Tag: Football

Say “Hi” To Hoda For Me. I’m Trying To Find Me On Wikipedia.

June 5, 2024 / Big Joe

Fun fact. I went to high school with Hoda Kotb.

Me and about 1200 other hormonal teenagers. I was a lowly underclassman, while she was the senior homecoming queen. Hoda successfully navigated high school and attained royalty status after four years. I represented the underclass, a serf freshly flushed from the bowels of middle school, just beginning my high school odyssey. She sat atop the food chain while I was lower than whale poop at the bottom of the ocean. Actually, it’s quite serene down there.

I perused the alums from Hoda’s graduating class. A couple of names stick out in my mind, but I cannot definitively say why they’re familiar. Maybe we played football together. If it wasn’t for the Today Show, I likely would not remember Hoda Kotb anymore than she’d know me. Regardless, it’s neat to see somebody from the old neighborhood making the big time. That’s assuming fame trips your trigger, which you know it does.

Commoners do not typically intermingle with the noteworthy people.

If we did, we wouldn’t be common. I scanned Hoda’s X account and ran across another familiar name from Fort Hunt High School, Mike Novogratz. I remembered him immediately as a wrestler, but that’s about as far as my memory took me. Upon further internet inspection, it appears Mike killed it in the financial world after graduating from Princeton. My wikipedia page is yet to materialize. How common of me.

Hoda and Mike graduated in 1982 or thereabout. By the time I donned the cap and gown in 1985, Fort Hunt High School ceased to exist. As a member of the final graduating class, I witnessed firsthand the death of the 22 year-old school. Zealous politicians, busy pushing their personal agendas, murdered Fort Hunt High School all in the name of community progress. Now the campus is an oversized middle school complete with a massive parking lot for all of those 13 and 14 year old drivers. Well thought out, councilmen.

But that’s basically it for all of the famous people I know, except for a few former NFL players I lost touch with. Once I hung up my cleats midway through college, that life stayed in the rearview until I recently looked up William & Mary. They recruited me for football, but I didn’t consider them because I thought it was too small of a school. Without the modern conveniences of the internet, I made a hasty collegiate judgment from high school guidance counselor pamphlets. Shrewd, very shrewd.

Fun fact. William & Mary’s green and gold school colors matched my high school.

I could have attended Bill & Mary without having to adjust to a new color combination. If I had been good enough, maybe the Green Bay Packers would have drafted me, too. Green and gold throughout high school, college, and the National Football League! Sure, that’s a bit presumptuous to assume the NFL loomed as a possible career choice. It would have been a great wikipedia storyline, though.

I closed the door on college athletics for what seemed like really good reasons over three and half decades ago. When I decided not to return to Wake Forest for my third year, I had just turned 20 years old. The WFU road looked dauntingly difficult and I allowed the passion for the game to slowly ooze out of me. At the time, leaving felt like a relief. However, the weight of reality quickly replaced my athletic scholarship burden. Ah, the freedom of naïveté.

It turns out the game wasn’t a heavy lift.

Motivating myself to play football was the heavy lift. In the spring of 1987 a new head coach unexpectedly moved me from the defensive line to the offensive line, which left me feeling totally unprepared and ill-equipped to succeed. I could have stepped up, put in the work, and seen where that took me, but I chose to quit. Of course I used different verbiage like, “leaving the game” and “pursuing academic interests without football”. A good rationalization can go a long way if you say it convincingly enough.

I watched teammates languish on the bench, their whole college career spent in the scout team trenches. My freshman season of this was enough. Additional seasons spent on the scout team appeared as pure, unadulterated torture. The prospect of forever sitting as a failed offensive lineman terrified me. Not to mention, I hated playing offense and I was no fan of the new coach, freshly fired by Virginia Tech. I hit the campus in July 1985 with high personal expectations. By May 1987 I wanted out. If only a transfer portal existed way back when.

Feeling utterly defeated and lost, I decided to throw in the towel rather than swing another wild, inaccurate punch.

It’s hard admitting this, even three and a half decades later. I buried it because it brought shame. I was there. I played. But I didn’t finish strong. Truthfully, I didn’t finish at all. At least not football. The year after I left, Wake Forest beat North Carolina in Chapel Hill. On TV I saw my former teammates, exuberant on the sidelines, jumping up and down. Nothing felt better than beating the reigning in-state powerhouse, particularly when you’re the conference cellar dweller. At least that’s how it looked on ESPN.

