That four-year stretch of being attached to football also provided one of the most intense experiences of my high school years, at least that did not involve me as more than an observer or spectator. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't). I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. My mother was involved as well, as the director of the concession stand on the visitor's side of the field (the Band Boosters got to run those to raise money). My Thursday nights became band-practice nights, the one occasion on which the marching band actually got to practice on the actual football field. As a result, except for the rare open date, my Friday nights from maybe late August into part of November were governed by the football schedule. My instrument was the mellophone (that's what they gave French horn players to march with).
You see, I was in the marching band.Īs a result I played four years in the Dublin High School Fighting Irish Band. My closest brush with athletic success was as a coach of elementary school kids, where we managed to come in first in a league with all of two teams.īut in some ways my high-school years were governed by football possibly more so than anyone other than a player or maybe a cheerleader. Goodness, no, I've never been an athlete church-league softball and basketball were the extent of my athletic struggles as a youth, and whenever possible I was the last guy off the bench for good reason. Soccer is an extremely recent passion in my life.īut I was like a lot of other people who were raised in small or smallish towns, particularly but not exclusively in the South, whose life actually revolved around football to a far greater degree than I realized at the time or at any time until recently, as I began to dig into the issue of football and brain trauma. Hockey never took with me, even though I tried really yard for the few years that Tallahassee had a minor-league hockey team while I lived there. Although basketball was actually a sport I played in my teenage years (strictly church league, folks, don't get excited), I never really "got" it until I attended Wake Forest for a year and a half and was thus introduced to ACC basketball. It was never my favorite sport, to be sure Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home run record sealed baseball on the throne of my sports-fan kingdom forever and always. After getting established, at least a little, in the new call, I found that I missed the blog, missed the outlet to cry out and lament against this ongoing damage done by a game I used to love. It actually got more clicks than usual on this shouting-into-the-wind forum, but then the transition to a new state, a new vocation, generally a new life derailed my blogging of any sort. Last fall I used a blog entry to tell the story of how I came to stop watching football.
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