Pioneer Pride: Part 4-Football

From my senior year journal:

9-15-81

I can say with all complete honesty that I hope Oregon City loses every football game they play. Why do I have this feeling? There are numerous reasons.

1. The value of football at this school is blown way out of proportion.
2. The administration in this school bends over backward to promote spirit. While this in itself is not bad, it’s all the bastards do.
3. Every other activity is overshadowed.
4. If you don’t belong to the “crowd” you are labeled an eccentric.
5. Many more.

I had a love-hate relationship with football in my Oregon City youth. It went from sheer joy during the grade school years, to something more competitive and somewhat sinister in junior high, and finally, the target of my hostility in high school. Actually it wasn’t football’s fault. It was the people who ran football. But not at first.

Doug Bansch, my fifth and sixth grade flag football coach at Mt. Pleasant Elementary was the best and kindest football coach I ever had. We lost one game in two years. Our team scored at will running the pro-set, full house T, I, run-and-shoot, and shotgun offensive formations, all color-coded with options for the quarterback to call audibles. We ran a dozen gadget plays. We shifted, motioned, and executed seamless walls on punt and kickoff returns. We were virtually never penalized. Bansch used to bewilder opposing coaches with the highly unconventional ploy of occasionally repeating a successful gadget play—on the very next down or offensive series if we hadn’t already scored using it. I used the same strategy when I coached seventh grade football and my team executed Bansch’s ingenious tight end reverse, a play that scored almost every time I called it.

Even though I didn’t quarterback my grade school team, I was the team leader, and Bansch somehow understood I possessed the uncanny ability to design successful offensive plays on the spot. I knew this to be second nature because I’d been doing it since I first gathered into a sandlot football huddle and no else spoke up. But doing it in an actual refereed game was something else altogether. Thus, it was quite unexpected during the course of a close game well into the fourth quarter, as our offense drove down the field, when Bansch sent in a runner who told the huddle, “Mr. Bansch said let Matt design a play.” I did, and a halfback option pass run to our left, thrown right handed by our fullback, netted 25 yards.

That constituted blind faith in a young player by a young coach and I always remembered it. But even more memorable, was when Bansch accorded me his highest honor by entrusting me with the ultimate pre-game responsibility. One day after practice in my second season playing for him, he took me aside and announced my new job was to chalk the field before every game. He then dumped a bag of lime in a roller and showed me how to do it.

Bansch taught me a lot of football but more about sportsmanship. Other coaches taught me football but very little about sportsmanship. It’s a strange thing as a kid to see an adult running up the score on another team. I had coach in junior high who was particularly notorious for doing that, and once ran up the score on my father-coached team at a crosstown rival. I scored three touchdowns in that game, against my Old Man! We beat him 50-0. On one of the touchdowns, I ran right past him on the sideline and sort of nodded in apology.

There was the kid on my junior high football team, with a locker in the locker room next to mine, who lived in a chicken shack on his family’s egg farm, and smelled worse than any other human being I have ever smelled, who never talked about girls, but only about trapping beavers and other small woodland creatures. He was an offensive lineman with no cleats who practiced in worn suede shoes that I now recognize as Hush Puppies.

I am ashamed of my participation in bullying a player on my eighth grade football team. He was too poor to afford cleats and played in hand-me down black loafers! This bullying was aided and abetted by a coach. He made the kid hold up the blocking dummy almost the entire practice and absorb huge hit after hit. He never quit and I think he made one special teams tackle all season.

I quit playing organized football my sophomore year in high school. I broke my ankle in a JV game and that was it. A short time later, I started writing a novel about my high school football experience. I never finished it and don’t think it had a title. This fragment was lost decades ago, but it had a Holden Caufield kind of narrator, a defensive back, who loathed everything associated with high school football, except for the actual playing of the game and the chess of being a smart defensive back and trying to outguess the opposition quarterback. I got about 25 pages into it before abandoning the idea. I wish I could read it today.