Bits & Pieces

Thank Goodness, It’s Football Season

By Kim J. Harmon

 

Bombs are still blowing up on roadsides halfway around the world, people are still dying needlessly for causes they may not even understand anymore, and though the world seems so out of kilter because of all that I can, at least, gain a modicum of comfort knowing that another football season is upon us.

Football evokes so many pleasant and reassuring memories and every time September rolls around, I can feel the warmth of those memories tingling in my fingers, my toes … my heart. Like with a warm blanket and a cup of hot chocolate on a chilly fall afternoon, I feel safe again.

Some of my earliest football memories were of playing in the side yard at my grandparents’ house on Chipman Street in Waterbury. Grammy would be baking cookies or making lunch and my brother and I would be running back and forth along the house while Grampy would be burning leaves out back, near the garden, just a few steps from the piece of land where Westside Middle School now stands.

I can still remember some of our games, back then. You know how kids, with no formal instruction, tackle? They grab each other up high, stop momentum, and then sort of wrestle each other to the ground. Well, there was this one play when my brother was racing towards the end zone (invisible, it ran from the tree to the corner of the house in the front yard) and I went in low and took him out at the hips. He spun over my back and landed hard on his rump.

It was a textbook tackle, though if someone had been filming it I would probably be embarrassed to discover I had actually tripped and that’s why I had done in low.

We tried to recreate that tackle (we both thought it was so cool, like the things we saw on the old NFL films with John Facenda narrating) but we never could.

In those days, I always pretended to be Walter Payton when we played at my grandparents. Whenever I had the ball, I would try and high step it like Sweetness used to (like I remember him doing one snowy day against the New York Giants) and thank goodness I never had a chance to see how ridiculous I must have looked.

Later on, we played a lot of football down the street, with friends. Sometimes we had just a couple of guys and would just throw the ball around and sometimes we had eight or 10 people and put together a real nice game.

If we played in the road on Wesley Street, we’d have to stop roughly every five minutes so a car could pass by. We were never jerks about it, but more than once I can remember scrambling to the line of scrimmage and trying to get a play off before the car racing around the corner could reach us ... and getting an irritated bleat of a car horn in the process.

I still recall a kick return for a touchdown on Wesley Street. There were only six of us, but the street was narrow and there wasn’t a lot of room to run. But I took a kick deep near the end zone and ran straight up the street for 10 yards or so, waiting for my two blocks (it was three on three), then dodging left and bursting through a hole right up the sidelines for a touchdown as another friend, who had just arrived, yelling, “There he goes!”

If we played in apartment complex parking lot right off Wesley Street and Bradley Avenue, we would use the parking lines as yardage markers (10 lines for a first down). Trying to dodge in between and around parked cars made for a lot of interesting plays and we quickly learned that, okay, you were wide open in the parking slot between the brown Buick and the red pickup truck, but once you made the catch you were trapped and had nowhere to go.

No one ever tried to kick us out of the lot, which was strange even then, but more than once we got yelled at from the balcony of one of the apartments.

I had a couple of pass catches in that lot I’ll always remember – one while doing the two-step next to the curb to stay in bounds and one seeing a ball way over my head, then racing head down before stretching out my lanky arms for a very surprising (for me) touchdown catch.

Those were the days, at John F. Kennedy High School, when I would be drawing plays up in my notebook … instead of listening to whatever the teacher was saying to me. There wasn’t a lot of variation (let’s face it, how many different patterns can you draw up for three guys?) but I had a full playbook that probably could rival anything NFL coaches are handing out to their players (or probably not).

Of course, growing up we played an awful lot in the backyard, too, my two brothers and I. Though my older brother was not a fan of football, he would be the “artificial” quarterback (that was my favorite position when we played with our friends, whenever we had uneven numbers) and my younger brother and I would go head to head.

The games weren’t so bad. The yard was small, so it was largely a running (and tackling) game. There just wasn’t a lot of room to throw the ball.

Thanksgiving was the best, though. Right after the Iona high school game (which always seemed to be on) and the King Kong versus Godzilla movie (which always seemed to be on, too) we would head outside to play and, if we were lucky, the ground would be soft, wet or – better yet – covered with snow.

We only had one mud game that I can recall (and mom was not happy about it) and a couple of snow games, but mostly I remember heading out to play football before the turkey was ready and trying not to break any bones on that cold, hard-as-stone ground.

When I was a kid playing football in the backyard (or my grandparents’ yard) my heroes were Walter Payton and Ken Stabler. When I was running with the football, I was Sweetness. When I was dropping back with the football, I was the Snake.

I liked a lot of other guys, though. Guys like Conrad Dobler and Jim Hart, Billy Kilmer and Sonny Jurgenson, Fred Bilitnekoff and Dave Casper, Hacksaw Reynolds and John Hadl.

I can remember Daryle Lamonica heaving those deep balls for the Raiders ... before the Snake came to town.

I was a Raiders fan before I was a Giants fan and I remain somewhat of a Raiders fan today (though, considering the state of the franchise, I hardly like to mention it aloud). I became a Giants fan because – this is in the days before cable television and satellite (for you younger kids, there really was a day before cable) – they were on television every Sunday and I had a chance to watch them all the time.

Of course, in those days – when I was 12 or so – the Giants stunk. No, they didn’t stink. They were awful. Joe Pisarcik, Craig Morton, Doug Kotar Larry Csonka – gosh, it was just terrible.

But I watched.

Every single week.

Eventually, in January of 1987, I was rewarded. Thanks to Phil Simms and Joe Morris, Phil McConkey and Mark Bavaro, Jim Burt and Lawrence Taylor.

My, those are such good memories that when the final pre-season game is played every year and when everything starts to count, I can’t help by smile. I know there is still a lot of madness going on in the world these days, but those memories are my safety blanket.

Uh, Excuse Me?

An elementary school in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has banned tag and any other games involving chasing because it “fuels too many playground disputes.”

This isn’t new. Schools in Attleboro, Massachusetts were in the news last year when it was discovered that kids were not allowed to play tag, touch football, or any other games involving contact because of, of course, liability concerns.

Schools in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Spokane, Washington, all agree.

That’s okay, though. Even with an obesity epidemic running rampant through the younger age groups, exercise is vastly overrated.