I Quit the Football Team, 1976, by Wilder J. Leavitt

From MemoryArchive

Who: Wilder J. Leavitt
What: Quitting the Football Team
When: August 1976
Where: Enfield, Connecticut

My father loved football. He played it in high school and college. It was the only positive experience he could remember from his two year draft in the U.S. Army. He coached my brothers when they were in high school. He watched college and professional games every weekend and was ecstatic when the National Football League added Monday night football to their weekly roster.

So when I was twelve, it didn’t take much for my best friend to convince me to try out for midget football. There were four teams in our town and I joined the one he had belonged to the previous year and would play for that year. I am the oldest son and at that time, where I went, my two brothers followed. We did everything in threes.

We started practice in the middle of a late August week in northern Connecticut running around a local high school field. We would spend the next few days being driven by coaches and parents to run, learn to block, run, learn to form up on the line of scrimmage, run, learn to throw the ball and run some more. I already understood the running part, just not as much of it as the coaches expected of us. Beyond that, everything else was new. Despite our efforts, kids were tripping, falling down, moving in the wrong directions and circling the coaches like stunned bees. The coaches were trying to get us to practice football; to wear down our natural resistance to being told to do something that physically hurt. This was something that few of us had ever experienced but that we had to come to accept and endure if we were ever to perform as a team.

All I could think about was that I had never sweated so much in my life. After three days, I was beginning to wonder what the point of all the running and sweating was when the coach instructed us to get cups and mouthpieces for the next practice. My dad happily took us down to the Woolco Department Store to purchase our first football gear. After boiling the mouthpieces and biting down on them for a custom fit, we showed up at the next practice with pieces of plastic between our teeth and our legs. More running, more sweating, more pain. After a few more days, we were issued our helmets and pads and the fun really started. It was hot that summer and pools of sweat would collect under my shoulder pads and around my hips where I wore the girdle that housed my hip pads. When I squeezed on the helmet, I felt like a plow horse strapped with oversized blinkers and cotton balls stuffed in my ears. Just look straight ahead and do what the coaches say, I thought.

But we were still running and sweating and hurting. We did drill after drill, still buzzing around the coaches and parents, but by now we were starting to take on the gait of athletes. My father came to every practice and was giving tips to us from the sideline. After a full week, I was starting to crack. I worried about each upcoming practice hoping that I could somehow sit the next one out. My brothers seemed to be having the time of their lives. Didn’t they know what I had come to understand – that this was a sadistic sport?

On about the eighth or ninth day, I was emotionally out of breath. It was early in the practice. There was a break in the drills and my shoulders shrugged. I just couldn’t stand up straight with the pads on anymore. I took my helmet off and trundled up to my mother present for the one and only visit she would make to our practices. She was sitting on an aluminum folding chair bracing herself on the best remaining plastic straps left on the worn seat. I looked into her face for relief. She did not say anything. I looked into her face for reassurance. She said to me, “Are you OK?” I looked into her face for an excuse. What I wanted to say was “Help me, Mom, please get me out of here!” What I said was, “Mom, I want to quit.” She looked at me compassionately and said, “You can quit if you want, but understand that your father will always pay more attention to your brothers for as long as they play football.”

How do I know if I made the right decision when I was twelve years old? Does time provide one with the tools to understand one’s childhood rationale and the choices that were before him? Perhaps making the “right” decision is not really the point when you are twelve. What matters is learning to live with our decisions and growing to understand that a young boy or girl often makes decisions for the love and acceptance of a parent. When I think about my decision to quit football, when I wonder what would have happened had I kept playing, when I ponder how my relationship with my father would have changed, I can console myself that many of my choices I made when I was twelve were for his love.