For most people, New Year’s and birthdays are the annual events that remind us we’re getting older. Another year, another birthday. But for me, that prompting comes in the form of football. Not the kind you watch, the kind you play.
Every Saturday-after-Thanksgiving for the past 10 years, my high-school friends and I have joined in a classic game of football. And every year it is played the same way: full-body contact, with no padding or protection whatsoever. The teams are usually seven on seven, and everyone, at some point in the game, gets the ball — and gets crushed. The first years after high-school graduation, we played from mid-morning until mid-afternoon. We’d take a short half-time break, guzzle down some Gatorade, and then head back to the field to inflict further damage.
But college life, free of required phys ed, had an impact on our play. With each Thanksgiving that passed, our guys were looking heavier and running slower. Receivers were starting to slip and fall, and the quarterback’s beergut made him less agile and more prone to getting sacked. And injuries began to mount. Bloodied knees, gashed lips, sprains, and pulled muscles.
One player, who had previously suffered a dislocated shoulder, aggravated it when he was monster-tackled. Another time, a friend with a size 15 shoe stepped on a guy’s neck. One of us still plays despite pins in his upper arm from an arm-wrestling contest gone awry. And once, a player brought his buddy from college who was hit so badly we had to take him to the hospital for an ultrasound. That was the last time we saw him.
Still, we kept on playing, knowing that pain and punishment awaited us.
Then two years ago, my team faced a motley crew who were strangers to all of us but one — and even he scarcely knew these distant in-laws and assorted hangers-on. Obviously, though, they were out for our blood — especially their wiry quarterback, who had a shaved head and tattooed arms. It was an unpleasant experience, with a few personal scuffles, and in the end they ripped us to shreds. Those guys, for reasons apparent, weren’t invited back last year.
My friends and I took comfort in the thought that that game was an aberration. But last year, we came up against our younger selves: my classmates’ younger brothers. Most of them had played varsity football in high school, and one was playing at the college level. We lost badly. Some of us had taken up smoking and were just plain out of breath. This time, there was no escaping the knowledge that we weren’t the athletes we had been in 1990.
Now, none of us is quite 30 years old, but we’re getting close. In the back of our minds, there’s long been a nagging question we have chosen to ignore. But a few weeks ago, two players brought it up: What if we used flags?
The very notion sent shivers up my spine. And most of my teammates thought the same: To take down an opponent not by tackling him to the ground but rather by pulling off tiny flags attached to his waist with Velcro? It was a slap in the face. To end a decade of tackle football with humiliating flags would be to admit we were all washed up. That our bodies have had it. One of us pleaded that if we play again this year under tackle rules without protection, we’ll lose George, and “he’s got to support a wife and kids!” True. So maybe George doesn’t have to play.
There probably isn’t a better example of male stubbornness (and possibly stupidity) than this. That we will someday go from tackling to touching is inevitable; we’re all more or less resigned to this by the time we’re 30. Just not now.
As the years fly by, that post-Thanksgiving game is a jealously guarded constant in our lives. Same time, same place, even same weather — in 10 years, the Saturday after Thanksgiving has never failed to produce a crisp autumn morning beneath a cold blue sky. Some of us are indeed married, some have children; some still live in Jersey, while the rest have gone to big cities. But when we step onto that field, it’s as if we were still in high school.
After the big game, both teams head over to McDonald’s for a second Thanksgiving feast. And for the time being, we continue to eat as if we had the metabolism of 18-year-olds. It’s awfully hard to consume $ 10 worth of McDonald’s, but after the game, some of us come pretty close. A favorite post-game meal is the Surf’n’ Turf (Big Mac and Filet-O-Fish). And everyone supersizes.
Come to think of it, the eventual shift from tackle to flag football might not even be the ultimate proof of our getting older. Perhaps an even crueler blow will come the day one of us forgoes the Double Big Mac for a Grilled Chicken Salad. Now that will be the final insult.
VICTORINO MATUS
