Football and Cotillion

Since Colorado I had been playing, but not loving, American football. My Pop Warner league team was the White Oak Lancers (White Oak being yet another little “city” in the center of the San Fernando Valley.)

For some reason, while we usually played and practiced at a large recreation area in White Oak itself (probably the only time I had reason to be in the place) our dreaded summer training camps were held in a park in Encino.

The reason I belonged to this team was that my dad had researched the league and found White Oak had the best coaches and trainers. This was true and would pay off for us in the final year I played, but at the time it just meant weeks of hell as they whipped us into shape at the beginning of each season (also the hottest time of the year.)

The last Pop Warner year (I was a 9th grader) before the players would move on, presumably, to their high school teams, we actually had a good team. Our superior conditioning helped us win against many teams that should have beaten us, and clever coaching (or in one case, knowledge of the rule book) helped us beat the best team in the league on a technicality. This would end up having humbling consequences, but such is life.

My parents, coming from good families in Louisville, also thought I should have training in the social graces so they signed me up for the Bel-Air/Beverly Hills Cotillion at the same time I was playing football. This meant that I would leave a grueling practice, tired, bruised, often bloody, and then have to take a quick shower and change into dress clothes and then be driven over the hill to Beverly Hills to learn to dance and... stuff.

If I had been living in Louisville, and ever associated with the other kids in the cotillion, this might have made some sense, but for me it was just hell piled on top of hell. Eventually I wrote a scathing and humorously exaggerated account of all this for some school class which my parents read. After that they agreed to let me discontinue the cotillion. This was the first time writing paid off for me in any meaningful way.

While I never really liked playing football I had learned along the way that the person who hits the hardest usually doesn’t get hurt. Since I was always a lineman, this meant blocking or tackling as hard as I could all the time which made me quite good. (I also knocked out my best friend during a routine blocking drill.)

I'm 50 and 73 is the friend I knocked out.

Unfortunately, by this final year, I had stopped growing physically so I was beginning to be a little small for my center (offence), nose guard (defense) position. Previously I had played mostly defense but there was a bigger guy who took that position and I was left with being the offensive center. At the end of that season we were the second best team in the LA Basin which qualified us to play a bowl game in Northern California -- the Santa Clara Valley. 

We were bused up there and stayed with the players of the opposing team. As the center, I stayed with their quarterback. Remember about El Niño? Well this was another El Niño winter. For the big game (the Toys For Tots Bowl) we were playing for the first time in a university stadium and under lights. It was a big deal for us but what we didn’t know was that college and high school games had preceded ours and the rain saturated field was left a muddy mess. Someone thought throwing straw onto the mud would help stabilize it but really it just made it worse. It was a nightmare to play on as you couldn’t get any kind of traction.

There’s one other piece of information you need at this point. My eyesight is very poor. I’ve worn glasses since I was six and playing without glasses or contacts at night, I was at a severe disadvantage. I could tell from the uniforms who was on which team, but that was about it. As offensive center, this shouldn’t have been a problem because all I had to do was hike the ball to the guy with his hands between my legs and then block anyone who came in my direction... but that’s not the way it worked out.

We actually played two night games that year and both were against superior teams (the game we won on a technicality because Pop Warner games were not supposed to go past 10pm -- our coach waited until it was after 10pm and we were ahead and pulled us off the field.) In both of these games the guy who had taken my defensive center position got discouraged and I had to replace him.

In the first game, with a good field, I was able to play normally and could penetrate the line and tackle people -- the problem was I couldn’t see who had the ball so I just tackled any opposing player running near me. They didn’t much like it.

In the bowl game I couldn’t do anything but struggle in the muck to hold my position. It was so frustrating. But instead of getting discouraged I just got more and more pissed-off and pounded the line as much as I could every play. We were soundly defeated but I won a little trophy for being such a stubborn bastard.

And that was it for me and football. Since I was no longer big enough to play my usual position, I never moved on to high school teams. Plus we next moved to Scottsdale and there was no way in hell I was going to train for football in that heat.