Hail Mary

Maybe it is the first smell of a wood burning stove every year that always reminds me. That chokes me up a little and whips me back. There is no smell like it. Or maybe it is how swiftly the day deteriorates after four, and the sky gets dreary and gray and fades so rapidly that there is an anxious race to capitalize on the light of what is left of another summer gone too soon. Or maybe it is just the feel of the first crisp afternoon on that boring walk from the office to my car. That old familiar sting upon the skin of my cheeks. My watery eyes and nose. There is no feeling like the first day of fall. Whether the calendar says it is fall or not is of no matter. It’s fall when it feels like fall. When the cold says it’s fall.


It is unnatural not to play football. To be too old to gather up your friends and find a field somewhere, a churchyard, or a big enough backyard to play a game or two for the two hours and some minutes between the time you go home from school and the time your mom calls you in for supper. There were few requirements of a suitable field. It had to be close. It had to be at least 40 or 50 yards, and somewhat flat. Grass was nice, but we didn’t need it. We sometimes played on the cinders of the street, which was like turf to us and nice because we didn’t have to change our shoes, and because the streetlights gave us a little more light in the end. The sidewalks were out of bounds, and though it was two-hand tap in the street, it was tackle in the grass in that narrow strip between the street curb and the sidewalk.

It’s been unnatural for twenty-five years now. That’s about how long it has been since we played last. Me and friends I don’t see anymore. I don’t know where they have gone. I see their ghosts sometimes in my dreams. They whisk by me, just out of reach in slow but certain blurs, clutching a football and stiff-arming their way to some mysterious fate. I sometimes hear their voices when there are no other sounds. In the dead of night. In my car before I turn on the engine. I sometimes see them in daydreams, when I take my kids to the park and there is an open field where no one plays anything. All that good grass going to waste, I think. We played here a few times. I threw five touchdowns here once before they broke my clavicle. I can almost see myself out there in a hologram of sunlight through the same trees that watched us play once upon a time. Trees that had seen one of my biggest victories and possibly my worst defeat.

We were our own players. It didn’t matter if we had twelve other kids, eight, or four. Whoever we had was always enough. We could make it work, even when there was only two of us. There was always the kid who said he would come, but who never did. There was always the kid who had to go home earlier than the rest of us. There was always the kid who was losing and wanted to stay until he was winning. The kid who cried and quit. And there was always the kid who showed up in new blue jeans and his good school shoes. Who said his mom said he couldn’t get dirty. Who didn’t have any sweats or a leftover pair of cleats from pee-wee football, or little league baseball. The kid who didn’t have older brothers and who stunk and was no good, but who came anyway. The kid who showed up, reliable as an alarm clock. The last pick who couldn’t cover anyone and who gave up ten touchdowns a game. The kid who dropped every pass, but who seemed to always make that one big catch to win the game. The fat kid, the skinny kid. The kid who everyone took it easy on, but who always ended up getting dirty.

We were our own quarterback, our own pulling left tackle, our own running back, wide receiver, tight end, but we were never a kicker. No one ever kicked. There were no goal posts for field goals, and no one ever pussed-out and punted their chance at glory away. Even the kickoffs were thrown. They were hurled away from the speedy kick returner who predicted the pattern of the kickoff throw and ran to the other sideline as soon as it was tossed and gathered up the ball only to be smeared twenty yards later. His dreams of busting the big one, the vaunted hundred-yard kickoff return, dead with him and the grass stains on his “The Fox” JC Penney striped polo. Those things never ripped. But at some point, the stretched-out collar would invariably become a clever metaphor for someone’s mom’s vagina.

There were no penalties. No unnecessary roughness calls. It was war. We went for it on fourth down, hell or high water, no matter where we were on the field. It was two completions for a first down, approximately thirty foot paces measured out ten yards by scraps of torn shirts from last week that were crudely tossed down a lumpy imaginary sideline. There were no sticks to bring out to see if we made it. The measurement was to look around and see where the quarterback was eating grass from the flesh and bone avalanche of a blitz and to decide if where we were was a respectable distance from there. If it was about thirty paces or so.

We were our own owners, creating our own franchises, signing our own players all day during school. Our own agents offering bribes and contract negotiations that consisted of lunch money and expendable baseball cards. We were our own coach, writing plays on the backs of graded homework in Xs and Os with lines and arrows in pencil led and sometimes drawn in marker on the hand or forearm of the playmaker. The hook and ladder. The jet sweep. The go. The fly. The post. The statue of liberty. The flea flicker that never worked, but for that one time, long ago. Hand-offs that were blown up. All plays that were pointed out meticulously beforehand by the index finger of the quarterback in white ghostly trails impressed upon his blushing palm.

You can tell me to run a flag route today and I could do it with my eyes closed, if I can still run. I don’t know that I can. I haven’t run for a while. But I can undoubtedly negotiate a curb, instinctively, or a gopher hole like it is nothing. We were our own cheerleaders, our own fans, our own statisticians inflating our stats like our fathers inflated the sizes of their fish, or the beers they drank, or our older brothers inflated the quality and quantity of girls they screwed.


We were sportscasters, and every game was the Super Bowl, or Ohio State vs. Michigan. We were our own referees and every dispute was argued out or negotiated judiciously, somehow or another. And if things got heated and it couldn’t be agreed upon, there was the do-over. There was uncalled pass interference on every play, and the five thousand rush every down. One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand… counted as quickly as the sole eager linebacker could count as he teetered across that crooked invisible line of scrimmage out of breath and salivating over the quarterback who was surveying the field with bulging white eyes for an open man. 

