Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Jan. 30, 2012

Another Gravity Bowl loss



The Super Bowl is almost here, and it will officially mark the end of the football season. If you are anything like me, you’ve probably watched one of those extraordinary gridiron feats by some fellow half your age and twice your size and said to yourself: “Geez, I wish I could do that!” One maneuver I’ve always admired is when a running back is about to be tackled and dives for the end zone, holding the football at arm’s length so that the nose of the ball will cross the plane of the goal line. It takes a real physical specimen to stretch himself horizontally that way and thus expose all of him, from his finger tips to his toes, to that harsh moment when “gravity meets flesh and bone.” And after a successful landing, what does he do? He hops up and does a little dance, just to show us oldsters sitting in front of our TV sets how remarkably funky he is, and how remarkably out of shape we are.
Well, take heart, fellow oldsters. You may have hidden athletic talents you were blissfully unaware of. I certainly do.

First, you need to know that our house is surrounded by huge deposits of gravity. I’m not sure how those deposits got there, but there’s one large gravity mass, near the bottom step to our deck, that has been known to suck birds flying overhead right out of the sky. I firmly believe it is every bit as powerful, inch for inch, as that huge gravity deposit in Arkansas that seems to suck entire flocks of blackbirds to the ground on a yearly basis. A couple of weeks ago that enormous gravity field beneath those deck steps went after me. [It may interest you to know that the attempt on my life occurred on Friday, January 13. Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences.]

But back to my football analogy. At about 4:30 that afternoon I was carrying our dachshund, Maggie, across the deck toward those fateful stair steps. We always carry her up and down those steps because she has a bad back, and has been known to rupture a disc by running up or down the steps with too much weiner dog abandon. I was carrying her in the prescribed position, cradling her with her chest resting in the crook of my left arm, and my right arm supporting her hindquarters. All according to Hoyle. Things went well until I hit, or didn’t hit, that bottom step.

I know what you’re thinking: “So you fell down. You are an oaf, and that should put an end to your football analogy right there!” Well, not so fast. First of all, I was wearing no pads, no athletic supporter, and no helmet. Cleats? HAH! I laugh at cleats. And furthermore, a regulation NFL football, fully inflated, weighs 15 ounces. I looked it up. That’s less than a pound! Maggie, on the other hand, weighs between 16 and 18 pounds, fully inflated. And she is almost always fully inflated. And while that ever so graceful running back is diving for the end zone, the less than a pound football he is trying to nose over the goal line is just lying there in his hand, perfectly still. Dachshunds, when they find themselves in the grip of a gravity attack, tend to wriggle and squirm. But I could not let my kicking, scratching cargo jump, because of her back. The word “fumble” is not in my vocabulary. Instead, with no regard at all to my own back, and legs, and rib cage, in a brilliant flash of super-athleticism fueled by the desire to save my little teammate from either hitting the ground too hard, or landing directly under me, I stretched my left arm horizontally until her nose was ... if not across a goal line, at least a couple feet from the rest of me as I fell.

Maggie survived the last play of the Gravity Bowl unscathed. Immediately after I fell, she walked casually over to my writhing carcass and put her nose to mine as if to say: “Are you going to lie there and twitch like that all day?”

Of course I wasn’t. I was only trying to remember my first name. “AAAAAARGH,” I finally said to whoever might have been listening. Then I slowly rolled over, crawled to the steps, and after what seemed like an hour but was probably only 58 minutes, pulled myself to the top of the deck. I raised myself to a more or less upright position, and staggered into the house. Then I backed up, located the sliding glass door, and was able to actually stagger IN TO the house. “Ma-a-arilyn,” I squeaked. When she finally answered, from somewhere near the den, I repeated my name, which was still “AAAAARGH,” and explained to her that old AAAAAARGH Sanders was in great pain due to a serious sports injury.

After a night of moaning and groaning and shouting OOOH, OOOH, OOOOOH every time I breathed, Marilyn took me to the local emergency room. X-rays revealed that nothing was broken, bonewise, but I believe that several muscles and ligaments were separated from my ribs and introduced to new body parts where they had no business being. And I don’t think anybody checked, but my guess would be that my spleen and my right lung are not where they used to be. For over a week I could not get in or out of a chair, or in or out of bed, without Marilyn’s help. I was a wretched piece of humanity–the finely tuned athlete who has hit the wall, as they say. Or the ground.

It’s been over two weeks now, and I am on my way back to the same splendid physical specimen I used to be. I can go to the bathroom by myself like any other highly skilled athlete, and have re-mastered the art of taking my very own shower–a feat for which my family is eternally grateful.

I’m still not able to carry the dachshund outside, but she probably prefers it that way. By the way, if you plan to try to impress the neighbors by duplicating the Sanders Gravity Bowl goal line plunge, you might want to consider using a larger, more substantial breed to help cushion the impact.

Try carrying a St. Bernard down those steps. Or a Holstein.