Pole Tim: You're highest level of football played

1to392831weretaken said:

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GrundleStiltzkin said:

Real talk, I really love all the stories. More please.

My dad was a high school quarterback and had a really good arm. Was also one of these asshole dads--in a good way in this case--who would laser footballs with all his strength at his 7 year old son. When I was in elementary school, I was a schoolyard legend. Faster than anybody else by a good ways and could catch anything because of my dads' abuse. It was a total Sandlot story: Every lunch recess, the rich kids on the actual peewee football team would play me and my unathletic ragtag group of friends in a game of touch (when the duties weren't looking). We would absolutely destroy them every day.

Thought I was hot shit, so I got signed up for REAL football when I was 10. At equipment handout, I was near the back of the line, being a new player. They handed me this helmet that was like a novelty thing you'd wear to a game if you're a 12: rubber disc floating below the shell, suspended by little ropes. About as protective as fuckall. I know @RaceBannon and @PurpleThrobber wore leather helmets with no facemasks and probably think I'm a pussy for this, but nothing about that helmet gave me confidence to be anywhere near a collision. I spent that year absolutely terrified, getting constantly blown up, and getting a mild concussion every time a strong wind hit me in the head. I learned that real football is very different than schoolyard football, and there was this thing called "hitting" I'd have to learn to deal with.

Or quit. So I did. At which point my dad said, "Over my dead body is my son going to be a pussy quitter." So I went at it again the following year.

Very early on that second year--now sporting a helmet that featured actual protection--I accidentally made a discovery early on: Peewee football is a game of chicken. Size is almost meaningless, and you can dominate by just being the kid that doesn't flinch. 99% of collisions in peewee football, one of the kids flinches first. If that's the bigger kid, he's about to get knocked on his ass my my tiny self. And so it came to pass: another try-hard was born. For the next seven years, I was always one of the two or three smallest kids on my team, yet positions I started at included nosetackle, OG, DE.

Freshman year, kids still hadn't figured it out. I was 5'3", 120 lbs., and stupid kids on the freshman team still feared me in hitting drills because they didn't understand physics. Except every once in a while, when a kid--usually on the other team--didn't flinch. Freshman year was the beginning of physics getting involved. The Jake Browning helicopter shot? That was me once or twice. I actually played quarterback because we didn't have anyone on the team who could throw. So we just ran triple option, and I was never asked to throw the ball more than 10 yards downfield (extent of my range). I couldn't wrap my hand around the ball, so I'd drop back to pass with the ball just up on my hand like a shot put. Pathetic. Anyway, a 120 pound try-hard QB can be helicoptered quite easily when pitching at the last second, so it was kind of a thing. Fun film reviews...

Getting back to the point, every time I got completely destroyed in my entire football "career," it was from going full-try-hard and launching right into somebody twice my size on purpose just to make a point or something. We had a receiver who later played at Eastern. We collided at full speed in practice just for fun on a broken play. He laughed, I walked a 10-yard radius picking up every piece of my helmet. In a game my junior year, I had to miss several plays while my facemask was reattached to the helmet shell, as half of the plastic clamps ripped right off. When I was 13 and Amon Gordon was 11 and playing on my team because he was so huge, I decided to give him all I had in practice and picked myself up in the next town over.

When you walk your dog, you're invariably going to come across somebody walking a little terrier or something, and that terrier will inevitably think it's the biggest badass on the whole trail and puff up and attack your dog 10 times its size while you laugh at it in pity. That terrier was sooooo me.

/csb?