Steven Kayfes
Writing 121
Ms. Gritter
February, 10, 2003

Football

Football has been life to me since I was born. It was considered a religion in my house. I grew up watching college football on Saturday and Pro football on Sunday. I can tell you about any aspect of the game. I have seen countless numbers of games; all seventeen of the Super Bowls that have been played since I was born, the seventeen national championships for college football and dozens of other various games of significant importance. I don’t believe that I would be able to completely understand what the word football meant without experiencing the game for myself. To understand the game you have to know what it feels like to be out on the field in the mix of this coordinated chaos that is referred to as football.

From the age of eight, every fall I would be strapped up in shoulder pads and a helmet ready for practice. For the first few years football is no more than a mass of bodies running into each other, the game doesn’t take shape until about the fourth and fifth grade. Here is where the first of the children will start to sprout. There are kids of all sizes on your team. Some are almost the size of your coach, while others have yet to get rid of a single ounce of baby fat. The kids who have started to develop are usually the stand out performers. This will usually last until about the eighth grade. In the eighth grade most kids have fully developed and guys that were small in third grade may now be the kids who are bigger than the coach.

For about your first five to six years you play football because it is fun. In about the eighth grade football becomes a full time job. You will spend all of August preparing yourself for the fall, the first week of August is always the worst. A whole five days dedicated to running until you puke under the blazing August sun. Then the daily doubles or as I have come to describe them the two weeks from hell. All of this discomfort turns for the better during the first week of September when you play your first game. The puking and weeks of hell will help you and your team win the game if you are lucky.

This work continues into high school. This is when it gets real. This is where winning matters and hard work really pays off. In Pop Warner (third through eighth grade football) you may have been able to get away with slacking off during hell week or missing puke week for a family vacation. But in high school this means loss of playing time. In high school you spend your whole summer in the weight room and running on the practice field. Now your whole summer has turned into puke week. After a full summer of workouts you get the pleasure of going through two weeks of pukes and two weeks of hell. The payoff if you have worked hard enough is; you will get to start. This means that you get play in front of the big crowd where every game is the big game. Putting in your time and having it payoff by earning your starting spot is what high school is all about. In high school time is what it all boils down to. For the lucky few who play college football, I have great jealousy towards them. They don’t get to have the feelings the rest of the kids (about ninety seven percent roughly) get to feel, after the last game it’s all over.

The final time you strap up your helmet it hurts. Every moment of that game hurts. The game you have put your life into is coming to an end right before your eyes. There is nothing you can do but put your heart into it. Your coach says that if you haven’t put your heart into every game this season then you are wrong. But inside your heart you know he is wrong. Because no matter how hard you played in your other games, nothing can prepare you for your last. If ten years of work hasn’t prepared you then nothing anybody can say will make you understand the aching feeling in your gut that have when you walk off that field for the last time.

You will walk off the field under the goal posts and up into the mud room. On your way one of your coaches will come up to and say “Thank you Steven, I know you put heart into it.” He’ll pat you on your back and you will continue up to the mud room. You will sit in the mud room and watch your team walk in and take off their cleats. You won’t want to but eventually after everyone has left you will take yours off and then your helmet and finally for the last time you will take your helmet off and take one long look at the S on the side of it. Then you will be done.

The only way to understand this game is to play it. Nothing can prepare you for those Friday nights under the lights. All I know is that to understand this game you better be willing to puke, bleed, sweat and cry because this is the only way to understand what it means to put that purple jersey.