NFL

By Jonathan M. Bell
Outsports.com

Have you ever watched a sport with a person who formerly played that sport at a high level?

Don’t.

My father played high school and college football. He refuses to say whether he could have had a pro career or not, but even college is a significant level of play.

Up to a few years ago, he would not watch football on television. He could always find something more interesting to do on Sundays, Monday Nights, Saturdays, a few Thursdays or any other day they threw football on the small screen.

My brother and I worked concessions at Dallas Cowboys football games during the mid- and late 80’s, alas just before they got good. Dad was often there, but only to work. While my brother and I would frequently wander off to watch the game in progress, my father never left the counter. (Brief explanation: up till Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys, the concession stands were run by various charities and clubs as fund raisers. We worked for the Girl Scouts, and yes we got paid in cookies. A case of them would show up on the porch every season.)

My father was entirely uninterested in football for most of my formative years.

Recently he’s started paying attention again, and this is not a good thing. Every game we watch together is hours of commentary on blown coverage, overweight linemen, holes you can drive a Mack truck through. It just goes on. 

My father sees practice as the real work; games are just for fun in his mind. Practice is where football players are made.

His stories from his playing days are almost all about practice, not actual games.

Stories about being on his back doing leg lifts with the coach in cleats standing on his stomach. His eyes were closed so he didn’t notice. The coach started jumping up and down. He didn’t notice. Everyone but him stopped the exercise, suddenly he notices that.

Stories about running up and down the field, and the coach doesn’t think he’s running fast enough. So the coach gets behind my father to kick him. Of course, my father, swearing he doesn’t know about the coach behind him, speeds up just as the coach starts his kick. They had to take the coach off the field on a stretcher with a dislocated hip.

Or the story about him going up for a lay-up and coming down on the aptly named “Spider,” he was all arms and legs, and Spider not getting back up... Oh, that was a try out for varsity basketball. Anyway, he didn’t make the team.

Not to mention the various apparatus he broke during track and field practices.

My father is full of stories about how hard one has to work hard during practice to be able to accomplish anything in competition.

So watching football coverage with him is just torture. Particularly when Nate Newton was a Cowboy.

Nate had a tendency to talk, a lot. He also was on the portly side.

Fat, trash-talking linemen are the bane of my father’s existence. He would yell at the screen. He would yell at anyone in the room. And for hours after whatever it was that we watched, be it the news or the postgame, my father would regale anyone who would listen, or was simply present - a pulse and breathing were optional, with tales of how it was when he played football. How it wasn’t the size of the linemen, but the athleticism that counted. How it wasn’t just a matter of out massing the competition; that one had to get lower than the competition.

Which inevitably led to the stories of Digger.

Digger was a high school teammate of my father’s. He wasn’t big. He wasn’t fast. He wasn’t what one would consider a lineman. But he could get lower to the ground than anyone, and he just went under opposing offensive lines. The quarterback would yell “Hike;” Digger would disappear, and the ball carrier would wind up on his ass.

Going to the games usually isn’t quite so bad, if for no other reason, you can’t always hear someone sitting next to you in a stadium full of people. However, my father doesn’t like going to football games much. The Fall is a difficult time of year for my father to be in public. He’s 6’3”, 275 lb. and has a huge white beard. Every time he goes to a Cowboys game he finds himself surrounded by kids wondering what they’re going to get for Christmas. We’re Jewish.

So the season is underway once again and I have no idea what’s going on. I’ve been avoiding football coverage when hanging out with Dad this year. I have a choice; I can be well informed about football, or I can have peace.

I chose peace this year.

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Jonathan M. Bell is a writer and graphic designer in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several small press literary magazines including ``Jack the Daw,'' ``Parallax'' and ``Garcia’s Kitchen'' and have won several awards. His graphic design partnership, The Dog & Pony Show, creates corporate identity through the creative use of the print medium.