At 9 years old, (American) football was everything to everyone around me. Our move to Texas would only support the ether of the sport. I was a small kid afflicted with the aggression of a mammoth superstar. It didn’t take me long to find some neighborhood pick up games.
One game we played was on the front lawn of the local elementary school. I remember this one game, vividly, because my dad told me a story about the famous Chicago Bears running back, Gale Sayers, who had scored six touchdowns in a single game. The game was played on December 12, 1965, less than 4 months after I had been born. He went on to tell me he was there, at the game, at Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play now; and he witnessed it in real life. “Every time Sayers touched the ball, he scored,” my dad proclaimed.
Schools in Dallas were built on enormous, flat prairies, 1/2 mile square in size, maybe a square mile, I honestly don’t know. DeGolyer Elementary School was no different. We usually played along the short side of the school but since there were twenty of us, we had to open up the size of the field, so we played on the front lawn of the school. It was going to be like a full size football game. The field was bordered by the sidewalk on one side and the flat evergreen bushes in front of the building on the other. Not a tree in sight. The field was true to size — 50 x 100 yards.
Soccer (fulbol, everywhere else in the world) was huge in Texas. Some of the kids were serious about their agility skills so a lot of the kids had their soccer cleats with them. I brought mine too but I was getting frustrated because the cleats would slip whenever I made a dodging cut on the hard dirt under the grass. My body would hit the ground hard, as I trusted my cleats would grip the grass on top.
It was Texas. The grass was fried to dust.
As I pulled my cleats from my gym bag, the fantastic story my dad told me was buzzing through my mind. I remembered a detail that would forever alter the history of American neighborhood football. Gale Sayers changed his shoes from flat shoes into long cleats, because the grass had turned to mud in Wrigley Field during that record breaking game. The flat sneakers he had on were ideal for a flat frozen field. The cleats he changed into held him firmly into the mud as he was able to cut laterally, while the defenders slid off of their feet. My situation was the polar opposite. I decided to leave my cleats in the bag.
Before the game started, some of the kids became aware of the slippery ground. They were taking turns to see how far they could slide. It reminded me of Chicago, where the side streets would glaze over, frozen, in sub-zero temperatures. We’d take a running start, bending our knees as we tried to gain traction against the frictionless surface, and let the ice carry us down the street.
But, this was burnt out brown grass. I gave it a try with my flat shoes, but my flat rubber soles instantly tripped me up. As I stumbled, I had a vision of how this game was gonna go. One of the kids actually referred to my flat bottomed Adidas running shoes, “Aren’t you going to put your cleats on?”
“Nope, I’m good,” I said, trying to keep it a secret.
We took our positions on the huge field. I took my spot as the kickoff receiver and I sized up our opponents. Rather than look at how huge they were, I looked at what kind of shoes they were wearing. The most athletic kids on the field were all wearing their cleats. The excitement was stirring inside my belly. This was going to be a fun experiment.
The kickoff came straight to me. Seconds later, I stood in the opposite end zone. Touchdown. It was a dream. No one touched me on my way to scoring. “Well, that’s one,” I thought. “Five to go,” as the idea of breaking Sayers record invaded my thoughts.
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As I remember it now, through the filtered fog of 45 years of concussions, alcohol, and other occasional embellishments, no one touched me that entire day. When I went to make a cut, I stuck to the earth. They didn’t. Like Wile E. Coyote, they flew off the edge of the cliff as, I, the Road Runner, watched them fly by.
“Meep meep.”
My sixth TD was another kickoff return. It was too simple. I had worn the opponents out. I caught the kickoff and ran full speed at an angle across towards one sideline, cut and ran across to the opposite sideline into the end zone. The players on both teams were completely exhausted as their legs became rubberized in the Texas heat. They gave up. I walked into the end zone with no one anywhere close to me, not even a fellow team mate.
Six!
It was a huge moment in the history of football! I tied Gale Sayers’ rookie record of six touchdowns in one game! I did it by the age of ten. I looked back toward my friends, who were gathering in the shade of the school, and informed them of my accomplishment.
“Who?” They asked as they winced in contempt.
“Gale Sayers!” I bragged. “The greatest running back of all time.”
My friends didn’t care. They were exhausted and completely oblivious to the infamous story I had heard a hundred times in my 9 short years of life. They didn’t care much about the Chicago Bears. In fact, they didn’t care much about any football team unless they were the Dallas Cowboys.
“At least Dad will understand,” I thought, as I ran home to share my incredible feat.
“Dad! You won’t believe what I did!” as I woke him from his Sunday slumber in front of the TV. “I tied Gale Sayers record.”
He mumbled a distant ‘good-for-you’ as he rolled over and fell back to sleep. It was good enough for me. My accomplishment has been recorded in the history books. It has been acknowledged.
Ultimately, it was my only truly great football moment. In the autumn of the same year, I decided to take my world class skills into organized football. Playing for the local 5th grade YMCA Cardinals, I was called on to return a punt. I caught it and looked down field for my pathway into the end zone. Instead, I saw two peers in the shape of freight trains angling on me as if they had been taught how to properly converge upon a ball carrier. I didn’t have time for a juke so I tried to run straight between them. The point of vortex became my head. The collision was nothing less than soul crushing.
My helmet had spun 90 degrees across my face, and because it was cold that day, my face felt like it had been scraped off of my skull. I had no interest in returning to the game. Ever.
I hung up my shoes until my senior year in high school, when I decided I should give it one more try. My stats for my single year high school career:2 carries, 0 yards, 1 fumble (lost), and 1 tackle along with a concussion.
