Famed comedian Bill Cosby once posed the question: Why is there air? His answer had to do with being able to blow up various balls.
Ask Curtis Cunningham, a Columbine High School lineman, why he and so many of America’s youth prefer football, and his reply is just as simple – he likes to blow up opponents.
“You don’t get in trouble for hitting kids,” the 6-foot-2, 270-pound Colorado recruit said.
Football has a firm command of an audience here and nationally – it’s king in prep participation, and the NFL is the major reason there’s less traffic on Sundays beginning in September.
“It’s America’s game. I think so,” said former Broncos cornerback great Louis Wright, who has coached schoolboys in Colorado since the 1990s and is an assistant at Rangeview in Aurora.
Despite a considerable injury threat on every play, football lures schoolboys much as free chicken wings do at lunch.
“For me, I’d have to say it’s the aggressiveness. And it gives you respect in school,” Rangeview lineman Marcus Lucas said.
And a sense of belonging.
“The teamwork and being with the guys is great,” said Nolan Brewster, a safety at Mullen and a Texas Longhorns pledge. “This is not an individual sport. You get that feeling of being around all of your friends.”
It also can become a future.
“I realized the summer of my sophomore year that football was going to be my way of going off to college,” East coach Ron Woolfork said. He played at CU and in the NFL, and sees the game as having a lock on the “homegrown talent.”
“If you break down all the sports, internationally, the primary sport is baseball or soccer. They start younger, and their skills develop at an early age,” Woolfork said. “Here, we get them in football, we get them young, in Little League, and the physicality of the game takes time to hone.”
As for the NFL getting the best players, Broncos safety John Lynch said: “It’s always a hard one to answer. I think football’s popularity is at a high. But I don’t know if more kids are playing. That’s becoming a problem in more and more communities. It’s expensive. But I do think we certainly get some of the best athletes. … The NBA gets theirs and baseball gets theirs.”
Lynch was like so many others who excelled in multiple sports- while starring in football at Stanford, he also was a high draft choice in baseball.
However, even those who identify football as a career might have to wait. Broncos teammate Nick Ferguson did.
“You have to be in that community with involvement with it,” he said. “I didn’t play Pop Warner, because my mom was worried I’d get injured. … I didn’t play football at Pop Warner but still made it. Some kids who don’t grow up in that situation, it’s not there. It was later for me as far as a future is concerned. I just thought I would be doing something different.”
In the United States, football was the universal king “30 years ago,” Wright said, but it’s not now, it least not to the same magnitude.
“I recently read an article where a player gave up his scholarship,” he said. “It used to be that if you got a major D I-A football scholarship, you’d never give that up. Now there are too many other things to do, and you’ve got studs out there.”
The game, said Columbine lineman Ben Tedford, who also played select basketball, “just grows on you. I like it the best.”
Brewster, whose older brother, Clint, joined their dad, Tim, at the University of Minnesota, tried other sports. “But in basketball, I’d foul out all the time,” he said. “In football, you can come out here and take your frustrations out. It’s just a great sport.”
Plus, Lucas said: “In the NFL, there’s a lot of money in it. People will go with the league with the most money.”
And interest.
Staff writer Neil H. Devlin can be reached at 303-954-1714 or ndevlin@denverpost.com.
