Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [93]
One of the saddest days of my life was the day I realized I’d played my last game of football. It was as final as death. As a young boy, I’d played in vacant lots—back in the days when there were vacant lots— every Saturday during the fall. By the time I got to high school, I knew I loved the game better than any other.
I played all through high school and in college and then, one day, it was over. It was like the day my dog died.
It probably wouldn’t occur to anyone who never played that even second stringers love the game. You don’t have to be a star to enjoy playing football. You hear parents advise their children to learn to play a safer sport, a sport like golf or tennis that they can enjoy all their lives. I understand that argument but, as bad as I felt on that last day, I wouldn’t trade my football days for golf if I could have started playing when I was eight and grown up to be Arnold Palmer.
People who have played football at any level watch a game with a different eye than someone who has never played. For one thing, they tend to watch the man playing the position they played. If you played center, you watch the center a lot. If you played end, you watch the ends.
I hear people say they can see the game better at home on television than they can see it sitting in the stadium. No one who knows much football thinks it’s as good to watch at home as it is at the stadium. Watching at home is better than not watching football at all, but it isn’t the same as being there.
The biggest difference in being there is that, good as the pictures, commentary, and replays are on television, the person at home is watching a small part of the total game that someone else has chosen to show him. What you watch is not your choice. At the stadium, the fans can watch what they want to watch anywhere on the field. I concede that if a person is not a knowledgeable football fan, he or she might get more out of watching it on television.
I often miss completely something that has happened to the ball carrier, because I’m watching what the guard is doing to the nose tackle or vice versa.
Every team played a seven-man defensive line when I played, with only one linebacker—always the toughest kid on the block. We all played both ways, of course, offense and defense. If they hadn’t changed the rules, Joe Montana might have had to play free safety on defense. I don’t know how that would have worked out for Joe, but I think New Orleans fullback Ironhead Heyward could hold his own as a middle linebacker on defense.
The great Frank Gifford, the most graceful football player I ever watched, was one of the last to play both offense and defense for the Giants.
Even relatively new football fans have seen a lot of rule changes. One of my prized possessions is a Spalding Official Football Guide that belonged to my uncle, who played for Williams College in 1900.
In those days they had to make only five yards for a first down (in three downs), and the literary style of the old rule book should embarrass the current rules committee.
“The game progresses,” the rule book reads, “in a series of downs, the only limitation being a rule designed to prevent one side from continually keeping possession of the ball without any material advance, which would be manifestly unfair to the opponents.
“In three attempts to advance the ball, a side not having made five yards toward the opponent’s goal must surrender possession of the ball.
“It is seldom that a team actually surrenders the ball in this way,” the rule book continues in its elegant prose, “because, after two attempts, if the prospects of completing the five-yard gain appear small, it is so clearly politic to kick the ball as far as possible that such a method is more apt to be adopted.”
Eat your heart out,