Another sad, sad tale
By Dave
April 26th, 2008 | Leave a comment
So, yeah, we didn’t win everything, but who cares??
With your host, Dave Wilson
Do I love football!
Twentysome years ago I wrote a column for my college paper theLantern (it didn’t actually run cuz of an editorial mix-up) about my love of football, and the unrivaled rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan (Florida/Florida State/Miami? Please! Auburn-Alabama? Pffft! Pittsburgh-Cleveland? Get Cleveland competitive first!) No. It’s Ohio State-Michigan. With few exceptions, top-10 perennials over the decades, vying for Big Ten supremacy, lately almost always deciding the BCS representative for the Big Ten and often enough the national champeenship.
I am posting this on the Eve of the Big Game (Editor’s note: originally posted in November of ’07). This year’s match is a bit of a let-down because both teams lost last week — it was more fun last year when the No. 1 ranking was on the line.
But I digress.
I wasn’t a natural-born football star. Or even much of an athlete. Fact is, the first year I played I was afraid to hit. But by the time I hung up my cleats in my senior year of high school, there was nothing more fun, more satisfying, more exhilarating than plowing into an opposing player and knocking him flat on his backside.
At Ohio State in the mid-’90s they described the ultimate block by Orlando Pace as a Pancake. They even conjured refrigerator magnets for the Orlando Pace Pancake as part of a Heisman Trophy candidacy campaign. I can only remember a pancake or two of my own. In fact, curiously, I had a harder time against guys my own size, fellow mudders, than against the big hogs. Just get low and root out the tubbies, that was my approach. But when low-lying mudder hits low-lying mudder, it was, well, a mudfest. We’d grind it out, pounding the pus out of each other, not giving any ground. In the ideal offensive situation, pushing the offensive line blew defenders back a yard or two. That’s called offensive surge. I didn’t have that in those games.
What I had was quickness, the ability to get in the defenders’s legs and keep him from getting at our running back as he cut off my block.
Our back had near-blinding (4.4 in a 40?) speed and good cuts, so if he had a decent block he could go to the house in a heartbeat.
My favorite recollection of that is in our first state playoff game, Tim Brady (the speedy back I’d referred to earlier) had a breakaway play and an opposing player hanging on his ankle; he looked back and was about to lateral to me (he later said he really was about to, with my hands of stone!) when the tackler lost his grip and Tim just bolted for the end zone. Glorious.
Touchdown. Watterson Eagles win. All is well!
In the pregame warmups, I overheard one of the other team’s parents quip, “What, did they dress the freshmen?” Yeah, we were pretty small (our nose guard, best man at my wedding, weighed about 135 pounds, swear to God – at 155, and I’ve “grown” by about 30 pounds since, I wasn’t a whole lot bigger), but we had gotten used to thumping teams way bigger than us. I think that’s part of what made that season so satisfying. Working hard, exceeding expectations.
Too bad we lost the next week in a muddy mess. But that’s football in November.
Back to Playing for Pizza
