From my senior year journal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
9-15-81<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I can say with all\ncomplete honesty that I hope Oregon City loses every football game\nthey play. Why do I have this feeling? There are numerous reasons.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I had a love-hate relationship with\nfootball in my Oregon City youth. It went from sheer joy during the\ngrade school years, to something more competitive and somewhat\nsinister in junior high, and finally, the target of my hostility in\nhigh school. Actually it wasn’t football’s fault. It was the people\nwho ran football. But not at first. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doug\nBansch, my fifth and sixth grade flag football coach at Mt. Pleasant\nElementary was the best and kindest football coach I ever had. We\nlost one game in two years. Our team scored at will running the\npro-set, full house T, I, run-and-shoot, and shotgun offensive\nformations, all color-coded with options for the quarterback to call\naudibles. We ran a dozen gadget plays. We shifted, motioned, and\nexecuted seamless walls on punt and kickoff returns. We were\nvirtually never penalized. Bansch used to bewilder opposing coaches\nwith the highly unconventional ploy of occasionally repeating a\nsuccessful gadget play\u2014on the very next down or offensive series if\nwe hadn\u2019t already scored using it. I used the same strategy when I\ncoached seventh grade football and my team executed Bansch\u2019s\ningenious tight end reverse, a play that scored almost every time I\ncalled it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even\nthough I didn\u2019t quarterback my grade school team, I was the team\nleader, and Bansch somehow understood I possessed the uncanny ability\nto design successful offensive plays on the spot. I knew this to be\nsecond nature because I\u2019d been doing it since I first gathered into\na sandlot football huddle and no else spoke up. But doing it in an\nactual refereed game was something else altogether. Thus, it was\nquite unexpected during the course of a close game well into the\nfourth quarter, as our offense drove down the field, when Bansch sent\nin a runner who told the huddle, \u201cMr. Bansch said let Matt design a\nplay.\u201d I did, and a halfback option pass run to our left, thrown\nright handed by our fullback, netted 25 yards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\nconstituted blind faith in a young player by a young coach and I\nalways remembered it. But even more memorable, was when Bansch\naccorded me his highest honor by entrusting me with the ultimate\npre-game responsibility. One day after practice in my second season\nplaying for him, he took me aside and announced my new job was to\nchalk the field before every game. He then dumped a bag of lime in a\nroller and showed me how to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bansch taught me a lot of football but\nmore about sportsmanship. Other coaches taught me football but very\nlittle about sportsmanship. It’s a strange thing as a kid to see an\nadult running up the score on another team. I had coach in junior\nhigh who was particularly notorious for doing that, and once ran up\nthe score on my father-coached team at a crosstown rival. I scored\nthree touchdowns in that game, against my Old Man! We beat him 50-0.\nOn one of the touchdowns, I ran right past him on the sideline and\nsort of nodded in apology. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was the kid on my junior high\nfootball team, with a locker in the locker room next to mine, who\nlived in a chicken shack on his family’s egg farm, and smelled worse\nthan any other human being I have ever smelled, who never talked\nabout girls, but only about trapping beavers and other small woodland\ncreatures. He was an offensive lineman with no cleats who practiced\nin worn suede shoes that I now recognize as Hush Puppies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am ashamed of my participation in\nbullying a player on my eighth grade football team. He was too poor\nto afford cleats and played in hand-me down black loafers! This\nbullying was aided and abetted by a coach. He made the kid hold up\nthe blocking dummy almost the entire practice and absorb huge hit\nafter hit. He never quit and I think he made one special teams tackle\nall season. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n I quit playing organized football my\nsophomore year in high school. I broke my ankle in a JV game and that\nwas it. A short time later, I started writing a novel about my high\nschool football experience. I never finished it and don’t think it\nhad a title. This fragment was lost decades ago, but it had a Holden\nCaufield kind of narrator, a defensive back, who loathed everything\nassociated with high school football, except for the actual playing\nof the game and the chess of being a smart defensive back and trying\nto outguess the opposition quarterback. I got about 25 pages into it\nbefore abandoning the idea. I wish I could read it today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. The value of football at this school is blown way out of proportion. The administration in this school bends over backward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,942],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-city","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5865"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5867,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5865\/revisions\/5867"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}