I felt proud for the Deacs, but a big smattering of envy sat on my plate as well. I opted out of my 1987 fall semester and worked a blue collar job. Seeing Wake beat North Carolina while I sweated and froze my tail off on the Ronald Reagan Airport tarmac didn’t sit well. The grass wasn’t greener on the other side and “real” work was far less glamorous than playing college football, even though I got to wear a new uniform. A puke green shirt with my name above a breast pocket and matching pants became my occupational polyester nightmare. I started to miss the concussions.

I can’t piss and moan too much.

I went back to school and graduated from George Mason University. For 33 years I worked a job that I dreamed about in my younger days. And I still haven’t quit or retired! And I’m doing it in one of the most beautiful states in the union, Colorado. None of this would probably have materialized if I stayed in Winston-Salem, NC. And if I hadn’t quit back in 1987, the three most important people in my life would forever be lost to me – my wife, my son, and my daughter.

I hope Miss Kotbe and Mr. Novogratz don’t think too poorly of me for walking away from the adversity I chose to side-step and the new positional assignment I so passionately dreaded. If they do, oh well. Fear can be debilitating and it’s a daily challenge still. But I suppose celebrities and billionaires understand and are real people, too. Nah! That can’t possibly be true. That never gets mentioned on their Wikipedia pages.

The Greatest Halftime Football Speech I Never Remembered Saying

November 7, 2023 / Big Joe

It’s fall semester of my son’s eighth grade year. I coach his youth football team’s offensive line. Several other player’s dads comprise the remainder of the coaching staff. My son and I joined this team a season ago. Since 7 years of age, I coached his football teams in some capacity. This will be the final football season coaching my son. Next year he and his teammates will progress to the high school level and get instructed by their coaching staffs. For a middle aged man, this is quite a milestone.

We fellow coaches invested significant time and effort into coaching our boys these last several years. Because of this, our head coach suggests participating in an end of season youth football tournament in Las Vegas, NV. He billed it as the final blowout before turning over the football coaching reins to the high schools and taking our places in the stadium seats. We unanimously agree that this is a good idea. What could go wrong?

We roll into the first tournament venue comfortably seated on our private, chartered bus. Our opponent came from Bakersfield, CA, where they most likely carjacked their way to Nevada. However, this conclusion only became evident by the end of game. At this point I know nothing about Bakersfield other than it’s a desert town way east of L.A. As we drive past our opponent warming up, I feel unsettled.

Immediately, I reference the football tournament rules. Nothing in the literature suggests that this is a father-son tournament. The Bakersfield team looks enormous. And that’s without pads on. How could these behemoths all be eight-graders? I’m certain some of them are shaving on a daily basis. I think a couple of them have small children, too. We coaches take notice. So do our boys.

Naturally, we played teams that out-sized us before. We were never the biggest squad, but we emphasized game preparation and positional technique execution. In football size looms large, but it does not independently determine gridiron success. I remind myself of this personal postulate while staring at Goliath. Unfortunately, we couldn’t scout Bakersfield before the contest and nobody on our roster is named David. But we still have technique, right?

On the first snap of the game our offensive backfield has more Bakersfield players in it than we do. Instead of tackling our running back, a Bakersfield player lifts him off his feet, drives him backwards, and plants him in the turf. The situation does not improve. Not only does Bakersfield play with great speed and physicality, but they possess just a plain mean and nasty edge. They land punches in the piles, throw elbows after the play, and literally kick our boys when they are down.

As our team exits the field, they gaze at us with a “deer in the headlights” look. Fear emanates and spills out from their helmets. Their bodies appear unstable. They look like they just saw combat for the first time and held no desire to see it again. As the game progresses, the referees seem oblivious to the Southern Cal late hits and Bakersfield sucker punches. Murmurs of forfeiting the game out of safety arises amongst our parents. If something doesn’t change, one of our kids will get seriously injured they say.

We manage to make it to halftime without a single death, dismemberment, puncture wound, or any other game ending injury. But the boys still look shell shocked. If they are to survive this contest, we coaches need to find the right words and motivation to snap them back into the team we believe they can be.

The first thought that runs through my brain is our guys are in a street fight and the only logical response is to fight back with the mindset to fuck up the other team. Hell yeah, fuck ‘em up! However, these are eighth grade boys. Saying that would be inappropriate. I change gears and shift my paradigm to our guys are in a street fight and just got punched in the mouth. The only logical response is to pick themselves up and punch those Bakersfield boys right back in the mouth. Yes, right in the mouth. This is much better.

