In my illustrious sports career, which includes scoring five points over an entire season of intramural basketball, nothing compares to the time when I took a kickoff, pulled around the end past outstretched hands and trotted to the end zone.
It was the fifth grade. None of my pursuers weighed more than a hundred pounds, and we weren’t playing tackle.
I’m still proud of it to this day.
That’s partly why I continue to love football. When you’re 10, the pads you imagine jutting from your shoulders may as well be vestments. You see in sports nothing but potential, and a God who will one day smile on your favorite team.
Possibility becomes a harder sell over the years; I know what I can do, and it doesn’t include beating double coverage on a post route. As for my favorite team, the odds against a Super Bowl run are usually steep.
Ironically, then, what grips me most today is how the NFL frames impossibility.
The game can’t be replicated on the fields of daily life. We don’t live it by playing “Madden 2006,” indulging pals in flag football or wishing we had tried out for cornerback in high school. Unless we’ve suited up for real, absorbed three hours of pounding, then winced in a hot tub afterward, it’s a matter of looking without touching.
Certainly we can’t be Shaquille O’Neal either, but basketball’s minimal equipment and less-severe contact means that a guy in a pickup game can dare to dream. Same for baseball, soccer, tennis.
Sports like these forge heroes, men who connect with fans even as they tower above them. Superman has batted under many names: Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Ryne Sandberg. In a 3-4 defense he would be lost, Clark Kent pulling him offside or too far back into coverage.
Football favors omnipotence over heroism; it bends us back from a New Testament love of the certain to an Old Testament awe of the unknowable. The god of this religion, never truly revealing himself, takes the helmeted forms of Ray Lewis, Brett Favre, Randy Moss.
Angry, jealous, mysterious, aloof – not a bad description for many NFL stars. And one that didn’t seem to apply so broadly to their counterparts when I was a kid.
Loyalty, accessibility and a purer love of the game marked players in the ’70s. They were smaller and not as sculpted, earned a lot less money and were far more likely to play for one team their whole career – much like your granddad at the factory.
Of course, nostalgia always attacks the present indiscriminately. Modern offenses have freer reign; the league is more competitive in the age of the salary cap; and players are faster and more athletic – which also means they are even less like you and me.
In a Mad Magazine cartoon from around the time of my kickoff return, a teenage boy sits leaning toward a TV in grim concentration. The caption, paraphrased a bit, says that the start of football season reminds us we’re another year older.
It also reminds us today that whenever Brett Favre conducts his huddle, we never can divine what he’s saying. But then, where’s the challenge in knowing the mind of a deity?
A Guy Thing runs every other week. Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
