Third and long in the tooth
OUR TOUCH football season ended last week, after the doctor told me I needed some work done on my elbow.
“Farmer John surgery,” I warn my wife.
“I thought it was called Tommy John surgery,” Posh says.
“In my case, Farmer John,” I say. “First, they take a big sausage. . . .”
“Dad!” screams the lovely and patient older daughter.
“Oops, too much information,” chirps Posh.
Actually, too much football. My buddies and I have been playing weekly games of touch football since October, which seems like forever. When we started our season, gas was a mere $3.25 a gallon. Ed McMahon could still afford a house. Kathie Lee hadn’t returned to morning TV. Those were the days.
“Did you hear I’m having surgery,” I tell my buddy T-Bone, an amazing defender, a Sunday league legend.
“Breast?” he asks.
“Elbow.”
“Tommy John?”
“Farmer John,” I say, and I can see the concern in his eyes.
“You gonna be OK?” he asks.
“That stuff’s all very routine now,” I tell him. “First, they take a big sausage. . . .”
It’s been a long and glorious football season, running nearly as long as the NBA’s, but with more prima donnas. There’s the baseball executive, the actor, the former writer on “West Wing.” They are all funny and a little crude. In many ways, it’s a lot like coaching T-ball.
There are also some attorneys -- eight or 10, at last count -- nice guys who never argue. I’ve rarely heard an unkind thing come out of one of the attorneys’ mouths. That’s right, I usually wear earplugs.
“Where’s Hillary Rodham Rhymer?” one asks when one of our regulars doesn’t show.
“Where’s Sauce?” asks another.
“Book club,” someone says.
“Sex change,” says another.
As is often the case among 12-year-old boys, everyone has a nickname. Gloves. Goldfingers. Millertime. Junior. Burly. T-Bone. One player was dubbed C-Bone after crushing his collar bone on a spectacular somersaulting play early in the season.
“Come on, I’ll drive you to the hospital,” I told him after the pileup.
“That’s OK,” he insisted, and stumbled toward his car.
“Hey, I’ll drive you!”
“That’s OK,” and off he went, holding a bag of beer ice to his shoulder.
We’re not old-school, we’re just old. By my count, we scored 400 touchdowns, threw 600 interceptions, pulled 1,000 muscles.
We tend to throw the football furiously, sort of side arm -- like a guy hurling a 9-iron. We specialize in passes that are tipped four times before someone finally holds on and scampers into the end zone. We score more often than George Clooney.
Remember that crazy Boise State game against Oklahoma? We have a dozen games like that, with improbable endings, miracle plays. Usually, the games wind up with scores of 82-80, with the outcome coming down to a final play -- the ball bouncing off one attorney’s clammy hands, hitting another attorney’s clammy forehead, ricocheting into another attorney’s waiting arms. He drops it, of course, but another attorney is waiting patiently, passed out on the clammy ground.
Injuries are common. I once laughed so hard, I gave myself hiccups. I once hiccuped so hard, I cracked a tooth. At our age -- between 40 and 55, most of us -- one little ailment leads to another. Yet, in a sense, these weekly games make us ageless. Like Hercules. Or that actress Holly Hunter.
“All my blood just rushed to my tongue,” I tell a teammate while thinking suddenly of Holly Hunter.
“Is that where your prostate is now?” the teammate asks.
Who knows where my prostate is these days? My body processes a lot of fluids. In that sense, it is much like the Mississippi River, constantly changing, altering its course on a daily basis. Today, my prostate is here. Tomorrow, it may well be over there. Stupid gland.
When I was younger, I used to have two prostates, one for Friday night and one for Saturday night. But I had to sell one when I got married. It was the only way we could afford our first house.
Anyway, those days are long gone, and now I have football, and family, and my football family, such as it is, a ragtag bunch of guys who played for 35 straight weeks, with only one or two broken bones and one blown-out knee (sorry, Mike).
Talk about miracles.
“Do we get old and quit?” asks Commie, in one of our weekly e-mails back and forth. “Or do we quit and get old?”
We just keep playing, dude. New season starts Oct. 5.
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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.
