My Five Minute Football Career

by Alan C. Fox 1 Comment

5min-football-glory-peopletoolsI arrived at the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in the early afternoon of a pleasant Sunday in June. I was sixteen years old.  After my adventure of flying alone, and riding a subway/elevated train in an unknown city all by myself, I found my dorm and checked into the room where I would spend the next five weeks.  I was participating in a national five-week summer speech program for high school juniors.

A few of the guys had arrived before me and were throwing a football around on the grass between the dorm and Lake Michigan.  I was large.  By that I mean fat — five feet seven inches tall and over two hundred pounds heavy.

“I’ll bet you play on your high school football team,” one of them said. My priority at that moment was to fit in rather than be honest.

“Sure.  I’m a lineman,” I heard myself say.  “Third string, all city.”

Before I could retreat to the relative safety of my room he said, “Great!  Now we have enough players for a touch game.  You’re on my team.”

“Oh, shit!” I thought. “Sure!”  My traitor mouth said.

But I was on the debate team, not the football team.  Even so, my first fib had led to another, then to a whopper, and there I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

On the first play of our “touch” game I lined up to the right of the center.  As soon as he snapped the ball I was knocked flat on my back by the player lined up opposite me.   He was smaller than me, but at the time I had no idea he was an all-state guard on his high school team in Tennessee.

I smiled apologetically, lined up again, and for the second time landed on my butt, looking up at a fuzzy sun.

The third play was different from the first two in one significant respect.  I didn’t get up.  My right thigh was burning, and my leg had disconnected from my mind.  The leg refused to work.  I couldn’t move it.

My memory of what followed is foggy.  I somehow ended up in the campus infirmary, and after a painful examination by someone in a white jacket I learned that I had torn a ligament. I was given a few pills and told to stay off my feet for a few weeks, “maybe longer.”

The next five weeks were a torment.  Classes were at the other end of campus.  Fortunately, someone loaned me a bicycle.  It would take me a few minutes to painfully place myself on the seat, then close to half an hour to propel myself, with only my left leg, to the other end of campus.  Using the pedals was out of the question.

Obviously, I survived.  I even won an award in discussion, which many of my classmates regarded as a wimpy event.  I had a girl-friend, Becky from Indiana, but only for two weeks, because she got tired of my limping along behind her and she stopped talking to me.

Did I learn my lesson?  Am I now willing to risk rejection by speaking my mind?

I’m still working on it.

But as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize winner in Literature, wrote, “When I was a boy they called me a liar.  Now they call me a writer.”

Actually, my football career didn’t really last a full five minutes.  It was more like three and a half.

Alan

Comment ( 1 )

  1. patti
    At least you didn't say you were a quarterback. (That's the extent of my football language right there). Great anecdote Alan, and haven't we all done that, especially in High School, trying out who we are not, to please who they are. You survived, learned a lesson, your leg healed and you're still brilliant.

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