Fall and Football

Ah, Fall. The days are warm, the nights are cool and everyone in the family is back to a normal schedule (that means I’m not the only who isn’t on vacation). I really do love this time of year, when you can go outside in the middle of the day and do stuff and not be sweating profusely. The sky is a deep blue color and the leaves are starting to turn colors, too. You go out at night and someone in the neighborhood is burning some wood. I just love that smell. Somewhere from the back of my mind, happy thoughts and memories come forth. And then there’s football.

Yes, football season is in full swing, already four games into the season. There is just something relaxing about watching a game or two on Sunday afternoon, hanging out with family and friends, and eating some good food. I’d love for the Patriots to win all their games, but does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? If I’m watching the game all by myself and my team wins, it’s not as much fun as watching the game when my team loses if I’m with a bunch of people. Unless I have something important to do, I’m watching at least one game every Sunday.

I didn’t play organized football as a kid. We had plenty of games, either playing two-hand touch in the street, or playing tackle football in our back yard or in the field at the cemetery. We also played another kind of football. There was no running, no passing and no tackling. We didn’t even go outside to play it. No, this kind of football was played indoors, on a table or a desk, with paper. That’s right, paper. You took a piece of paper and folded it into a small triangle and pushed the “football” toward the other guy’s end of the table. If it hung over the end without falling off, you had a touchdown. You kicked extra points by having the other guy lean on his elbows and make a “U” shape with his two hands, thumbs touching and pointer fingers extended up for goal posts. You had to kick it through the uprights for it to be good.

I guess the real name of the game is paper football, but we just called it table football. In elementary school, we played at recess on a table at the back of the room when we couldn’t go outside due to bad weather. When the bell rang for the end of recess the game was over. One year we decided to make the football out of construction paper instead of regular white-lined paper. That little paper football left a mark! In middle school, we played at lunch on a table in the corner of the cafeteria. If too many people (girls) complained about getting hit in the back of the head by a football, that was the end of that game, so we tried to get a table in the corner away from everybody else. We even played a little in high school at lunch or in study hall. Study hall was a time when you didn’t have a class scheduled and you were supposed to, well, study. However, not many people studied in study hall. We felt like we were getting a little too old for paper football, so it kind of died out after freshman year.

We used to play at home, too. We had a perfect sized coffee table in the living room that was just made for paper football. It was smooth wood on top, no ridges, no tiles, no nothing, just wood. I think one of my brothers might have made it in woodshop in school. I liked playing against my older brothers because size didn’t matter, I could actually beat them in spite of how much smaller I was. Of course, most of the time they beat me anyway, but it was still fun to play. It was awesome to drill them in the face with that little paper football when kicking extra points. I was pretty accurate with those. We’d play, laugh, have fun and usually end up fighting about something. Then we’d pull ourselves together and finish the game before Mom shut the whole thing down. No, it was better to overlook our differences of opinion on whether it was a touchdown or not than to have to do a couch faceoff, even if it only lasted a few minutes. It killed the flow of the game.

We had a lot of fun playing paper football when we were kids. It was quick, easy, there weren’t a lot of rules, and no one got hurt. You didn’t need to have a deep blue sky and warm sun to play, but there’s just something about a crisp, sunny, Fall afternoon in New England that just begs you to go outside and enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the season.  

Football

Football is back! The games are on television and I’ve seen quite a few people either playing football or just tossing a football around. Around here, this time of the year is perfect for being outside and doing something. It’s not too hot and it’s not too cold. You can work up a bit of a sweat, but not have your shirt soaked through. If you’re not much of a doer, there’s nothing like watching football on a Sunday afternoon, hanging out with friends or family and eating some good food.

Football was big in my neighborhood growing up. When we only had a few guys we played out in the street, two-hand touch, from telephone pole to telephone pole, and the defense had to count to 5-Mississippi before they could rush the quarterback. You would think that counting to 5-Mississippi would be simple, but not much was with those guys. There were the guys who made up their own language when they counted (1missippi2missippi3missippi4missippi5missippi). I still haven’t found Missippi on a map. There were guys who rushed the quarterback when they got to the five in 5-Mississippi instead of after saying the full Mississippi. There were the guys who counted silently when you were supposed to count out loud, yelled “5-MISSISSIPPI!” after about 2.5 seconds and then rushed the quarterback.

Sometimes we made up first down markers, like you had to get past the tree in the front yard of our house or past the front walkway of the neighbor’s house across the street. Once you got past that mark, we chose another. Or sometimes we played that if you completed a pass, the down stayed the same. You could theoretically drive the length of the field, going 2 feet at a time, all the while being on first down. The shorter the pass, the better chance of actually catching it, so sometimes people would try to sneak in a pass that was behind the line of scrimmage, but the rule was that the receiver had to be over it to be considered a complete pass.

Of course there were always the arguments over whether the guy got you with one hand or two. There were some kids who would swear on their mother’s grave that you didn’t tag them with both hands and sometimes it just wasn’t worth the argument. But just to make sure they didn’t do it again, they just might get tagged a little extra roughly the next time he caught the ball. There were some kids who would lie or cheat in order to win so there were always arguments, ranging from the 5-Mississippi rule, to whether a pass was complete or not, to whether you tagged them with both hands. Amazingly, I don’t remember any games breaking out into actual fights. You argued your side, made your point and then we moved on for the good of the game.

When we had a larger number of kids to play, we went to a field at the beginning of the cemetery at the end of our street and played tackle football. No, we didn’t play amongst the graves. The front part of the cemetery was actually very nice. It had the field we played football on, some nice trees, a couple of ponds we played hockey on in the winter and people fished in during the other months, and a small hill that kids went sledding on in the winter. The graves started beyond the ponds and never bothered any of us – except at night, when we weren’t supposed to be in the cemetery at all. So we’d have our big game and we all got dirty, some of us got slightly hurt and a few of us lost our shirts. I remember a few of my friends going home and getting yelled at for the condition of their clothes and themselves, but hey, this is football, not badminton!

A highlight of the games, whether two-hand touch in the street or tackle in the cemetery, was after playing for a few hours we’d pool our money, go to the Sunoco station and buy sodas for everybody. If we had enough money, we shared some candy bars, too. Isn’t it funny how you could be beating each other up, getting into heated arguments and swearing you would never play with that kid again, and then you’d get a Mountain Dew or a Pepsi and all was forgotten? Now that I think about it, there were times we didn’t have enough money for each of us to have a soda so we shared those, too. Without straws. And none of us died.

If you want to get out of the house this weekend and not have to do yard work, go play some football. A little three-on-three, two-hand touch is great exercise. Us older guys aren’t as quick as we used to be, or as limber, so take it easy on us. But please, don’t be that guy who always says you only got him with one hand. You just may get unexpectedly jacked up!