“But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
Matthew 19:30
The brown leather football rotated upward, juxtaposed against a brilliant, blue late summer sky. Passing slowly by a puffy white cloud, the ball continued upward. It was a perfect spiral, the revolutions seemingly effortless, with no wobble to the ball, untypical for a backyard football game of elementary school boys. At least for that few moments, life seemed in slow motion with that beautiful, clear blue sky and a certain crispness in the air. It felt so right. Despite the illusion that the rising ball would never return to earth, continuing to rise, I angled as fast as my little legs would allow toward the spot where I perceived it would ultimately come down. This was the stuff of my dreams during the week, to experience this beauty and activity in a weekend ball game.
As the nose of the football finally turned over and the ball began its descent, I realized that I was on a good path to make an interception, as I was on defense. The ball’s trajectory sent it downward, now below the level of the pine trees that lined the field, coming back to earth. It was a feeling of anticipation and joy as I prepared to cradle the ball in my arms as it fell toward me. Then my silent reverie and concentration was broken by the sound of a “whoosh” as a runaway train, by the name of Ray Tiller, swooshed past me, grabbing the ball in mid-stride, racing toward the goal line to score for the other team. Thus rudely awakened from my bliss, I sprinted after him. Looking back, Ray, two years older than me and always much faster, seemed amused that I was trying to catch him. He slowed down, then expressed mock surprise and worry that I was closing in, before he put on the speed and easily dashed for a touchdown.
This occurred in the back yard of the Tiller home, out in the country, not all that far from our home, though too far to walk.
My brother Joe had thrown that football, high in the sky, so that Ray could run under it. Joe had the confidence to take charge, and he was good at many things – just ask him! I grew up watching and learning many things from Joe. He was not afraid to go with his own ideas. I would copy him sometimes, and our other brother Sam, who was equally as talented as Joe, sometimes copied his ideas, as well. And although he would not admit it, later in life Daddy sometimes copied him, also.
My other brother, Sam was and is a close friend. He accepted me as I was more so than Joe or my sister Jean, not that they weren’t good friends, also. Sam was the most easy-going and happiest most of the time, of anyone in our family. I have known for a long time that Sam liked me and would be likely to understand how I felt about things. All three of my siblings looked out for me and did many things to help me.
Sports
As far back as I can remember, I loved sports. And by sports I mainly mean football, basketball, and baseball. My older brothers were twins, four years older than me. They were talented and smart, taught me some basics about these sports, and would play together with me some. They were good role models for me in sports, but being older, they were at school a lot and off playing with their friends sometimes. Up until the time that I started first grade, I spent most of my time at home, playing by myself while my older siblings were at school.
Basketball is the easiest of those three sports to play by oneself. You can just practice shooting. The barn behind our house doubled as our garage. When I was a little guy, there was a small hoop – about 8 feet up – on the back wall. There was also a smaller hoop on the side wall, so small in circumference that a regular basketball would barely fit through it. I spent hours and hours shooting baskets under the garage, imagining games in my mind.
Later on, we had a wooden basketball backboard rigged up on the telephone pole on our back driveway, with a goal at more or less regulation height. My father also built some backboards and goals to go inside one of the barn hallways, to simulate a full basketball court, at my request (and pestering, maybe). It was a pretty narrow court, and the barn rafters didn’t really leave enough room for the regulation 10 foot goal, but hey, it was still pretty cool in my eyes. I spent a lot of hours in that barn shooting baskets and imagining ball games.
I always liked baseball. The smell of a leather ball glove – that was the smell of springtime. My Uncle Thomas next door would always give us a new baseball each spring.
It’s kind of hard to play baseball by yourself. My brothers and I would play catch some, and then there was whiffle ball (plastic baseballs and bats – better for smaller fields and smaller teams).
We also got one of those bounce-back nets, so that you could throw a baseball and it would bounce back in your direction, so you could practice that way.
We would play “flies and skinners” – a game when you only had a few players, or sometimes “pickup” games with our cousins in the front yard. You see, we lived out away from town on our farm, and the only neighbor within walking distance was my father’s brother and his family – my Uncle Thomas and Aunt Wilma.
I so looked forward to having some sort of pickup ball game. My actual skill set versus my imagination of playing sports had little in common with each other. One time that our cousins came over to our house with a few of their friends we had a baseball game in our front yard. I was maybe 5 or 6 years old and the youngest of anyone there. There were only three or four kids on each team, so you just kept batting around until you made three outs. Well, I was an easy out, and one inning made all three outs for our team. I left crying in humiliation. Later my father commiserated with me, for he was the youngest of ten children and hadn’t been as good at sports as his older brothers Otis and Thomas. He remembered the same thing happening to him as a little boy.
