The Wright Angle
Aug. 7, 2006

Here's hoping they don't touch touch football

By Scott Wright

A few weeks ago, just as I was beginning to get excited about the approach of football season, I ran across a story in the news section of USA Today that reported schools across the nation are eliminating touch football from their playgrounds. Apparently, educators worry the game is too dangerous because kids are “running into each other.”

That's ridiculous. Back when I was in elementary school my male classmates and I spent an hour every day playing touch football, and the only things I ever remember running into were swing sets, chain link fences, a row or two of hedge bushes and one little buck-toothed girl who got too close to the action because she thought my friend Rodney's feathered haircut made him look like the blonde guy on “Simon & Simon.”

Some of the players in our game might have tried to convince you they were pushed or knocked into those solid metal objects but they were “sissies”, typically, and should have never walked onto the field in the first place. They certainly weren't allowed back onto the gridiron once they complained to the teacher about the “rules” of our particular brand of football.

Despite such lax enforcement, we still hardly ever ran into each other. Besides, physical pain wasn't what we were out there every day trying to accomplish as we ripped holes in the knees of our blue jeans and tore the shirts right off each others' backs. Everyone knows the object of the game of football (I refer here to American football, not that crap they play everywhere else) is to score points -- hundreds and hundreds of points! Well, dozens, anyway. And if you're going to score more points than the other guys, sometimes someone has to take a little trip into the old hedge row. Oops.

Speaking of scoring points, back in the fall of 1981 my teammates and I ran an offense I would later learn was eerily similar to football mastermind Tiger Ellison's run-and-gun. In fact, as far as I know, at that time there was only one other elementary school “team” in the entire country experimenting with Ellison's wide-open, high-scoring attack. Unfortunately, that other “team” had a little more “gun” and a lot more “run” than we did, and we played them every weekday at noon.

The guys I lined up beside always included Greg, Chris, Brad, Kenny and Rodney. Typically, we were joined by whoever else felt like taking a beating that particular afternoon. Donald and Ty were the masterminds of the other team, and were usually joined by bigger Chris, Derek, Brian and Teddy, along with a few other like-minded “goons” (that's a term of endearment we often used to address each other, particularly as we righted ourselves after “falling” into the landscaping). I'm not sure how we initially chose teams that were so athletically lopsided, but for what must have been hundreds of contests over the course of our years together, the rosters stayed pretty much the same whether we were catching a football, swinging at a softball, or tossing quarters against a locker room wall.

Sadly for my guys and me, the outcome was usually the same, too. And there was no other arena where our sporting contests came closer to being declared “no contest” than on the 40-yard-long "battlefield" behind the old spook house that was our school library -- and if the field where we played football every day resembled anything, it was a battlefield.

The back of the east end zone was defined by a potholed tar-and-gravel road. The field itself looked like it had just been blanketed by artillery fire. Twice. The south sideline was a tangle of rusty barbed wire, cockleburs and briars littered liberally with strips of ripped polyester and thumb-sized chunks of displaced denim. Along the north sideline, you knew you were out of bounds when the monkey bars told you so. As for the other end zone, that was the one my teammates and I were always running-and-gunning for and, usually, we only saw it from a distance.

Each team typically consisted of several players besides those I mentioned earlier, but we were the ones who talked up the coming conflict every single day on the way to morning break. We were the players who crowded around each other while standing in line for Mr. Alfred's store so we could draw pass routes in the dirt away from the prying eyes of our opponents. We were the ones who huddled every day at lunch, devising blocking schemes using our empty milk cartons as dummies and who, on rainy days, looked out Mrs. Melba Mitchell's classroom window in utter despair at the thought of being marched off to the gym for P.E. class, forced to endure the 60 minutes of pure, unadulterated hell that was playing volleyball with those silly, screaming girls. Yuck.

Given the choice, everyone one of us footballers would have voluntarily submitted our behinds to three licks apiece from Mr. Evans, the high school shop teacher. For those of you who either haven't heard stories of his prowess with the paddle or seen the devastation firsthand, Waylon Evans (may he rest in peace) was then and remains today the most feared administer of corporal punishment in the history of Cedar Bluff School.

Did Mr. Evans have all ten fingers? No, not by the time I could count that high (ask around, plenty of people know the story). Could he register a 10 on the Richter scale with your ass as the epicenter? Believe me when I tell you that I know for absolute certain: YES HE COULD.

Now you're beginning to understand just how badly we wanted to play football.

When we did play, Ty usually outscored the rest of us by himself. He was only about 4 feet tall (maybe 4-foot-6, if you count the afro) but man, was he fast! Why, if he wasn't so small back then and we'd ever heard of such a thing, we'd probably have accused him of being hopped up on steroids. Maybe he was, but it must have been some type of muscle-building cream that he only rubbed on his legs (and, occasionally, through his hair -- that would explain his speed and his happenin' 'do).

Donald regularly gave us what-for, too. He was the same size as most of the rest of us, but he could already throw the ball farther than most guys on the junior varsity team. Whenever their team wanted a quick score, Donald would simply give a wave of his hand and Ty would break off his crossing route, hit the afterburners and take off like a streak down the middle of the field. By the time the wisps of smoke from our singed eyebrows had cleared, Ty had already made it to the end zone untouched, spiked the ball Billy “White Shoes” Johnson-style, and was trotting back to his teammates, grinning and pointing like he'd just made all of us look like a bunch of idiots -- which of course he had.

Thing is, I wouldn't take a thing in the world for every one of those scratches, cuts and bruises, or the mound of used Band-Aids and empty bottles of rubbing alcohol we left behind on that field. All those years of running kept me healthy as a youngster and all those physical injuries have healed. I wouldn't take a thing for all Donald's Hail Mary passes or Ty's Jerry Rice-like moves, either. Mental scars eventually heal, too. I hope.

Fast forward to today, and as we approach another glorious football season in America adolescent boys all across the nation are surely looking for a school district that hasn't eliminated corporal punishment so they can take a beating instead of playing co-ed volleyball. Forget the fact that taking away activities like touch football limits exercise and can possibly inhibit a child's development. Why, the very notion of a young boy spending his elementary and middle school years sans the opportunity to learn all the skills besides how to play football that can be learned from playing football seems like an absolutely horrible idea to me -- at least until puberty sets in. At that point, volleyball with the girls will probably start to sound like a pretty swell way to kill an hour.

Right now, though, there are 11-year-old boys everywhere, we live in the most diehard gridiron state in the union and we're quickly approaching football season. I don't know if teachers in Cherokee County still let kids play touch football, but I hope they do and will never listen to that "they'll get hurt" silliness. It's already happening in other places across the country, but let's resolve to never discuss nixing touch football in Cherokee County if we haven't already, OK?

Let's just let the kids play the game. Any physical or mental wounds they accumulate along the way will heal. Eventually.