What happens when the games are over?

I was sixteen when I first broke a bone. It was a small bone in my hand. I broke it on George Brown's helmet. As I was want to do, as George snapped the football to the quarterback in practice, I slapped my open palm across his helmet. It was the same motion I used in every practice, every week, every year we played against each other in practice at Dunwoody High. The only difference was that this time a small bone in my hand cracked, making my head swim and feel like I was going to pass out. George, like the doctor he would become asked me what had happened. I told him I broke my hand. Unlike the doctor he would become, George said, "Good. You have been giving me headaches for weeks."

Three days later, I was dressed out for the last game of my junior year, against Northside High in North Fulton County, and I was wearing two pieces of rubber taped to either side of my palm. It didn't prevent any additional pain when I used my wounded hand to fend off offensive linemen or tackle running backs or run quarterbacks off the field in some level of terror (I hope).

I mention all this as juxtaposition to the original thought which, you may remember, that I didn't break a bone until I was sixteen. When I was a child, I was relatively careful. My mother was protective of me. I didn't do anything too rash or dangerous. I didn't break any bones.

Frank, on the other hand, broke his collarbone twice. It wasn't that he was brittle. Just a bit more foolhardy. He took more chances.

Still, I was more careful. It wasn't until I was on the brink of my time playing football, when my mother told me, "Be agressive." I think on that last home game on Wilson Field when I put an opposing quarterback in the hospital with a concussion. Was that what she was talking about? I know at the end of the last game she was thankful that it had all ended, fourteen years of football, without a serious injury. Maybe it was just being agressive to a point.

Still, I worry that I was too protected than the previous generations. Would I be ready for what was ahead? Would be found wanting when faced with life's dangerous challenges?

Now I worry about the newest generations. Generations of boys whose mommas put them in soccer becuase they were afraid of what might happen on the football fields. What will happen when they are forced to act? Will they rise up? I know football was no panacea. No ultimate wisdom. But it did provide certain opportunities to learn in an atmospher of good, clean, healthy violence.