My early baseball days involved a lot of striking out. Striking out and striking out. My brothers helped teach me and played with me some, but I struggled to just hit the ball. At age 5 I got to play “pee wee” baseball. In practice I sometimes could hit the ball but never in a game until I finally hit one in the last game. My brothers helped me learn the game – but they didn’t believe me when I said I was hitting the ball in practice.
Baseball got better as I got older, and I always enjoyed it, but I was never great at it.
Football
From a very young age, I always liked football, though I wasn’t any better at it than I was at baseball. Just the idea of it was fascinating. There was so much involved. Athleticism and graceful running but also brute force. There was an odd-shaped ball that could bounce any which way, lots of players and little battles going on all over the field on every play. Drama – conflict of goals, strategy and teamwork, mathematical logic and geometrical designs that impacted play design.
In football, my brothers helped me learn to throw and catch as we played around a fair amount. Like with baseball, though, I played mostly by myself, just hoping to have opportunities to play pickup games with other kids someday.
Picked Last
Most of us can tell stories of our experiences in being chosen last for some team or something – such as in a pickup ball game or gym class or whatever, when the team captains take turns choosing players for their side. Being chosen last can be embarrassing and humiliating. But let me tell you, for much of my early football career, it was my goal to be chosen last. Let me explain.
From the ages of about 4 to 6, there were occasions, though not frequent, when I got to be around when my older brothers and some of their friends were having a football game in the yard, either at our house or at the home of a friend of theirs. They would choose up teams and I wanted to play. I just knew it would be fun. I will describe the action in stages as I worked my way up the ladder:
1st Stage – “No, you can’t play, Charlie. You are too little. Go away.” Now I don’t really remember how I advanced past this stage, as my persuasive skills were (and are) limited. I’m going to confess that my best guess as to what happened is I used my trump card – run crying to my mother, “They won’t let me play.” Then she might reprimand them, “Let Charlie play; oh, and make sure he doesn’t get hurt.”
2nd Stage – “Okay we have to let Charlie play, but he’s on your team.” “No, we don’t want him – he’s on your team…” Back and forth until someone agreed to let me be on their team. Then during the game maybe I just ran around and stood around some and got in the way, as the older boys played and ignored me, but in my mind I was right there in the middle of the action. It was fun.
Now to explain the next stage, you have to understand a few special rules that we often used in those games. They were usually all passing plays (no running plays allowed), and to rush the passer from defense, you had to first count to 3 to give the offense a chance.
In real football games, you get four downs to score, or you can get a new set of four downs (a “first down”) by moving the ball 10 yards down the field. In these little pickup games with young boys, we would play that three completed passes made a first down. We didn’t measure 10 yards or anything like that. So completing a short pass, even if you gained no yardage, could be a benefit in helping to get another first down and keep the ball.
There came times when the quarterback was about to be tackled and he had no open receivers. With me just standing around near the line of scrimmage, he could just throw it in my direction and if I dropped it, it was no worse than throwing it away to keep from getting sacked. If I caught it, one of the older kids would run up and tackle me quickly, but it counted as a completed pass. At first, I usually dropped such passes, but gradually I got to where I could hold on to some of them. As time went by, I was starting to look like less of a liability for the team I was on.
3rd Stage – After picking all the other boys for teams and lining up to start the game, someone would remember me and say, “oh and your team gets Charlie, because it’s your pick.” The reply: “Well okay good.” [Okay good was a big step up from oh gee, but I still wasn’t quite there].
As my ability to sometimes catch the ball improved, so did my prospects.
4th Stage – After the last pick of all the other boys, one of the captains points at me and says: “and we get Charlie.” I was actually picked on purpose! Music to my ears.
Achievement of goal – picked last, at last. An asset instead of a liability. Then, as a bonus, the other captain said, “Well, we should get Charlie to even it out more because y’all have the better team.” Then “No, no, it’s our pick. We get Charlie.” They were actually fighting over me. I had arrived! The last pick, at last. A heady achievement at the age of 6.
Distractions
Now that I had finally achieved this high goal, I really looked forward to these games with my brothers and their friends. Problem was, not all of those boys liked football as much as I did. Or should I say, they were less obsessed with it. It became all too common to have a good game going, when some boy would say something like, “hey let’s go to the woods and play army.” Or maybe it was to build a fort. Or maybe it was to shoot birds with BB guns. Whatever it was, it ended the football game and that disappointed me. All of the older boys would take off for the woods behind the house.
I understand the fun of running through the woods and playing there, but I didn’t want to as much and couldn’t keep up with those older kids, anyway. So, generally, I just stayed behind and threw the football around by myself for a while. The games never lasted long enough for me. I hoped someday to play in a football game that lasted a long time. It was just fun to play.
