Why Mom Supports The Game

I'll be the first to say that playing high school football certainly does keep the boys off the streets. That it also keeps a boy up studying half the night, out of all Friday afternoon classes at school, on the ragged edge of hara-kiri when he drops a pass in the end zone and late for dinner every single evening, I am able to view as an operational necessity. It is what high school football does to me—and to my husband—that leaves me wondering what is so awful about a nice, wide concrete street?

I keep having these fantasies, for instance. My fantasies are not normal, everyday daydreams about cruises along the Dalmatian coast on Ari's yacht while Jackie is away having her carats counted or receiving special-delivery invitations to Truman Capote 's next party. When I daydream, I picture myself having a membership card that causes buzzers to be pressed, opening doors without handles and admitting me to soundproof isolation booths in every football stadium on our high school team's schedule. The booth is completely screened from public view, and only mothers of football players are allowed to enter. There, when I look out during a game and see my pharmacist and my mailman stand up and wave their arms-when my son has failed to catch a ball, I can at least try to imagine they are shouting "Great try!" instead of shaking fists and screaming "Butterfingered idiot!" at him. On the other hand, when he occasionally catches a ball, I can fondly surmise that those strangers carrying banners for the opposing team have risen to their feet with cheers of "Good show!" instead of roars of "Kill him!"

My isolation booth would also serve to remove me from the members of my own family. It is bad enough to watch your very own son being yelled at for dropping passes and fumbling footballs without having to discover that your male relatives are sometimes the most irrational critics of all. You can drive up to the stadium with the gentle, humorous, logical engineer you've been married to for 22 years, and by the time he is seated in the stands and looking at his son down on the field in full football gear with a big number 80 on his jersey he turns into a deaf stranger with tunnel vision who sees nothing but his son and is possessed of the notion that not a soul in the stands but himself can see the boy. It then becomes essential that he report every move the lad makes to you and to everyone within earshot. If your brother-in-law is along—and he is—the same thing happens to him, and the two men start loudly and urgently giving exactly the same reports to each other.

This is unnerving, and can be dangerous. I sat between the two of them during Tim's first game. Through touchdowns, fumbles and spectacular runs, they maintained dramatic duplicate accounts of the activities on the bench, where Tim was sitting. Finally, Tim got into the game for a moment and, dear heaven, managed to block an opposing player. At the same instant both men crashed into me with fierce body blocks. Groping back to my seat, I invaded my husband's tunnel view. "Sit still," he commanded. "I think the coach just looked at Tim."

By the time the fourth quarter was over, Tim had been in the game for four complete seconds in three different quarters and was feeling great about it. I could tell because of the way he stood and the way he looked while talking to the other players; but the two logical, objective men I sat between were in a state of raging fury. They decided the quarterback was a publicity-seeking show-off who always ran with the ball on all the option plays, and the boy who started at split end—for whom Tim was the third substitute—was a slow-footed, dull-witted, ham-handed pet of the coach, who was himself so talent-blind he would keep Don Maynard on the bench, if he had him, out of simpleminded ignorance of what it takes to make a winning football team. The two men rushed down to the field to tell Tim these facts, but Tim had disappeared along with the rest of the team to shower and celebrate a 21-0 victory. There are some things about a man his wife should never know.

Now, no matter what you normally hear, I and most football mothers I meet are not particularly worried about our sons getting hurt playing football. Why pick on football? Tim has been bound and determined to get hurt every hour of every day since he was 10 months old. He can break his leg while walking the poodle and has been known to sprain an ankle getting out of bed in the morning. Sending him and a friend out into the backyard to play catch has been, in my experience, a nearly fatal directive. One time the ball went over the fence and down into the ravine. The boys went after the ball. The boys failed to find the ball. What they did find, because both of them stepped on it, was a nest of yellow jackets. Unless you've tried putting two boys covered with 50 yellow jackets apiece—crawling in their hair, in their ears, under their jeans and down into their sneakers—into a car and driving this writhing, screaming cargo through midday traffic to the nearest hospital, you may not believe how obsessed a woman can get with details, such as who is going to come running when I need help. For years, before I started dreaming of isolation booths, I used to play around with thoughts of inheriting $10 million so I could have my own personal emergency unit consisting of one orthopedic man, one general practitioner, one ambulance and two strong attendants, all located on my back porch and ail waiting—night and day—for the moment I needed them.

That's why the very first thing I noticed about football fields encouraged me so. It was, in a manner of speaking, my dream come true. There is a long, gleaming, pale-blue ambulance parked immediately at hand, with two uniformed attendants in constant readiness. There is a nice friendly doctor on the sidelines with not one other thing to do but attend to the boys. Oxygen tanks and first-aid kits are right there where anyone can find them. Nobody has used up all the adhesive tape to hang posters on anybody's good plaster wall or borrowed the antiseptic and not put it back. The boys' fathers are there. Furthermore, if a player so much as bruises a fingernail the crowd gives him three cheers, and he is manly and brave and does not yell his head off. When the same boy falls down the back steps with the garbage, he loses his cool completely and howls all the way to the hospital emergency room where you always have to take him by yourself because his father is gone and your doctor is out of town and your son won't even let you look at his leg so you hardly know whether it is still hitched on to the rest of him or not.

Another remarkable thing I've observed about football is that boys who had to be forced into wearing their sweaters out into freezing weather, who refused to wear helmets while surfing, who always jumped into sailboats without their life jackets and never remembered to carry scissors with the points down, will, upon becoming members of a football team, sit still and allow their ankles and knees to be taped up, and cover themselves with layers of protective padding and all sorts of little corsets and helmets and bars before even so much as setting foot on the playing field. Some boys will do all this in the full knowledge that they are preparing themselves to go sit on the bench for the entire game. Why would any thinking mother object to that?

On the other hand, what I think all sensible mothers should object to is the sievelike quality of football insurance. Every time anyone opens up an insurance umbrella, I leap right under it with the conviction that if we take out insurance against a worrisome happening, it will never occur. After all, if it's not going to cost us anything, why should it happen? Therefore, the minute I found the notice about football-injury insurance in a pocket of a pair of pants at the bottom of the pile on Tim's closet floor, I sat right down and wrote out a check for the premium and sent it in to the company.

All I can say, after three years of this, is that the football-insurance umbrellas I shelter under must be made of Swiss cheese. But perhaps my problem has merely been Tim's refusal to cooperate. It seems to me that a 17-year-old boy with any wit at all could figure out some way to limit his damage to qualifying injuries. When he has learned they do not pay for infections caused by having hands stepped on by cleats, why doesn't he keep his hands away from cleats? Once he is fully aware that therapy is, in no case, covered, why would he persist in acquiring problems that only therapy can mend? The whole business has upset my faith in umbrellas.