Sunshine, warm weather, green grass, late sunsets, the sound of the ice cream truck playing Turkey in the Straw as is wends its way through the neighborhood…ah, July.
The sounds, the smells, they all remind me that this is the best time of the year…because there’s less than a month till the Bears report to camp!
Each year after the Superbowl, I heave a heavy sigh and hope that my Spartans, Bulls, and Blackhawks have decent seasons, ‘cuz if they don’t, it’s a long haul to the next kickoff. The annual hysteria that accompanies the Cubs and White Sox home openers in April is fun to watch, for anthropological reasons, but after that, it’s just baseball. Often bad baseball. Y’all can have your baseball. National pastime, my Aunt Fanny!
If you’re a real American, there’s only one national pastime and that’s football. Real football, not what the rest of the world calls football and we call soccer (I call it kickball). Nope, for me and millions of other right thinking fellow citizens, there’s no better sport. What other sport can boast of 22 guys on the field at once, and every single one of ’em is gonna hit somebody on every single play? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy basketball, hockey, rugby, Australian Rules Football (which is insane), hell, I’ll even watch cricket before I sit to watch a baseball game all the way through.
“Oh, but there’s so much elegance and strategy in baseball.”
Uh huh.
There’s elegance and strategy in football in spades. In baseball, you essentially have two guys who are key to the action, the pitcher and the batter. The rest may or may not have to move on any given play, except maybe to shoo a fly or watch the drunken girl in the outfield bleachers. C’mon, any sport where you can play two games more or less back to back isn’t a sport, it’s checkers. Professional baseball players get tired, injured, and worn down, but not from the game; it’s because they play 163 damn games! And that’s just the regular season! All the airport TSA searches alone are probably more grueling than the games.
No, for my money, give me football. 11 on 11, with every man carrying out his specific assignment. Move and counter-move, swiftness and precision. All carried out by finely tuned, physically gifted men working together, sweating, bleeding, enduring pain, bonded into a team. Man, there ain’t anything like it!
Ok, maybe I’m a bit biased. I played football when I was young, and the lessons I learned, the friends I made, make the memories precious to me. Hopefully, we won’t so lose our minds as a society that we ban the sport because of it’s perceived brutality. I hear earnest discussions of abolishing football for kids younger than college age. That would be a colossal mistake in my opinion. Some schools won’t even let the kids play tag for fear they’ll get hurt! Wrapping kids in bubble wrap won’t keep them from getting hurt, it will only stunt their physical and emotional growth.
When I first started playing football as a lad, my father gave me a piece of advice: Bumps and bruises are inevitable, don’t fear them, just play. It’s when you try to protect yourself that you really get hurt. He was right. And guess what? That’s a pretty solid piece of advice for living life. You can’t hide from it. If you try, you get paranoid, depressed, lonely, stunted, and miserable. The bumps and bruises are opportunities to grow. You win some games and some you lose. When the season’s over, you heal up and begin training for the next one, ‘cuz camp will be here before you know it!
[By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I never played organized baseball as a kid. The thought of some guy throwing a 70 mph fastball at my head terrified me. Sheesh. Are you kidding?]
