Fantasy Football
by
Dick Prosapio © 2004
My dreams of playing college football ended one day
when I was involved in a touch-tag game during my Army stint. Up to
then I had played some high school ball as a center and line-backer
and considered myself a pretty good prospect to play at some small
college somewhere.
Some day.
The key phrase here is, ".....considered myself.."
no body else was considering at the time.
I was good at two things and prided myself on them,
as a center I could snap a ball back ten yards or so accurately and
quickly and, as a linebacker, I could rip through most defensive
lines. I was in my early twenties and full of myself too of course.
On this particular day I was playing with some
fairly good players from all over the country. No one in pads or
anything of course, just a touch football game, but I was putting
myself into it fully, getting into the offensive backfield through
any one-on or two-on defense they put up to stop my penetration. In
those days, the mid-fifties, a 165-170 pound defensive player was
not uncommon. The age of the behemoths had not dawned just yet.
There were occasional big guys to face to be sure, but these were
"legendary" players, scattered here and there among lines that
averaged less than two hundred. So, a regular sized guy could still
do the job.
I loved it.
I hadn't done anything spectacular sports-wise in
high school, but a group of us had played pick-up football on the
side and we had met some very good players. One of them went on to
play pro ball with the Bears. We knew he was way above us talent
wise at the time. No body could catch him once he got his hands on
the ball.
Damned if I can remember his name.
Any way, on this particular day I was having a good
time doing what I thought I did well and then on one particular play
I found that I had gotten into their backfield really easily. The
next thing I remembered was a hard, clean hit that knocked me
senseless.
I had been suckered......."trapped" is what they
call it in football talk. A charging lineman is let in only to be
slam-dunked by a waiting blocker.
In retrospect, I knew at a physical level that the
block that had taken me down was a very good one. It felt "right". A
football player can tell right away if a block is clean or not. A
bad block hurts in unexpected ways. You see what happens to a guy
when he is hit by a bad block. He usually stays on the ground for
awhile. Good, clean blocks are the ones you can get up from. They're
not "fun", but they don't disable you. And there is no animosity
given or received.
This was one of those blocks. Who ever had hit me
knew how to do it and do it well. I was down and I was
impressed.
It turned out that the guy who administered the
lesson was a former third string end for the University of Indiana,
a not so tall skinny guy who didn't seem to be that imposing at all.
But he sure knew how to block.
It was right then that my dreams of playing college
ball got put into perspective. If a seldom-played third string end
from the, then, worst college football team in the Big Ten was that
good, what would the really high caliber guys I'd be up
against be like?
I'd be lucky to make ball boy on the junior varsity.
From that day forward, college football became a
spectator sport for me and anything beyond that, pro ball dreams for
example, were really out there in fantasy land. This last reality
was brought fully home not long after my Army stint when I stood on
the sidelines of a game between the Chicago Bears and the Rams, who
were the LA Rams back then. As one of the Ram ends thundered by I
could have sworn that the ground shook under my feet. And he was one
of the lighter weights.
You and I know that I would never have gotten within
sniffing distance of a professional football locker room no matter
how motivated I might have been even before they let the giants out
of their cages so I was in no danger of making the pros.
So I long ago accepted my football spectator status
fully, feeling I went as far as I could possibly go on that
particular dream journey, the day I was awakened by a third string
end from Indiana U.
As for baseball...........well, that's another
story.