When it comes my time to speak, I provide my simple, succinct halftime message. It is brief, but I believe it delivers what they need to hear. The boys quietly head back to sidelines, ready to face the third quarter. As I watch them, the offensive coordinator leans in close to my face. He is burley man with a thick, full beard. He speaks quietly through the corner of his mouth, as if imitating a ventriloquist.

“That was best fucking halftime speech I’ve ever heard,” he softly shares.

My head jerks back, attempting to peer into his eyes, but instead catch my reflection in his mirrored sunglasses. Is he busting my chops for my somewhat cliched speech? Did he find it so lame and uninspiring that he needs to give me crap about it, right now?

I give him a quizzical look and ask, “What do you mean?”

In exactly the same manner, he repeats, “That was the best fucking halftime speech I’ve ever heard.”

I now understand he is serious and not pulling my leg. I felt I relayed a useful point to the team and hoped to instill some fight back in the boys, but I don’t think my words would make anybody forget about Knute Rockne. It was just something I thew together about 30 seconds before the words crossed my lips.

Hesitantly, I ask, “What do you think I said?” He lowers his sunglasses so I can now see his eyes while he also points to the football field.

“You told them to go out there and fuck them in the mouth.”

Horrified, I stammer, “I, I did, I did not say that! There’s no way I said that!”

His expression never changes. It feels surreal. It is as if I no longer hold a grasp on reality. Could I have said that and not realized it? Maybe he misheard me, imagining something far more provocative than what I said. As I process the scene, this appears like the most plausible of explanations. Except for one damn, irrefutable reason. Witnesses.

I gave a short, albeit profane, speech in front of players and other football coaches. My words were heard by everybody except me. On the upside, we played far better in the second half.

Fortunately I never saw a member of our team attempt to perform oral fornication on the Bakersfield bad boys. I wonder whether those words shocked our team into playing better or was so off the hook that they completely forgot about the ass kicking they were receiving.

“Did you guys hear what coach said?”

“I know, right. Fuck ‘em in the mouth. Who thinks up shit like that?”

“Coach is whack. Hey, we’re lining up kick return. I guess it’s time to go fuck them in the mouth.”

“Yeah, let’s go bang some braces!”

It’s difficult to feel pride or shame for something in which I draw no recollection. I never consulted with my son to see if that was his memory as well. It would likely have been an awkward and confusing moment, as I never included that topic in the “facts of life” speech to him. Well, at least not that I recall.

Exploding Coaches, Erupting Teachers, & Big Helen’s Cataclysmic Death Slide

May 8, 2023 / Big Joe

When I say my high school days were mostly spent as a C+ student, I’m not bragging about my abilities to write computer code. Far from it. When I was in high school we slid 3 x 5 floppy discs inside terminal ports. I never embraced or fully understood the DOS world. The same could be said for geometry, chemistry, or most STEM subjects. I figured school wasn’t really my thing and college would be a struggle, at best. Some of us aren’t that smart.

During my first year of high school, Dennis Patrick was my freshman football coach. His fiery temperament and explosive personality pushed us to achieve at a high level for fear of incurring his wrath during practice or games. Not all of my friends appreciated his approach or particularly cared for his coaching style. I get it. When emotionally inflamed, he tended to grab players by their facemasks and jerk them around. Coach Patrick could be a hard, unforgiving coach. He also taught U.S. History.

As fate would have it, Fort Hunt High School placed me into his class my junior year.

He brought the same intensity inside the classroom that he carried onto the football field. I brought the same mediocre academic zeal to U.S. History that I carried to all of my other classes. Any illusion that Mr. Patrick might practice selective athletic favoritism rapidly faded early in the first quarter. As with coaching, he targeted the under-performers. With my sub-par test scores, I painted a proverbial bullseye on my back. And he had excellent aim.

He berated me during class for my U.S. History half-heartedness. I performed relatively well on the football field two years prior, so I was unaccustomed to his unwanted classroom attention. No previous teacher ever got up in my face like Dennis Patrick. Frankly, he embarrassed me in front of my classmates. It’s one thing to act like you’re too cool for school. It’s a completely different matter to made the fool. However, he provided a way out.

After successfully cultivating a D that first quarter, he required me and the other academic laggards to outline the textbook’s required readings. Of course I wasn’t really reading the textbook. Not shockingly, this greatly contributed to my lack of understanding in his classroom. Now he forced me to not only read the damn thing, but submit a written account of each chapter. It was not necessarily difficult work, just time consuming.

