Football
Saturday, October 18th, 2008
Saturday mornings in the autumn are alive with crowd noise and spiraling footballs before the frost has burned off the college campuses. The marching bands line the cold-metal bleachers letting the music loose over the hash marks and goalposts, into the earholes on the helmets belonging to players still weary from the early rise and expected to battle, first thing.
Fans enter through the gates and stop by the stale-smelling windows cut into the stadiums’ brick bellies to buy throwaway cups of hot cocoa. They wrap their hands around them and feel the heat throught the thin gloves matching the school colors on their jackets and scarves, the folding seats they carry under arm and the pennants from the souvenier stands. Then they walk through the dim hallways and up the crumbling stairs into the light and out into the bowls of seats.
Families sit under blankets together in the chill winds until the games are well into the afternoon and unexpectedly, they find themselves pulling at their clothing, a little too warm seated directly in the sun.
The players come from the huddle already slanted toward the ground and the larger ones hunch near the ball while the thinner more fleeted ones split out on the ends or stay in the backfield. They wait there listening to the quarterback’s count until the ball is snapped and, up front, the shoulders slam into one another, the bodies tangle and wrestle violently while the defenders push forward to chase after the ball and the offense struggles to advance it either by running it through the collisions and small individual wars at the line of scrimmage or tossing it to recievers maneuvering between defenders.
This sport is about ground control and executing a strategy – catching the other team in a formation that leaves itself vulverable to a play call or blitzing the linebackers to find the quarterback in the backfield before he can let the ball loose. And, the players are warriors, every bit modern gladiators enshrouded in armor and brave, lives at risk and death a possibility – bodies flying around the filed at high speed, shoulders thrown into midsections, bodies landing on the turf at odd angles, fingers jammed in face masks and stepped on with cleats.
Around all this the crowd sits and cheers on, rising to their feet when a player reaches daylight carrying the ball or holding their breath when the quarterback airs out a pass in a perfect spiral down the field. The fathers sit and hope this fate awaits their son – that hero status might be cast on the boy sitting next to him not yet even a third the size he would need to be to play in the rugged sport, but the hope continues anyway. The mothers fear that fate awaiting their boys and yet realize the wild calling in them – the nature to destroy and be rough. That natural feeling they can do nothing about except feed their boys well.
Bodies go spinning out of bounds. The ball comes loose and bodies fall and jump atop one another. The referees frail against the dog-piled bodies try to pull the players off one another and spot the ball for the next play the next chaotic explosion. The fans keep cheering, not so much fans but instigators encouraging the on-field violence.
Real wars have their own cheerleaders in the military generals and other leaders that rally troop brigades and send them off to war while they stay behind and plan the next attack from the results. Here, the battle is waged staright on. The two sides are lined up against each other and there are boundaries to ensure the confrontation is played out before the day is over.
When the last snap is taken, the players are covered in fresh grass stains and blood. They walk off the field with their heads down never acknowledging the band that played on all the big plays or at the half. The players just file out soundlessly as their bodies already begin to heal for the tradition that carries on the next weekend and the autumns to come.
