A Time and a Place

By my way of thinking, it’s now time for football, with baseball out of the way and the clocks pushed back an hour.  Never was a game made to be played in the lengthening shadows of autumn as our new national pastime.

 

And for me, football is about memory.  One in particular involves my sister Barbara.  She took me fossil hunting one Sunday in November, 1968, I think.  We went to Coal City, about fifty miles southwest of Chicago, where they did a lot of open pit mining.  I climbed up the waste piles, Barb wore heels; it was the ’60s and a Sunday, and we were raised a certain way.  On the way back to her apartment, we listened to the Bears.  Gayle Sayers did something impossible, again, like circle left 30 yards then right for another 30 then straight ahead for a five-yard gain.  After the game, it was time for Ed Sullivan and a ride back home.

 

I remember Dick Butkus the same way (but for some reason have next to no memory of Mike Ditka), a player doing the impossible in near anonymity; somewhere is film of Butkus using his pinkie finger while flat on the ground to sack a quarterback.  Butkus and Sayers, they ought to be charter members of the Hemingway club for long-ago twentysomethings showing grace under duress.  I’ve had the good fortune to meet both gentlemen in the years since.  They both carry themselves as warriors, I’d almost say lions in winter, but that would be mixing football with Shakespeare with the Detroit Lions.  “Bears in winter” doesn’t sound as good.  Warriors, it is.

 

Now, NFL football gives me something to ride my exercyle to after church.  I mostly have the sound off because the announcers irritate me in a Hawk Harrelson kind of way.  I watch the Bears if only for the chance to see old film clips of Sayers and Butkus at work, on a muddy field, the shadows gathering, the score in the other team’s favor, their desire to win unshaken.

But Ed Sullivan will not be on after dinner.