THANKSGIVING’S
BEST FOOTBALL
Never mind the Raiders
and Cowboys. If you want REAL football, next Thanksgiving I suggest you come to
our Ladera Elementary school in Tustin and see the game as it’s supposed to be played. You
might even get an email “e-vite” from a college athlete, as we did, or perhaps
you’ll simply hear about us on the street.
Around here football
is actually a GAME. It’s fun. Little kids get to “tackle” grownups, (okay, it’s
“tag” football), and they learn to kick a football and throw—as long as they
can successfully dodge a dozen multi-sized players and the two puppies loose on
the field.
The
grandparents, and that includes me, sit on the sidelines and watch. Right away
I spotted a small blonde girl, about nine, who seemed to be in on every play.
To my amazement, Taylor
could zigzag like a marine on an obstacle course. With the ball tucked against
her pink and white striped shirt, she dodged, in quick succession, a UCLA
volleyball player, an orthopedic surgeon, and a young man who’d just won a
national tennis tournament. Minutes later, Taylor made a clean, thirty-yard kick. But that was peanuts compared to the sudden,
surprising run by twelve-year-old Elizabeth,
who is usually more singer than athlete.
Along the
periphery of the field, Lauren, eight, practiced her gymnastics with three
back- flips in a row. While behind her, Davis,
ten but small for his age, caught the football just before it hit the ground.
He didn’t get far, though. The mother who is the country’s number one
fifty-and-over tennis player managed to tag him.
Within a small
circle, the game came to a momentary halt when the five-year-old threw a fit. One of the bigger boys simply picked him off
the ground and set him down again outside the boundaries.
For a few
seconds I tabulated the various ages. The surgeon, still a Sunday athlete, is sixty-one,
the UCLA player is 23, his sister, a landscape architect, is 26. Still, the youngest player was five. I have
no idea about the age or occupation of the man who arrived late, on his
bicycle. All I gathered, really, is that his kids are whiz-bangs at sports and
so eager to participate that they shortcutted the journey by climbing over the
school fence. Actually, so did several others. This is, after all, a
neighborhood athletic field.
With a
halftime water break,
the game lasted an hour and a half. By the end I had no idea which team won—if
indeed, scores were tabulated or anyone could tell who belonged to which squad.
At times they knew, but I didn’t.
From afar there seemed to be a constant shifting of team loyalties as new participants
arrived or others faded away, with large and small people reassigned to achieve
some kind of balance.
Balance? Oh
come on, there was no balance. Just a lot of sprinting, kicking, and throwing, with
a few spectacular performances distributed up and down the age groups. And from
us on the sidelines, a lot of wild cheering.
As they
departed, everyone was sweaty and most were smiling. Good feelings prevailed. The
smallest players dashed away without the need for extra praise. Hey, for awhile
they’d been treated like adults.
As far as I’m concerned, for the rest of Thanksgiving
none of the professional games compared, even slightly, with this one.
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