Football and My Crisis of Faith.

[Rain Man]

Okay, here's my essay.

The rules of the contest are apparently not available online any more, but in essence the mission was to write about why you love football, and what it means to you. It was a 1,000 word limit (or you could submit a video), and they basically said something like, "We're looking for essays that present a story that we can tell in a three-minute video" or something like that.

I envisioned it as them reading the essay and producing a video supporting it, and apparently their vision was that they wanted a video that featured the author. So I understand not winning and frankly am glad that I didn't, because I really wouldn't want to be featured in a video. My goal was to write an essay that would describe the typical arc of football in a human life, using myself as an example. But anyway, here's my essay just for grins.

In a quiet corner of my house, displayed on a high shelf, is a football.

It probably doesn’t have much monetary value, though it may be an antique now. It’s a beautiful aged leather, circumscribed by the white stripes of its era, and it’s inscribed with the machine-etched autograph of Gale Sayers. The laces are chewed up by past dogs who tackled it, and it won’t hold air any more, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s the only item from my childhood that I keep on display.

My uncle gave me the football in the Christmas of 1971, when I was eight years old. I was already an avid football fan, and I did all the normal football things that a kid did. I collected football cards, memorized stats, and was a sixty-minute man on the playground. I lived and died by the fortunes of my beloved Kansas City Chiefs. But I did not own an actual football, and I guess he recognized the gap that winter. He gave me his.

It would be nice to say that this gift unlocked an athletic greatness in me, that I found fame or fortune from its roots. It would be a wonderful story to say that it helped me get a college scholarship or date the homecoming queen, or perhaps that I caught the winning touchdown in some game that really, really mattered. Football has certainly been that story for many people.

But in my case, none of that is true. The reality is that I was a skinny kid with glasses, and athletic greatness was never in the cards for me. My greatest football feats, my touchdowns and interceptions and booming punts, came on vacant lots or playgrounds against other skinny kids with glasses. My field goals were scored over a clothesline. No fan ever saw my glories and no scoreboard ever recorded them.

But as important as they were at the time, in the end it wasn’t the touchdowns or the interceptions or the booming punts that really mattered.

You see, my uncle didn’t do this gift halfway. It was a high-quality football that he gave me, not some cheap toy. It had an ideal friction in the leather grain, and it was perfectly formed to produce spirals, even from small hands. If you played football, you loved this ball, and that was the key.

We moved a lot, so I was always the new kid. I went to eight different schools in twelve years. I was always starting over, regularly touching down in a place I’d never been before. But two facts held true no matter where I landed. Everybody played football, and I owned the best football in the neighborhood.

I learned that the best way to start anew was to show up with the football, whether it was at recess or at the park or in some field, and ask to play. I’d find the kid who looked like the leader and toss him the football. He’d look at it, grip it, and say, “Yeah, you can play.” And then he’d tell the other kids, “Let’s use this ball.” It worked when I was eight, and it worked when I was 18, and it even worked at my first company picnic after college.

At that point, the hard part was done. After that, whenever the neighborhood guys played football, my football was unequivocally the ball of choice. And if they wanted to use my football, I came with the deal. An interception here, a punt return there, and pretty soon they forgot I was the new kid. A good football and hustle would earn my way into any group. Football was my passport.

The football itself had an active career of about 20 years, and in that time I suspect that five hundred different people threw it, caught it, carried it, or hit someone who did. Nearly every best friend I’ve ever had has thrown that football to me at some point, along with a lot of people I met once and probably a few people I couldn’t stand, though I tend to forget about those. The friends were the important part, and that football helped them recognize that skinny new kids with glasses could have something to offer. I would be a different person today without that football, and I would be a different person without those games in vacant lots.

The last time I threw or caught the ball in a game was when I was 30 years old. After that, it became harder to get a group together, and the ball started losing air, and eventually it found its way onto the shelf. Neither of us has seen action on the field in twenty years, and we probably never will again. So why is the ball there, still within easy reach? Maybe it’s because it makes me smile whenever I see it, that it takes me back to a golden time of my life where I could run from sunup to sundown and bounce up from a blindside hit. Or maybe I’m secretly hoping for one more game.

I’m fifty years old now. I have no children, and my life has taken me far from those who know my history. Some day I’ll die and someone will clean out my basement and they’ll either throw the football away or they’ll sell it for a few bucks. No one will know its power, or how it helped to mold my life.

Like me, this football will never be famous. It will never be in a museum, or have its story told other than this simple essay. Like me, it will someday be gone and forgotten. But I hope and believe that somewhere on that same day, some other kid will be given a high-quality football that offers a perfect spiral, and the story will start again. It’s not really about the ball.