Some Thoughts on Football

Yes, another American football season is upon us and thus, football season is on my mind.

Recently, my Dad told me the hilarious story of how his Uncle Elmer had to tell my Dad’s step-mother to tell her two young sons to stop tackling the pigs on his Pendleton farm in the early 1940s. When it’s all said and done, my Dad and Uncle Max might be the only two American men still alive who learned how to tackle by tackling pigs in the slop pen!

Speaking of tackling, my ex wife called me a couple of weeks ago in a panic: her son, an incoming sophomore in high school was going out for football and HAD NEVER PLAYED ANY FOOTBALL before, either pickup with buddies or organized youth leagues. She was scared he might get hurt and wanted my advice since she knew I had played and coached football. I told her son would probably love it or hate it from the first time he hit someone or got hit. I said to tell him to always keep his head up when he tackled and he’d be fine. Two weeks later she called me and said her son loved the game and will be playing linebacker or in the secondary for the JV team. My ex and I are going to see a game! It won’t cost a cent.

I watched a couple of college games on opening day but just turned them off a few minutes in because of the terrible cliche-ridden announcing (physicality and athleticism said every other sentence!) and absurd amount of commercials.

I read an interesting feature article on the SEC commissioner who pretty much by himself ruined college football as an interesting regional sport for greed, greed and more greed. So be it. The sooner universities decouple themselves from big time sports programs, the better. I was curious to read that this commissioner, as conservative and Trumpian as they come, has one great passion outside of sports and greed and that is to follow U-2 around the country and world to see their shows. He’s 60 years old and recalled the first time he heard a U-2 album, Boy, being played by someone in his dorm. He said it changed his life, but obliviously had no bearing on what he would later do for a professional living. No one who professes a love for U-2, especially the first five albums, can said to be influenced by their music in any way if they ended up as commissioner of the SEC. But then again, there are Trumpians that follow the Grateful Dead knock-off bands so why not?

What may be the last OSU versus Oregon football game for a long time is in two weeks. I hope OSU trounces them. I might watch that one.

An NFL game in Brazil?

At a family gathering, the subject of football came up and someone asked me why I stopped playing in high school. A broken ankle was chiefly responsible but also it became increasingly harder to take direction seriously from the coaches, some of the most intellectually bereft men I have ever met. I wonder if that’s changed in four decades, especially since football has become so much more sophisticated and fast than the old running off tackle almost every offensive play. Probably not.

I won’t live to see the demise of football fading away as an overpowering popular cultural force, but it will come one day.