Whoever Said “No Pain, No Gain” Should Be Killed

I have never been one for frivolous sequels or uncalled for cash-ins, but the topic of how soul crushingly terrible I was at sports in my childhood never seems to get old. One would think that after repeatedly failing at a fairly lax sport like baseball would teach me to pack away my cleats and stick to the warm glow of the television and the safety of a firm Nintendo controller. After all it’s hard to have a career ending injury while playing NFL Blitz, except when the person you’re playing with relentlessly goes off sides and suplexes your quarterback every. play.

But something inside of me never let go of playing sports. It may be that the spirit of competition was sewn into my very genes. My father both wrestled and played football in his youth, my uncle played football and even went semi-pro, my grandfather coached football, baseball, and basketball; even my cake-baking grandmother was captain of the basketball team. Nevertheless, failing at playing soccer (crushed between a crowd of hyperactive six-year-olds), basketball (I made a basket once, during practice), and baseball (a well-documented incident involving a lot of blood and temporarily blinding a parent) left me with only one sport that I had yet to try: football.

Now, I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to try my hand at a sport that actually required me to dress in full body armor, but considering my large stature compared to the other eleven-year-olds at the time I figured I was made for the sport. After all, all I had to do was knock the smaller kids over, right? How much skill and coordination could that require?

One qualification that little league football had over other sports I had played in the past was a weight limit, because God forbid the fat kids get to play the sport practically designed for them. So taking into account that I was shaped like a Thanksgiving turkey I was made ineligible to play with my age group. But feeling sorry for me, the local sports organization gave me the “opportunity” to go into the next age group--which meant that if I wanted to play, I had to play with the twelve to thirteen-year-olds. Now age is a funny thing. Looking back, the difference between a 10 and an 11 year old is pretty negligible; but through the eyes of a ten-year-old, an eleven year old is like a mountainous God. They were in middle school; they had a facial hair; they were not quite pre-pubescent; and most importantly, they could kick the shit out of a fifth grader without batting an eye. So let’s see what happened when I played hyper-aggressive contact sports with them, shall we?

The first time I ever put on football pads I came up against a person who was about my size, so he too was playing along side the twelve-year-old demigods. Feeling confident at going up against someone my own age, I lined up to him not knowing what was to come in this boy’s future. If only I had known that this boy would go on to dominate the varsity football team, eventually going on to play college ball where he was an All-American linebacker for two years in a row. This person was the first person who ever hit me in football. After regaining consciousness, I found an oxygen mask strapped to my face and the blurred image of my coach with two fingers in front of my eyes barking at me to tell him how many that he was holding up.

Being the grandson of a successful high school football coach, I still felt confident in what I was doing—even though, in retrospect, I had absolutely no idea how the to play the game. The various rules and complex plays were completely lost on me, and as it turns out there is more to the sport than Super Tecmo Bowl put on, and apparently just doing 87 yard Hail Mary passes every play, in reality, never, ever works.

When confronted with actual football plays, I was aghast when I realized it required route memorization, organized blocking, pulling, opening up holes, double teaming—what the fuck was this? . I just thought I just had to go out there, knock some kids around, leave the strategy up the quarterback and call it a day. I had no idea what was going on. After the center snapped the ball, I would always try to follow the play the best I could, but by the time, it was over, I found that the quarterback had been killed and that I had blocked my own teammate.

I actually didn’t learn what clipping was until an official called back a forty-five yard interception return because I decided to start arbitrarily knocking people over for the hell of it. I mean, why not? It was football. They were standing there, so I knocked them over. Pussies!

Seeing that I was a strategic black hole my coaches put me on defense, probably hoping that the less complex philosophy of “less talkin’, more hittin’” of the defensive line would be a better suited position for me.

Playing on the defensive line introduced me to new levels of pain. What I thought would be an opportunity to crash down on good-looking quarterbacks or break the spine of puny running backs. I quickly discovered that defense really meant repeatedly crashing into an impenetrable wall of flesh only to be bowled over by a full back three times my size as he careened down the field like an unstoppable freight train. Who would have thought that good-looking quarterback would be protected by an impenetrable wall of flesh, and that my crushing that puny running back may actually involve catching him? Little bastard ran like a cheetah covered in chicken grease.

As the season progressed, my coaches came to their senses and simply decided never to let me play. Ever. Every game I would come in my pristine jersey, and my team mates went on to actually enjoy themselves, I just watched from the sidelines and pretended to be a part of the whole process of actually playing. Really, my amount of playtime was probably limited to maybe four plays in the entire season. The coaches would feel sorry for me, put me in, then I would pull the wrong way and run into another team member, then they would promptly put me back on the bench. At least they gave me a chance. I guess.

The end came during practice. The only time I really got to participate was during practice. The team mostly just used me as a living, breathing blocking dummy that just also happens to be able to experience pain. Intense, unforgiving pain. We were practicing a fundamental running play where I was supposed to open a hole in the center of the line. When the play started, the defender pulled right and with all of my momentum counting on him to stop me I slipped and fell face first. As I rolled over to get up, my own running back came charging through the hole and rather than being the sensible freight train and hop over me, he opted for the obvious option and simply dug his cleats into my unpadded mid-section.

After the play, the team collectively groaned as I gasped for air as I grasped my stomach as if I had to shove my intestines back into my body. I laid in the cold dirt as my coach hovered over me, asking if I could still practice, and looking up into the cold, grey November sky I replied that I couldn’t. After that, I took off my shoulder pads and sat on the wet grass until practice was over. I never went back after that.

For a while, I felt like I had let my entire sports loving family down. In a matter of ten years, I managed to fail at every sport possible, and after my failure at football, I never played organized sports again. I didn’t even have a good career ending injury. Maybe if that happened I would have just been looked at like a paradigm of lost potential—I could have gone out like Joe Theisman, except hopefully without the whole worst televised sports injury in history part.

As I got older, I started to be thankful that I had given up football, as I suspect the kids that the coaches were filling my former teammates with human growth hormones. While I grew to a reasonable height for my weight, they grew to be the type of people who were six foot seven and would eat nine sandwiches for lunch. Also, something about forcing a fourteen-year-old into a regimented weight lifted program seems deeply demented looking back on it. So as my peers formed into a High School version of the 2007 New England Patriots (18 and awwwww), I was happy to eat hot dogs in the parking lot and watch the game from the stands. I still got to enjoy the game but there was the added benefit of not having to worry about being killed by a person with a rare genetic growth disorder.