls do?"
I can remember the first time the boys played tackle football outside during gym. When we went back to our classroom teacher, and she told us (as she often did) "Girls on the right, boys on the left," t didn't feel like the end of days. We boys started acting less ashamed of ourselves. Why couldn't the class president be a boy? (it wasn't). Maybe the boys will do just as good on the spelling tests as the girls (we never did). We somehow had more confidence and self respect. Even the girls changed. One girl failed to be insulted when the nun admonished her for eating "like a boy."
Then came the coaches. They didn't seem to realize that the game we were playing was a rough house kid's game for the fun of it. In fact, by high school 'football' and 'fun' were supposed to be mutually exclusive. Football to them was about heroics and self-sacrifice for the glory of the school (if not for the honor of proving that your high school football coach really was the mentor and genius that the rest of reality insisted on missing). I don't mean to imply that all my coaches were dumb. Taking the fun out of football really must have required some true genius. Equating it to war must have helped or maybe making it some test of manhood that medical doctors seemed to miss.
Doctor: "Hmm, seems here mister that we have your chart wrong. You check 'male' on this form but your football coach tells us you don't block or tackle very well. It would seem that you flunked manhood. I'll have to assign you a gynecologist."
Patient (blushing): "Ah thanks doc, you won't tell my wife will you?"
I don't know if only high school coaches can be blamed. Profession football plays its role. Again, I really like watching a professional game with its high quality players and coaches that actually are as smart as high school coaches wanted to be.
The problem is winning, money, and heroism, in that order.
When football is fun, you almost have to pretend to be upset when you don't win. But as a coach or a fan, winning only is fun, and it only stays fun if it's on the way to a Super Bowl win. The season starts with twenty-eight cities not being clinically depressed and ends the day after super bowl Sunday with twenty-seven depression hot zones and one city hung over and worried that they might not be around next year.
Then the money.
It's strange, but true, that no one is happy when everyone is rich. Part of that flashes back to the wisdom of the football coach's insistence that you should never be happy. Happy is for losers, but being miserable makes you a better player. It's this that brings me to my final point.
The football "hero."
This does start with boys playing football for fun, but also pretending that they are "football heroes." The fact is, professional players have to be very very good in any sport just to get a chance to make it into training camp, but it doesn't mean they are good people. Some of them turn out to be pretty bad people. Of course, I really don't want to know that, because the little boy inside of me still wants to be a hero.
I might write more about this the next time I need to pretend that I'm just a ordinary guy instead of a ruthless dictating vampire. Reality calls, you know.
Ruthlessly Yours,
Ed Calkins, Steward of Tara
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