Weird thing happened.

The more hours I spent reading and outlining the textbook, the more U.S. History I comprehended and mentally retained for subsequent regurgitation. When called upon in class, I actually spouted correct answers instead of mumbling incorrectness or providing dumb looks. The second quarter culminated in a C. Not great, but definitely an improvement. This putting work into academics seemed to produce some discernible results. Who knew?

I don’t believe the other U.S. History teacher required it, but Dennis Patrick assigned us a yearlong 20 page research paper. He said universities would require works that properly cited sources and denoted references and we should know how to complete such a project before entering their esteemed halls. He established an academic year’s timeframe with due dates and benchmarks to measure and guide our progress. Just my dumb luck to get this new learning opportunity.

A 20 page paper seemed like a daunting task. I never wrote anything comparable in length and complexity. A whole school year at least built in a psychological time buffer. It’s not like it’s due next week. And like a coach, he provided step by step instruction on what he expected and how to complete the task. Crawl, walk, run. We’ll start with the basics and build upon them as time passes. We were eating the elephant one bite at a time. Too bad elephant sucks.

I chose to write about the May 18, 1980 Mount St. Helen’s eruption.

My father’s work travels took him to the Pacific Northwest in the early 80’s. The devastating explosion covered surrounding areas in a layer of volcanic ash. In a brilliant marketing move, a hotel bagged this ash into logo marked ziplocks as a memento for customers. My dad brought one home to me. The eruption fascinated me and now I could actually touch its aftermath. I was weird like that. Nothing’s really changed.

All other written assignments up this scholastic point pertained to English classes and were restricted to dissecting books and plays I never wanted to read in the first place. Mr. Patrick allowed us to choose our research paper’s topic. Mount St. Helen was headline news around the world. The tremendous forces of nature violently unleashed on that small community were absolutely apocalyptic. Kind of like Dennis Patrick with novice football players or lazy students.

I learned how to add footnotes and cite research sources. National Geographic became my new favorite publication. Meanwhile, I continued reading the textbook chapters and submitting the written outlines. When called upon in class I now spurted out answers concerning the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans. I referenced historical economic theories of mercantilism and protectionism and seamlessly provided examples of each. Who knew that Whigs didn’t go on your head?

The third quarter I achieved a B. Its shape is not far removed from the D, yet far more academically rewarding. The benefits of reading the textbook and outlining the chapters exponentially increased my desire to learn more and score higher. I actually toyed with the idea of getting an A for the final quarter. Is this how the smart kids felt?

I was not unfamiliar with that grade.

Okay, those classes were typically electives. I got A’s in Physical Education and Gourmet Foods. Except for Sue Hickman’s P.E. class my senior year. Sgt. Sue gave me a C. She forgot the class was supposed to be fun. In fairness, I behaved like an elitist jock and Sue didn’t practice athletic favoritism either. I got the grade I deserved.

Meanwhile back in U.S. History, I discovered my outlines were valuable study guides for tests. The contagion of academic success rapidly spread. The more I achieved, the more I wanted to top my last performance. It really wasn’t any different than sports. I’d just never been given a roadmap to scholastic success, or in this case, had the roadmap stuffed inside my proverbial facemask.

I completed the academic fourth quarter with an A in U.S. History. And I actually understood and enjoyed the topic and could speak quasi-intelligently about it. Maybe not today, but they say memory is the second thing to go. Also, that 20 page research paper proved a fairly painless task. I tackled the assignment better than any opponent I faced on the football field. Inked across the paper’s cover page sat a previously inconceivable A.

I received a B as my cumulative U.S. History grade.

I started slow, but finished strong. I felt proud of how far I’d progressed. I also enjoyed not being the target of Mr. Patrick’s verbal assaults he unleashed on the unknowing, unstudied, and unprepared high school U.S. History desk dwellers. I felt a little bad for them, but Mr. Patrick provided them with the same roadmap. They just never opened their academic Rand-McNally.

I’ve never missed particles of saliva landing on my face while enduring a coach’s or teacher’s tongue lashings. I’ve also never not gained something valuable from it, as well. I likely just need a good slap in the face every so often. And no, that’s not an invitation. But old D.P. taught me how to succeed in the classroom. It was ridiculously simple, but I’d never learned it before my junior year U.S. History class. He was a touch nuts, but probably the best teacher I ever had. And that’s my kind of nuts.