My finest moments as a football player came in eighth grade in central Nebraska. During one game, as the first team was on the field, battling a rival school located twenty miles away, I was on the sidelines, bullshitting with other benchwarmers, when I noticed the rival cheerleaders behind me, cheering some inane chant in a fluty, ear-bleeding, Pillsbury Doughboy chorus. I ogled them for a time and then loudly blurted, "Their cheerleaders are fucking ugly." My pals and I had a hearty chuckle, my uniform was spotless, it was a bright, bright, bright, sunshiny day, as they say, and all was well with the world for about two seconds.
"Who the hell said that?" our head coach yelled, further wrecking a voice box already ravaged from decades of chain smoking and swallowing huge, rhombus-sized pieces of unchewed porterhouse. Whoops. My own embarrassingly high voice, like that of Peppermint Patty on quaaludes, amplified by irrational excitement that these pasty white teenagers were a cartwheeling gaggle of Medusas and Calamity Janes, carried in the zephyr, and suddenly my grasp of the third-team center position was awfully tenuous.
The veracity of such an astute observation was lost on him. He tore into me. "Get your head in the game." "You're going to run laps next practice." "Can I bum a smoke?" The complete disdain for me in his eyes was apparent even through his bifocals. I was never going to see the field, which was to my ultimate benefit, because if he really wanted to punish me, he would have sent me into the game where bigger and stronger players would've summarily whipped my ass. I picked up cones and hastily dumped them in a storage shed after the next practice as he looked on with feta cheese crumbs in his mustache and a fag in his mouth—he called cigarettes fags back then; it was the early nineties, a simpler time, a time when the sound of a modem dialing so you could log on to AOL to jump into a chat room to post lewd comments about god knows what and chronically harass a user named "LibbyLuvsU" was harmonious—in a scene that was downright Rockwellian. He fed me false wisdom, I pretended to care, and then he returned to offering mustache rides to strangers and I returned to the joys of digital harassment.
In 1993, I was out of shape, lazy, indifferent, absent-minded, a lousy 5'10", 170-lb. athlete with a penchant for playing dirty. Not only are kegs and minds terrible things to waste, but so are cheap shots. Not merely a cheap shot artist, I was a maestro of cheap shots, a cheap shot virtuoso. Others played to the whistle (or "through the whistle," as certain no-neck coaches invariably say). I started playing, that is cheap-shotting, after the whistle blew. I have deteriorating VHS tapes with grainy, shaky footage shot by my voluble parents of me on the kick return team, leisurely trotting about, not blocking or feigning an attempt to block any of the opposing players darting past me on both sides toward our kick returner, and then after said kick returner is tackled and the play is long over, I give a forearm shiver to the kidneys of their kicker and throw him to the ground, strutting away as if I'd just made a textbook tackle of Walter Payton in the open field.
In another game, when I was surprisingly in on a defensive series—I think it was late in the fourth quarter; de facto garbage time—I lined up as a standing left defensive end, their offense ran a running play (trap, dive, a quick hitter, something easy and fast) to their left, the right side defensively, I went unblocked, as there was no reason to block me, my teammates tackled the runner for a short gain, the refs tooted their discordant whistles for varying lengths, I kept jogging, and all of a sudden I found myself in the vicinity of their quarterback. Officially and/or unofficially, the play was over. But when you didn't play much, you had a hankering to hit just about anyone. He was impeding my path back to the bench, so I shoved him to the dirt and puffed my chest out. I listened to "Thuggish Ruggish Bone" before every game. I was one bad, tough SOB.
Three words can describe my football-playing days: forgettable, ephemeral, inglorious. However, I played. This brings me to the point of the foregoing: I read ESPN and SI.com religiously, but when you look at the pictures of the writers of the various conference football blogs, you get the distinct impression that these blokes never played a lick of football. I ran gassers. I dogged it more often than not but I ran them nevertheless. I've been on the sidelines. That's where I spent the bulk of each season. The uninspired, bland, lifeless prose that these goofy-looking, nonathletic dweebs spew out is nearly impossible to digest because I find that I question the source, and for good reason. You cannot truly know about something unless you're a part of it. Not apart from it. A part of it. As my fortysomething cousin said one Thanksgiving about ten years ago while listening to Pam Ward, a female play-by-play announcer who works for ESPN, call a college football game, "What the hell does she know?" What the hell do these guys know? If they were former players or coaches, I could possibly forgive the mediocre writing. They're not, so I can't.
Sidebar: I see Todd McShay on TV, sneer, say aloud to no one in particular, "What a clown," and wish I could repeatedly rabbit-punch him. This putz has no expertise, profound knowledge, or remarkable skills. His opinions are as picayune as his ratings of players are flaccid. I've been to clown college, and when you graduate from clown college, the dean personally hands you your diploma. The dean? One Todd McShay.
I'll pen columns on football, gambling lines, and whatnot and take a superabundance of cheap shots. Whistle blows. There is only one rule: Merril Hoge is and always will be a tool.
