Are you ready for some football?

Amos Alonzo Stagg, University of Chicago, football playbook, 1927. Throughout his legendary career as a coach, Stagg maintained careful and detailed records of successful plays he had devised. Wisconsin and Ohio State felt the impact of his offensive innovations in the 1922 season.

I’ve been on a high school track team, a West Publishing softball team, even a middle-agers pick-up basketball team, but I’ve never been on a football team. I’ve played a little touch football over the years; once, in college, we were playing in the snow on an empty lot and I fell to the ground trying to chase the passer. My palm landed on a broken Cutty Sark bottle and I had to rush to the emergency room for twenty-two stitches. That scar hurts every time I grip and swing a bat. Even if I could punt the ball deep, like some of these modern girls can, I don’t think I’d ever push to join the boys.

Still, it is the one sport I watched with my dad when I was growing up. He rooted for the Kansas City Chiefs and I was a Steelers fan. I liked watching Lynn Swann catch those passes and would think he had the perfect name for the job, like Bob Barker’s was for his role as annoying game show host. I even knew the name of the Steeler voted “most fashionable”: running back Frenchie Fuqua.

My dad and I would take up our places in the basement rec room, he in the floral wing-back recliner, me in the matching floral sofa. Mom would be upstairs watching her own shows because she hated the sound of those announcers shouting out the plays. Cosell, Madden. She didn’t mind Musberger, though, so she’d come down with toasted BLTs and chips when he called the games for CBS. My dad and his brothers played high school football in Wisconsin and one of his brothers tried out for the Chicago Bears farm team. My Uncle Larry, on my mom’s side, played OT for Florida State in 1965. I heard a lot of football over the years.

So I’m a fan. Despite the militaristic machoism of the NFL. Despite the corruption of the college game. Despite the misguided frenzy at the high school level. Despite the fact that my young son might get upended and crushed by some 180-pound kid in the junior high league.

Some notes from our first weekend of football:

I heard about the visit by pro baller Chris Weinke, a Cretin grad, who attended Florida State on a football scholarship but opted out before graduating to play baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays. He told my son and other campers at the Cretin football camp that “of all the sports I’ve played none compares to the camaraderie of football. None.”

My son rushed the ball a few times in his team’s fall preview on Saturday, but when he was stopped by a large wall of defensive linemen his coach told him he should have jumped over them. So every time we watched a game on TV and saw a running back get tackled after only a few yards, we’d yell out “SHOULD HAVE JUMPED OVER THEM,” just to make my son crazy.

One of our friends is an All-American who played tight end at Michigan. The usually mighty Wolverines are a dismal 0-2 this season. My husband walked up to him at the kids’ game on Saturday and asked, “Wait a minute. How DO you spell Appalachian State?”

In order to run the ball in official games for the eighth grade, players must weigh in at 150 pounds or less. This keeps teams from giving the ball to their enormous lunks to plow over everybody else thirty pounds lighter than them. My son is at 151. His official weigh-in is today at 3:00 p.m. with the school nurse. I was in the bathroom this morning getting ready to shower when I heard my husband walk into my son’s room.

“You have weigh-in today,” says dad.

“Uh, I know,” says son.

I’m thinking, “Don’t say it, please don’t say it.”

“You should, uh, you know . . .” says dad, faltering.

Son waits. I’m thinking, “Really, just don’t say it.”

“You should, uh, you know, try to go to the bathroom before, uh, you get weighed,” says dad.

“Man,” I think, “he said it. I knew he’d say it.”

“Dad, knock it off. Seriously,” says son.

I can see my husband, who is really not as fanatic as this sounds, standing by the scale with my son, the reading at 150-1/2, and him saying, “You should try taking off your pants now, son,” and the two of them getting in a huge fight right there in front of the unsuspecting nurse. Camaraderie indeed.