I know a lot of people get their love of football from their dad or maybe an uncle, but I got mine from my older brothers. My dad was never into sports, as a matter of fact he was rarely home when I was growing up. He was an over the road truck driver with an 8th grade education. He also had 13 children to feed and cloth, so sitting idle was not an option for him. I believe I remember seeing him maybe 5-6 times in my first 8 years of being alive. He would stop in whenever his truck broke down or needed an oil change. Otherwise, he was on the road making money to support the family. My older siblings were kind of into football, but it wasn’t something we sat down on Sundays after church and watched. The only “sports” we watched with any kind of consistency was professional wrestling. Every Wednesday night, if I remember correctly, we would watch the wrestlers of AWA wrestling. The likes of Mr. Wrestling, Rick Flair, The Junkyard Dog, and of course my personal favorite Tommy “Wildfire” Rich. My mom would usually make chili, since it was fairly cheap and would feed a lot of people. Sometimes my sister, who worked at the Pizza Hut, would get some pizzas for cheap. Either way we were going to be watching wrestling for the night.
When I was 7 years old my parents moved from our house in town to my Grandparents farm. All we had was an antennae, so there was no more getting together and watching wrestling. All we got for channels was ABC and CBS, but on a good day if we rotated the antennae just right we could get NBC in just clear enough to make out what the show was, but that event happened very seldom. So our new tradition was to watch football on Sundays. My brothers would all come out to the farm and we would watch the noon game and then during the break between games, we would go out to the yard and play a game of two hand touch football. We had a side yard that was about 60 yards by 20 yards, with a bush on one end and an apple tree on the other end, that made up the end zones. the house set about center on the yard, so one side of the house was a 1st down and the other side was the other 1st down.
My first recollection of professional football, may seem odd to most people. As I had written in my previous post, I come from a large family, I am number 12 of 14 kids. So my oldest family members are quite a bit older than I am, for instance my oldest sister graduated the year I was born. My oldest brother (the Packers fan) was 16 years older than me. I don’t remember how old I was when this event happened, I am guessing somewhere between 5-7 years old because we still lived in town, but my oldest brother took me with him to go watch football at his friends’ house. They had their chairs all set up around the TV creating a horseshoe. I remember they were all drinking Budweiser and smoking Marlboro Reds, I remember because I was walking around behind their chairs and drinking their Budweiser and smoking their Marlboro Reds, as well. I don’t know if they knew I was doing it or if they thought it was cute or funny to see a little kid partaking in such things. I must have had a little too much to drink, because I don’t recall the rest of the day, after football was over. I never asked my brother about it, so I guess I will never know if he got in trouble or if my mom just assumed I had a big day and was just tired.
Good memories. I remember playing football (by myself) on the lawn, too, and using a tree and the end of the garden fence as the first downs.
It was actually quite fun. I would throw passes to myself and then sprint like heck to try to catch them. The best catches were the ones that required diving!