Being a Player, Becoming a Man

In recent weeks, a professional, a collegiate and a 14-year-old prep football player have died on the practice field.

So why didn’t I blink when I dropped off my ninth-grade son for his high school football tryout? Because I believe the world is divided into football players and nonplayers and I want my son on the same side of that great dividing line as I am.

It’s sad that these young men died. But truth be told, their odds were not any worse than in many other activities of daily boy life: skateboarding, bike riding, surfing with sharks.

Football was my teenage rite of passage to manhood, and now it will be my son’s. And unlike other teenage rites of passage, this is one I can watch and vicariously experience the joy of days (long) gone by.

My son had played since he was 6 years old. But now the kid gloves were off. No Pop Warner weight limits. No rag-tag gathering of any kid with the registration fee.

Now he was playing real football. Hard-hitting, bone-crushing, real-deal football.

My generation was too young for Vietnam and too old for Desert Storm, so football was our war, and summer practice was our boot camp.

For communities, football is our spectacle. The grandeur and pageantry of the game only serve to dress up the violence that is at its core.

Yes, violence--but a kind of violence that is a suitable substitute for the violence that lives deep within the human soul and psyche. It discharges our primitive need for conquest. Our team, our army. Our coach, our general. Our star, our hero. Football is our war.

Football’s satisfaction is on such a primal level that it is difficult to explain to those who never have played it. Baseball may be the national pastime, but football is the American sport.

It is aggression. It is strength. It is downright Darwinian.

So deep is its connection to our humanity that it is difficult to elucidate its bestial beauty.

I know it is a cliche, but football is like life. It tests the very core of a person. Can you give more than you’ve got?

It asks of you what no one else may ever ask of you, to put your body on the line for something you believe in. Your team. Your heart. Your goals. Your pride.

Activism no longer demands the physical commitment it once did. With choreographed marches and arranged arrests, activism has become domesticated.

But football tests whether you can transcend your limitations and expand your capacities when everyone tells you you can’t.

Can you endure the pain? Can you conquer the fear?

Can you find that one quality that takes you beyond those who are bigger, better, faster?

Can you find the courage?

My son will play this season. He has proved that his career to this point was no fluke. He has shown that his fearlessness was not bravado. He will play football because it is his destiny to play football.

Football is in his blood, on both sides of the family. His maternal uncle wears a Super Bowl ring (Dallas, 1972) and his paternal uncle wears a Rose Bowl ring (Stanford, ‘71, ‘72). One day he may wear both.

Or he may never stand in a college end zone or wear a championship ring. But he will have courage and conviction.

And when he faces those challenges that life brings, he will know that he can stand the test.

He may get knocked down, but he will get back up. It may be hard, but he’s done hard before. He may lose, but he will play another day. He may be afraid, but he will not cringe.

This is what I hope he learns. He may dream of big bucks and fancy cars. I just dream of a young man who’s not afraid to tackle the big problems of life.