By ARTHUR VIDRO
What It’s Worth
When I was in third grade or so, I wanted to play football. There was a league you could pay to join. At registration, my mother and I were shocked to learn kids were assigned to teams based on age or scholastic grade. We watched others my age register and realized most of them outweighed me 2-to-1. We chose not to register.
I had assumed players would be assigned to teams based on size, like the weight divisions in boxing and wrestling. It makes sense to me to pit players against like-sized players. But the bureaucrats in charge lumped everyone in the same grade onto the same football field, sorting by age, not physical development.
In middle and high school I played pick-up tackle football games with my friends, who were more or less my size. We had a blast. But no organized play.
At age 21, I organized my friends (and my big brother) into a team to play in a county 8-on-8 flag-football league. (In flag football, each player wears a belt that has two flags attached to it by Velcro. A “tackle” is made by removing a flag from an opponent’s hip.) My best friend Greg was in charge of our offense; I was in charge of defense and special teams.
My first glimmer of trouble came when I ordered our uniforms: two Large, five Medium, five Small. The sporting-goods shopkeeper did a double-take.
“You said this was for a football team?”
“Sure.”
“Football teams order Large, Extra-large, and Extra-extra large.”
Gulp.
At the captains’ meeting where the rules were explained and the fees paid, Greg and I looked like Lilliputians next to the captains of the eight other teams. Each team announced its name. They were “bar teams,” each named after a sponsoring pub. They looked like firemen who effortlessly carry people out of burning buildings. But no two of us could carry any one of them.
I aptly dubbed us The Smurfs. At the time, Smurfs were tiny, adorable, and popular TV cartoon characters. If nothing else, we had the cutest team. In short, it was as if our opponents were John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, James Garner, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (all in their prime), while we were Woody Allen, Bob Newhart, Roddy McDowall and Davy Jones of the Monkees.
Even the refs towered over us.
Jay F. was the only one of us with high-school football experience. But he had been only a reserve player, probably because he was as small as the rest of us. After another unsuccessful play during our one exhibition game, Jay explained what had happened: “I executed a perfect block on that guy. It didn’t work.”
The guy Jay had tried to block outweighed him by 100 pounds.
Alas, even in flag football, size matters. There might not be real tackling, but the rules of blocking were the same as in the NFL. We constantly got knocked to the ground, while we could not budge our opponents.
We staggered through the eight-game season, relying on speed, guile, and finesse. Our opponents relied on size, strength, and savagery.
It was a brutal nightmare. Gary D., now a mild-mannered veterinarian, bled from his face every game.
Once as I stood on the offensive line hoping to block an opponent, I saw fear in his eyes – fear that if he tried his hardest, he’d land me in a hospital. So he took it easy on me. I was more grateful than insulted.
We ended up 0-7-1; a 12-12 tie against Village Pub was the highlight of our season. We had unexpected assistance that game – a massive fog covered the field. For the entire Fog Game, nobody could see more than a few feet.
At one point, Greg took the snap, ducked into the fog, tiptoed unseen to the sideline, then sprinted toward the end zone. Touchdown. For our other score, Greg blindly heaved the ball to where Mel was supposed to be – neither could see the other – and somehow it came down out of the fog just right.
Our cornerbacks – Greg and me – led the team in tackles, and that game I even nabbed an interception. We did well, because for once our opponents had trouble finding us. They couldn’t hit what they couldn’t see.
Every other game we were shut out – usually by about 40 to 0.
We never played again.
Now, decades later, another football season approaches. If high-school teams struggle to fill rosters, they’ll pull in JV kids and ninth graders. For players considerably smaller than their opponents, that could be dangerous.
You can’t always count on being cloaked by fog.
If you have consumerism questions, send them to Arthur Vidro care of this newspaper, which publishes his column every weekend.
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