Football

   Ronnie W. Wolfe

    You know, I don’t like football.  First, I am not too fond of feet; I mean, who sits around thinking about feet? Someone did, because they thought about it so long and hard that they decided to start using a foot to kick things; thus, the invention of kicking.
    Then there is the ball. I like balls, those little (or big) round things that roll and sometimes bounce. One can throw a ball, catch a ball, use a ball for a pillow, exercise with a ball, rolling over it and falling off. One can decorate with balls to make pretty, colored decor for a birthday party or a stage play. I like balls.
    But this thing they call a football is not really a ball. It isn’t even a sphere. It’s just a thing that seems to have come from someone’s nightmare. I understand it is hard to throw (unless one goes to university to get a degree in that). It is also very hard to catch, they tell me. It is very interesting when someone twirls it around in a circle in a spinning direction and leaves it there to spin for a while–that I do like about a football.
    I am not sure who designed this “ball,” but it looks like someone put their hands into one of those hand warmers (you know, like the English use), then pulled their hands out and brought out the inside of the warmer in the shape of two points, then went home and designed a “ball” like that. How it ever caught on I can never tell.
    Then someone played with this football long enough that he made it a game. Now every game needs rules, I suppose; so some people got together and made rules. In order to make rules, they had to have players in the game to do different things in order to fit the rules; so they made a quarter this, a half that and a full something else, a tight this and a tail that, a line this, and a corner that. Well, that is just confusing. I don’t really know how long it took to make all of these rules, but I asked my son once to sit down with me to watch a game and tell me about all the maneuvers, the rules, and the scoring of this game. After an hour of watching kicking, scrambling, falling, butting, rolling, and getting hurt, I was tired of my son’s telling me that every move they made had a rule to it. It’s sort of like Ezekiah’s dry bones: this rule connected to that rule, which overrules another rule, that offsets another rule.
    By the time one team got from the center of this playground that was built just for this game to the end of the playground, the players were not the only ones who were exhausted. I was pretty much given out myself.
    You know, I cannot play football, and I am pretty much glad for that; because I don’t have to get together with a bunch of ruffians who are bent on killing one another, put on what is the equivalent of three snow suits, a helmet on my head, and a cage on my face and pretend that everything is normal and we are having fun. I could just as soon join the army, go to battle, and fight the enemy. At least I would be doing it for a just cause; but what is the just cause in football?
    My birthday is on Monday; and if you would like to really tee me off (I think that’s from golf) instead of wish me a happy birthday, just buy me a football. You may experience a defensive tackle and come to a defensive end.