As I got a little older, more opportunities to play pickup football games would come around. Over time, other kids my age became included. The Tiller family was the only one in our little country church that had any kids close to my age. John Tiller was my age and Ray Tiller was two years older. Their little brother Frank was four years younger than John and me and too little to play at first. As the Tiller boys started playing with us we would have some good games. They were a safer bet for a ball game, as their father, Mr. Phil Tiller, was something of a sports nut himself. He had been a Carthage football star back when he was in school, he was our Little League Baseball Commissioner, and he was our Sunday School Superintendent at the church.
After I started first grade and made other friends, there were more possibilities, but it was still true that good pickup football games were few and far between. I envied the kids who lived in town. They could just grab their ball and walk down the street to find other boys for a game, or so it seemed to me. There were rare occasions when I got to be in on such games, when invited to the home of a friend in town. That was fun. My social life was rather limited, though.
As the occasional opportunity for a game presented itself at our house or the Tillers’ house or some other friend of my brothers, the mix of players was now changed. There were many older kids (like my brothers) and younger kids, like John Tiller and me. Rules and strategies got improvised.
Up the Middle
One game we played was called “Up the Middle”. It’s ideal for when you have a big difference in ages. The big kids would play on their knees, the field was narrowed, and the little kids were always the ball carriers, trying to get through the maze of big kids. The field was made narrow enough that you could not go around them and thus you had to go “up the middle”. Scoring was simple, but unimportant – the only way the big kids could score was to recover a fumble – they were always on defense. The little kids just kept trying to make yardage and score a touchdown. It gave the little kids a lot more action than in a regular game, and it was a good change of pace. It was fun.
Constructing the size of the field was an art form in itself in any pickup game. There were basic safety concerns, like a clothes line or telephone pole too close to the field, so you moved the boundary line a little further in. Or the game itself might reveal that the field was too wide or too narrow because it was too easy or too hard on the defense. Sometimes flower beds, trees, or fences had to be navigated. At our house, there was a tree at each end that represented the goal lines (about thirty yards apart), and two other trees toward each end that were used as the “twenty yard lines”, for starting with the ball.
Our front sidewalk ran right through the middle of the field. We thought of it as the 50 yard line and declared it a no tackle zone. If you were about to be tackled you could stop on the sidewalk and the defense could not tackle you until you took off again. Special house rule. The flower beds by the front porch were out of bounds, but there was often confusion as the flower beds did not extend the entire length of the field. We played it that the out of bounds were wider (all the way to the house) after you passed the flower beds. Some kids would logically think that a straight line from the flower beds would be out of bounds, but we didn’t play it that way. This led to more than a few arguments after a touchdown.
Rectangles
If you think about it, most sports are played on rectangular fields. Football, basketball, tennis, soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, etc. A hockey rink is not exactly a rectangle, due to the rounded corners, but close. Baseball is played on a diamond-shaped field, whereas golf – well that’s a totally different deal. Special situations, like our flower beds, led to something other than a rectangular football field.
Part of the fun and character of pickup games were the special rules and field adaptations. Like when we played baseball in our front yard, most of what would be right field was actually over a fence into the side cow pasture. If you hit it there, the game had to stop until someone climbed the fence and retrieved the ball. At first, we just played it as out of bounds – a foul ball. Over time, though, to discourage slowing the game down, we declared it to be an out if you hit it over there. Likewise, if you had a baseball field where the home run fence was too short for some kids, then maybe you declared it would be an out instead of a home run if you hit it over the fence, at least for some kids above a certain age. That improved the fairness of the game.
I was always open for a pickup football game. Like if we were waiting for a bus at school, or out at the deer camp after hunting, there were often opportunities to start up a game. If you didn’t have a football handy, you might improvise with a coke can or anything you could. If you only had three guys, you would play interception, where one guy is quarterback, one receiver and one defender. To make it fair, sometimes you would have to limit how many seconds the offense had before throwing the pass. It was just fun.
There continued to be times when other kids would rather do something else than play a pickup ball game. I did not understand this. I distinctly remember one Sunday afternoon after church when the Tiller boys were coming over to play. I was stunned when they got out of their car dressed in full army gear and declared, “Let’s play Army.” Oh, no. Not the Tillers. They were the ones you could usually count on to play ball. So off they ran to the woods, and I was disappointed.
Other times we would play ball for a while and then a game we called “Giant”. It was pretty fun, though not as much fun as a ball game. The name came from the giant slide that we had in our yard. It was basically a game of chase or tag with specific rules we came up with that centered on going up and down the slide.
As I got older, in the last years of elementary school, I would sometimes get to meet with boys in my class on the weekend and play football at one of the high school practice fields. That was great fun.
Football could be fun to watch, too. The strategy was always fun. The skill and grace of the better players was downright artistic at times. A smooth pass route by a fast receiver with a well thrown ball, the receiver fluidly adapting as necessary to catch it in midstride. The fakes, the need for quick action, the constant activity, it was all exhilarating.
It was much more fun to play football than it was to watch it, though. My friends and I looked forward to junior high, when we could start playing on a real team.