We suffered injuries that we tried to hide before we went home. Bloody noses and teeth. Broken fingers. Bruised ribs. Sometimes we went home without shirts, which were used to stop the bleeding, and which would serve as next week’s yard markers, or Jim McMahon bandanas. We knocked heads, and heads bounced off knees and elbows, and surely, we all had several concussions. We all saw stars and lost our breath and forgot plays or entire games. We split our chins open, sprained ankles and wrists, tore muscles and broke bones. We hobbled home more worried about our clothes than our broken and bruised bodies. Hoping not to lose the tooth that was knocked loose. Hoping we wouldn’t have a black-eye, at least, not until tomorrow. We could always come up with a story later. A bike accident. It happened in gym class, I said more than once. We couldn’t ever risk being found out and subsequently retired by our overprotective mothers. Football was too damn important for that. Cuts and broken bones heal quick when you are a kid, but lost childhoods are never recovered.

We were our favorite players in our minds. We copied their moves and their attitudes. Louis Lipps. Bo Jackson. Jerry Rice. Marcus Allen. Walter Payton. Boomer. Bernie. Dan Marino. Howie Long. Mark Gastineau. Warren Moon. Mike Singletary. Barry Sanders. The kid with glasses was always Eric Dickerson. The fat kid was always The Fridge. The asshole masochist was always L.T. The Catholics always wanted to be Theismann, Montana, or Rocket Ismail. But no one was ever Elway because everyone thought Elway was a dick. Some of the older kids were Jack Hamm. Or Dick Butkus. Or Bradshaw. Or O.J. Or Jim Brown. Or Broadway Joe. Legends us younger kids only heard about.

We were all those players on those cardboard cards in the wax paper with the stick of stale gum. Those we saw on TV before sports became sports drama and bullshit. Ruined and exploited by ESPN and Colin Cowherd the way some of our games were ruined by someone’s nagging mom who came to bawl us out when her son got hurt and went home crying. The mom who said she would tell all our moms.


But we could be our heroes for a few hours after school and on weekends. They all made appearances now and then. Like they were conjured up by our enthusiasm, risen from their football graves to live gloriously again in the lumpy awkward bodies of excited kids racing to the field on their chrome bikes. Debating what football we would use, tossing the others to the side. Switching up at halftime, which only came when someone had to go home and we had to repick teams. We never had their jerseys and they never endorsed our generic shoes. But we were them, just as much as they were them. We were the incarnations of the football Gods. It was all so simple then. It all made sense to me the way nothing makes sense now.

Sometimes in our backyard, my brother and I painted the grass with leftover house paint. Hash marks and sidelines. A couple crooked goal-lines. College and NFL logos as best we could on the fifty-yard line and in the end zones. They looked damn good, though the only picture I have is that which I keep in my mind. Dad never missed the paint. I don’t know if he even noticed because he rarely went out into the backyard. I don’t know how we ever played in yards so small as in the subdivision where we lived, thinking back on it. In those dog shit yards. They were all separated by chain-link fences that were homerun fences in the summer. I don’t know how we ever organized such quick games that were done by dinner when you could hear any one of our moms call from three or four blocks away, “Adam, it’s time for dinner!” But it was one more play after that. Or next score wins if it was tied.

Some of our moms and dads have died, most of cancer. I have read obituaries in papers. They worked themselves to death for us while we were playing football at the park, or on the church hill. While we were throwing a last Hail Mary before dinner got cold and we got the belt. I imagine that some of us have died, as well. I don’t know who all played in those games across all those years. I don’t know what happened to them, or where they have gone, or how many kids they have had, or who they married. I don’t know if they think of our football games, or of us. When we played a quick game, with the little rubber football that was small enough to stash in a backpack, in the street the next morning at the bus stop before the bus turned the corner and honked for us to get the hell out of the street. I don’t know if fall brings that back to them the way it does for me. I hope that it does because I don’t want to feel alone the way I do looking at this empty field, or across chain-link fences.

I don’t know where all the kids have gone. I guess they aren’t like us anymore. They say times have changed and there are killers and pedophiles out there. But there have always been killers and pedophiles out there. Christ, we probably played a few games in King Curly’s backyard. He might have watched us from a window a time or two. There was no sex offender registry back then. People have always killed kids and there have always been lecherous strangers in the park giving candy out of the backs of blacked-out Econoline vans. But nothing could have happened to us when we were playing football with each other. Nothing bad ever happened. We were never safer.

Maybe someday we will run in to each other and have a beer. Or maybe they will smell a wood burning stove, or feel the sting of that first crisp fall afternoon as they walk from their office to their car and think about the time when we wore grass stains and bruises, and The Fox polos and generic shoes. When that last fateful Hail Mary pass was tossed up in the purpling sky whose color matched the bruises on our shins and elbows. When we lied and said our homework was done so we could play football with our friends. When our noses were crusted over with blood and our heads spun from having our bell rung. I don’t know that I will ever get to see any of them again, but I would like for them to know how important they were to me. And how I would give anything for another game with them. I don’t know why it matters, or if it even does. But God, I hope they had as much fun as me, and I hope they remember how good we were.