The grind winds down
The local high school football team practices across the street from my house. In late July or early August, I start to hear them in the afternoons. Anytime I’m outside, I can faintly hear the coaches’ whistles and the crack of shoulder pads as they go through drills. From the front yard, I can’t help but pause and watch, feeling the nostalgia wash over me.
Football is a profound sensory experience. It’s not just the intensity of the sport itself that lodges in your brain. It’s the plastic taste of a mouthguard or the dingy smell of a practice jersey or the vaguely unsteady clip clop of cleats on cement as you make your way to the field I remember just as much as I remember the thrill of catching a pass or making a tackle. All those little things make up the mosaic of moments that form the imprint football has left on me.
As it happens, most of those memories are from practice, not games, and that’s what I’m thinking about as I watch the boys across the street get ready for another season. Football isn’t war, but I think there are parallels. I’ve read soldiers from all eras, even antiquity, talk about how their profession is mostly monotony punctuated by moments of extreme terror, and I think there’s some of that in football. Most of your work as a football player is going to be on the practice field. Competition takes so much from you that you just can’t play as many games as you do in basketball or baseball or soccer. You’re really less a football player and more of a football practicer.
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