In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes…
It's September, when males get a gleam in their eyes, while gentler eyes roll back in their heads, not believing it's already here. Football season is off and running, and blocking and tackling, and constantly injuring. James Wright (1927-1980), whose lines frame this essay, linked the game's glory and sorrow to our defeated dreams of heroism. (Most men, uninterested in poetry, or even retrospection, would just blink on hearing this, and pop a Yuengling — excuse me a minute, I'll be right back…)
OK. At 76, my zeal for watching football has been diluted, though not diminished. Robert Frost, an athlete himself, asks (at the end of "The Oven Bird"), "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." The oven bird is singing about the change from summer to fall — a related subject, of course.
I place playing football in the class of Youthful Follies, like smoking, or joining a fraternity (I was a Deke, like the Bushes, the Roosevelts, Cole Porter, Charles Ives; not to mention, more locally, George Steinbrenner and Hugh Culverhouse). All hail, strangers and brothers!
I feel two ways about these activities: 1) If I could live life over again, I wouldn't do them. 2) I enjoyed them all immensely while doing them.
I gave up smoking in 1980, but only for selfish reasons: by then the evidence was in, and I was coughing. I'm still close friends with a handful of my fraternity brothers, with whom I spent several extraordinarily excessive years — smoking was the least of our foolishness! — during which we even managed to squeeze in some serious study. But it wasn't an efficient system for getting the most out of our college years.
As for football, if I had to start again, I'd switch to tennis, which I've enjoyed ever since we moved to Florida. Old football injuries to my knees and wrists have bothered me all my life — and I was lucky! Nothing serious happened. Our children went to Eckerd College, and we were happy Eckerd didn't have a football team. Our sons went in for soccer and swimming: good choices, I thought (though son Pete broke his leg playing soccer).
Nevertheless, when I think of all the sporting contests I've been in — football, baseball, basketball, volleyball, track, wrestling, canoeing, golf, badminton, squash, racquetball, others too humorous to mention — none of them holds a candle to the emotional intensity and excitement evoked by football. In high school, the camaraderie developed practicing for the big game on Saturday, when the whole town turns out, can hardly be exaggerated — every year, young men drop dead trying to tackle better, run faster, block harder. For most of us, it's the last chance to be heroes physically, using the "masculine" virtues. Young boys don't grow up wanting to be good and wise — that comes later, after we've failed to become brave and strong.
Football, many have observed, has its societal value. A lot of people blame the wars that rage incessantly around the world (fought almost entirely by young men) on testosterone; and sports in general and football in particular are a way of working that testosterone off. Football is to violence what dancing is to sex: an acceptable sublimation, a kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing.
I wouldn't claim football "builds character" — witness the more or less constant thuggery of NFL players, most recently the Bucs' own cornerback Aqib Talib — but for multitudes of young men it's a chance to lay down one's scrawny body for someone else, for a team, for a cause, for school and community. I still can recite my teammates' names: Henry McClure, Ed Miller, Dave Peasback, Norm Pack… their names etched in my psyche, as on a trophy. And this wasn't about winning (in our senior year, we were 1 and 6!); it was about playing as hard as we could.
Of course, football on TV would be more appealing if its announcers were wittier, more grammatical and less idiotically excitable. Maybe President Obama, a sports fan himself, will have some effect here. And we know from Tony Dungy, this can be done.
In any case, the whistle has blown again.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
—from "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"
—Peter Meinke (www.petermeinke.com) had his high school football career overshadowed by Jeanne's when, at Syracuse University, she scored a touchdown in one of the women's games (called in those days "Powder Puff" football), and Syracuse's great All-American halfback, Jim Brown, came up to her and said, "Great running, man!" They'll be showing a few of their moves at Inkwood Books in Tampa, at 7 p.m. Thursday Sept. 24, along with their latest collaboration, Lines from Neuchâtel.
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2009.