An Important Moment in My Life

A Game of Inches

Some people say that in the south football is God. All I know is, in the state of Florida it was a rite of passage passed down from father to son. One thing I learned early on was that if you could do certain things on the field, you could be somebody. Not someone that people made fun of, or looked down upon. You could be revered, respected, envied, but most importantly you could be somebody who people didn’t look through. You could go from being invisible to being an icon. Because of football, I know how it feels to go from being consistently overlooked and feeling like an afterthought, to feeling invincible.

The first day of conditioning started off as the worst day of my life. I showed up to Ribault high School early and was eager to go out and prove myself. This would be my first time playing organized football and I sweating bullets. I had played a lot of sandlot football growing up, but this was different. As soon as I stepped foot onto the practice field, I could feel the eyes of everybody there sizing me up. The Coaches were trying to determine if I was the next superstar, and the players were trying to decide whether or not I could take their spot.

Before I could make my way over to a corner and hide from the scrutiny our head coach, Coach Doc. He called us over and led us into a film room. The film came on, and I saw Disney World. I found out that the team my mom had signed me up to play for was the Grand Park Panthers, and they were a pretty big deal around town. They had gone undefeated the previous season and had made it to the national championship game of the Pop Warner Super Bowl held annually at the Walt Disney Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando. They had then suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of some team from North Carolina. Coach Doc made it very clear at that first practice that the expectation for this year's team (which was comprised of almost every player from last year's team) was to win it all.

I can still remember the feeling I had the first time I strapped on my pads and walked onto the practice field at Grand Park. I was amazed by the history of the place and how people always talked about it with a sense of reverence. After my first on-field collision I knew that this was where I was meant to be. The rush of adrenaline, the sound of helmets bouncing off each other, and the way we flew around with reckless abandon was addicting. Even today a football play is a terrible, beautiful thing to me. Everything from the moment of orderly silence before the snap to the shrill ringing of the referee's whistle to end the play seems perfectly orchestrated. Our first game was at Riverside less than a week away, and we began to prepare feverishly.

The referee blew his whistle and then came that beautiful moment of orderly silence; it seemed to last forever then the kicker started his trot. He booted the ball, and it appeared to hang suspended in the air flipping end over end as time stood still for a brief moment. My eyes followed its arc, and it landed in my outstretched arms with a thud. My legs went straight to work racing up the sideline. Past one, two, and a third defender I sprinted. My blockers did a fantastic job, and there was one man left to beat. He lunged at me, and if he had traveled an inch further, or perhaps if I weren't running like a madman, he would've stopped me. Simultaneously my hand shot out, caught his facemask, and shoved him into the turf. I tight-roped my way down the