FOOTBALL & THE 80-YARD RUN

Autumn is my favorite season of the year. Autumn brings cooler air and football. As an alum of the University of Oklahoma I am an avid Sooners fan. Not much winning this season for my Sooner gridiron heroes. The team last Saturday suffered their worst loss ever to those hated Longhorns from the University of Texas. The score 49-0 says it all- or perhaps nothing at all. It all depends upon one’s perspective.

The same Saturday as my Sooners lost to Texas my grandson’s high school team defeated a team from a very small town in Kansas 42-0. It would have been 49-0, I am sure, if the officials had not used a running clock in the final quarter. Are football scores indicative of the character of the players, the quality of their academic education they are receiving, or the overall success of the schools they attend. Of course, not. But our culture acts like it does.

The Sooners, like all other Division 1 (or whatever they call themselves today) football powers measure success very simply- 1) have a winning record, 2) go to bowl game, 3) win the conference championship, 4) be eligible for the national championship, and/or be ranked in the top ten at season’s end. To accomplish these ends, Dl powers hire coaches, pay them millions of dollars, and expect instant results through their nation-wide recruiting efforts and their technical expertise of the game that they can transmit to their players. Thousands of fans pack stadiums and millions more fans tune in to their televisions to watch their teams play. It is as the continuance of Western Civilization as we know it will cease if our team loses. But it doesn’t. Life continues despite the outcome of the Red River Rivalry between the Sooners or Longhorns, or any other college football game.

Please understand I am not denouncing football- it’s a great game. I played high school football as a substitute lineman, both offense and defense. Football can teach teamwork, discipline, and how to handle both winning and losing. But football, like all other sports. does not teach character. As I used to tell the soccer and basketball players I coached in high school- diversity does not build character; diversity reveals character.

Roland Ortmayer was a college football coach who died in 2008 at the age of 91 years. “Ort” as he was known became the athletic director and football coach at the University of La Verne in southern California in 1948 and finished his coaching career with 182 wins, 193 losses, and 8 ties- hardly a record to boast. Yet Ort was known for his winning personality, gentle ways, and compassionate ideals who many former athletes considered the most influential person in their lives.

Ortmayer did not use a playbook, did not require attendance at practices nor game film sessions, did not believe in weight training, rarely recruited players, never cut a player, and set no curfews. His was no “new age” hippy philosopher but rather was a “throwback” to a bygone era of sport where all contests, like football. Are meant to be fun, not a life and death issue. Ort understood himself primarily an educator.

The legacy of Coach Ortmayer represents the other end of the spectrum from the culture of DI college football powers. If Ort had coached at Oklahoma, Michigan, or Ohio State, chaos would have ensued. And while that many football fans may be drawn to the simplicity of the vison Ortmayer had for college football, that vison is unrealistic for most college. Perhaps there is a middle ground. But I will let better minds in the sport discuss and debate that. In the meantime, we obsessive fans can do three things-

1.     Keep cheering on your favorite teams(s). I just know that my Sooners will get their revenge next year!

2.     Don’t suffer from clinical depression if your has a rebuilding (aka “bad”) year.

3.     To help keep a proper perspective, adopt and cheer on a team from a small college. I think for me that will be Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas. My high school is located in Ottawa County Oklahoma which is home to the Ottawa Tribal Nation. The university sits on land originally reserved for the Ottawa Tribe, so it offers academic scholarships to Ottawas who are high school graduates.

 

Now, about that 80-year run, Which was the title and focus of a short story published in 1941 and written by Irwin Shaw. Long ago, I read this story in either high school or college, and it has struck with me since. Christian Darling is a football player at a midwestern college who one day in a football scrimmage runs 80 yards for a touchdown. He becomes the team’s hero and wins over his girlfriend to become his wife. Christian’s identity is so wrapped around this 80-yard run that when he suffers twin crises in his personal and professional lives 15 years later, he returns to the field to relive that run that made him so important. But that 80-yard run, the reader discovers, was during a football practice, not a game! Christian realizes that he had practiced for the wrong thing (football) instead of practicing for life. Ort would have loved that story.