Footballing

Footballing

It’s Super Bowl Sunday and in nine hours the LIV (54th) game will be played between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The 49ers have won five Super Bowls, the latest being twenty-six years ago in the days of Joe Montana.and Steve Young. By contrast, the Chiefs were last in the Super Bowl fifty years ago for game IV. That was actually the first year the game was formally called the Super Bowl versus the World Championship Game.

To begin with, have you ever stopped to think about where and why Roman Numerals are used? We see them at the end of movies or in the copywrite notices of books. Who among us hasn’t scratched our heads wonder what the L or D was (50 and 500) even though V, X, C and M (five, ten, hundred and thousand) were more self-evident. The Romans had no need for numbers over M, so modern Arabic numerals took over where the Romans left off. Their use tends to feel very literate as we see the preambles, forwards and dedications of books carrying these form of numbers. Outlining, especially in the legal citations are commonly devolved into lower-case Roman Numerals. It makes it all feel high falutin and pompous, almost regal. That would be logical as most monarchs and Popes use Roman Numerals to designate their lineage. Everyday folks even use it if they get to at least three generations. We used to have a bank chairman with a suffix of III, and we used to call him “three-sticks” for fun. I’m not much for inherited privilege and wealth (probably because I got none of either), so I would never inflict a Junior on my son, just so he could breed a III.

The most notable place for Roman Numerals in modern life is that they are used for the Super Bowl and the Olympiad designations. There is something rational and appropriate about The Games of the XXXII Olympiad. There may be something a tad pretentious about guys crushing Budweiser cans on their foreheads wearing knit caps emblazoned with Super Bowl LIV. I’ll bet some of those guys think the title references the fact that they are sitting in their seats at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami (average seat price $27,000 … no kidding) and watching the event live.

As you can probably tell from my tongue-in-cheek tone, I’m not much for football. Like all boys growing up in America in the sixties (I was there in between Latin America and Europe for formative years 1961 – 1968), I played my share of sandlot football once the sandlot baseball season ended. It was fun to run around and tackle one another, as boys like to do. I even had the pleasure of learning to placekick in the street mistakenly wearing leather-soled shoes, only to do a Charlie Brown Lucyesque kick that landed me flat on my back experiencing what knocking the wind out of my lungs felt like. In 1967 when I went off to Hebron Academy for a year of Dead Poets Society prep school, I joined the junior varsity football team and got a taste of real football. Between the wind-sprints, dummy sled blocking, crab-crawling and real shoulder-in-the-stomach tackling, I was more overwhelmed by the sport than anything else more glamorous-sounding. I think I got about thirty seconds of game time as an offensive lineman, more as a show of size than gritty and mean strength. I was more Ferdinand the Bull than anything else more menacing.

When I started at Cornell in 1971 there was an orientation gathering in the massive Barton Hall indoor gym and track where we were meant to choose our physical education options for the fall. Cornell not only had a four semester physical education requirement, but they also had a mandatory swim test. No Cornell student could graduate without an ability to swim. Some future story will be dedicated to the buck naked swim test experience, but for now let’s go back to Barton Hall. As I wandered around, I was stoped by two jock-looking adult men in Cornell Football polo shirts. At 6’5” tall and 310 pounds, it’s not hard to imagine why they chose to stop and chat with me in particular. They asked me if I had played football in high school, and I explained my freshman year flirtation, but explained that the last three years I had been a member of the Latin and Chess Clubs at Notre Dame International Prep School in Rome Italy. They visibly winced at the wasteful turns that life sometimes takes. They asked me to get down on all fours and crab-crawl left and right. I knew this one, so I did it. They were impressed. They then asked me to move laterally with cross-foot rapidity. I had played lots of tennis and was an avid skier, so my coordination, even for a big guy, was notably good.

These guys were assistant football coaches at an Ivy League University where there was no athlete without the scholarship balance, so their job was to find scholars that might possibly be turned into athletes that could compete. The crew team and squash team filled up quickly, but the football team was always in need of added bulk for cannon fodder. I guess I looked like I might fit into one of their cannons. They made me an offer. Join the freshman football squad and dedicate my next year and summer to working out with them, getting into top condition, learning the game, and then becoming a starter on the varsity in my sophomore year. 1971 was the last year of Ed Marinaro’s famous collegiate career at Cornell as a Sports Illustrated cover-boy fullback who was rushing for a 2,000 yard record-breaking career. He was a Heisman Trophy candidate (damn that SI cover jinx!).

I have often wondered how my life might have changed if I had taken those coaches up on their offer. I’m sure I would have become more fit and might have lived a healthier life. Maybe I would have gone with Bob Lally, the award-winning Cornell linebacker who went on to play in the NFL. Maybe I would have ripped a tendon or gotten a concussion and be working hard to not drool while I scooter around the mall as a mall cop. One thing for certain, I would understand the sport of football batter than I do, which is not at all.

On major holidays I always annoy my nephews, the Jabrones I have mentioned before, by not wanting to watch the big games. The Jabrones both played football in high school before graduating to rugby in college. Now they avidly ride the bench in front of the TV every Sunday. I occasionally accede to having a game on just to watch them crush a beer can on their forehead. I think I caught them asking each other what those letter were after the Super Bowl name. That’s when I tell them, “you know, I used to play football…”