Gridiron gal

Football can be an intoxicating way to spend a Sunday. It can also be a rough education.

by Lisa Susser

It's that time of year again: time for the clatter of plastic padding, for helmets crashing together with a solid thwunk. Time for giant men to huddle in tight tribal circles on green-as-the-other-side-of-the-fence fields, and for the rest of us to pile into stadiums and sit on rock-hard seats until our hips are stiff and our butts numb. It's time to spew fanaticism as we watch armored warriors grunt, hit, and run around each other. It's time for football.

I love football. This may seem odd coming from a girl, but I love how the strategic movement of one team plays against the defensive plans of the other. I like to watch the art of war played out on white lines. I enjoy the coaches pacing the sidelines like impatient parents waiting for children to come home after curfew. I still enjoy it, even though team personnel now change faster than Michael Johnson runs a sprint. (Eleven new head coaches this season alone!)

Football, in memory, means Sunday afternoons curled up with my dad watching teams battle it out, or making the drive to Veteran's Stadium in Philly to catch the Eagles in action. They usually lost, but hey -- that's 50 percent of the game. It was quality guy time spent analyzing plays, moves, referee calls, and strategy. Thanks to my dad and my older sister, Doreen, (who also loves the sport), football became my passion early on. To this day, I know exactly what both of them will be doing at noon on fall Sundays -- watching the sports shows that lead up to the hallowed kickoff hour of 1 p.m.

I had fallen away from the gridiron faith in recent years. Except for one college game last year, I hadn't watched football for 10 seasons. I had lost the edge. But last year I visited Doreen during the playoffs, and we watched hours of games, hours more of analysis. Becoming a fan again -- reuniting with my past -- was rejuvenating. Like religion, football binds me to my roots.

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I started playing football in elementary school. My three sisters and I made a dreadful team, especially since none of them liked to hit or be hit. Not me. I hungered to knock people down, to plow them out of my way. I was a born tackle. I got off on making guys fall. Leaping through the air, attaching myself to someone else's body, pulling him down to the ground. There's nothing like the mixture of grass, dirt, and sweat, a rich cocktail of aggression and thrill.

I sought out games with neighborhood boys, but they wouldn't let me play. It was a rude initiation into sexual politics. Sometimes the guys, hard up for a player -- or, I discovered, just wanting to cop a feel -- would let me play with them. The "let me" part really got me down. I couldn't figure out why the sport I loved should be off-limits. I noticed other girls weren't playing, weren't interested, didn't know how to hold the white-laced ball. I got the message: it was weird for me to play this game.

Playing football made me a misfit. Though I was also a cheerleader, a ballet dancer, and a member of the swimming team, what I really wanted to do was play football. I hung around my junior-high team, trying to ingratiate my way onto it. I ran drills, pushed tackling dummies around, watched films. I longed for the camaraderie the guys had. So I practiced throwing the ball and running plays. I learned to hit, to stop my opponent, and to interfere with the opposing team's game plan. I loved recovering fumbles. Tumbling on the turf, being smothered under the weight and musky-smelling plastic of several boys -- what could be more fun?

I set in motion a lot of commotion over being denied equal access to sports at school. I was determined to get what the boys already had: a spot on the team. What they had must be awfully good if they were so reluctant to share it. (I knew from playing Barbie dolls that if it was really good, you never shared. Girls and boys aren't that different.)

Once, after I had finally won the chance to practice with the team, I was tackled in a school hallway by one of the players. He warned me to stay away from "their" game. As I crashed onto high-waxed gray linoleum, I made a pact with myself: I'm playing this game. Screw you, mister. He left me with a chipped elbow that still serves as a reminder: entering a male enclave is painful, pioneering work. Though I never played in any league games, I earned my varsity letter in football, and I'm damn proud of it, thank you.

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Football, as I discovered, means learning how guys think. How they move, how they do battle. I have always viewed football as a giant how-to manual: how to make war, how to win graciously, how to outsmart your opponent, how to lose, how to learn from your mistakes, how to behave in the clinch, how to let 'er rip. Leadership skills and team skills; how to be a champion. And if it's often said that football builds character, it also builds lots of characters -- players, fans, commentators, coaches. Not that one more word should be written about Bill Parcells, but he knows how to bring together a bunch of losers, turn them around, and make them kings of the hill. Nifty work for a tuna. The Cowboys' Barry Switzer is a gem of eccentricity. Caught with a gun at an airport, he makes no bones about it -- America's team, after all, is based in a state where it's legal to carry a concealed weapon. (Besides, with all the convicted criminals playing for the Cowboys, he probably needs the protection.) My favorite coaches have always been the gentlemen coaches -- Don Shula of the Dolphins, Bill Walsh and George Seifert of the 49ers. Maybe even Pete Carroll. They're ruthless in a Cary Grant sorta way. Their brilliance is backlit with relentlessness. I'm also fond of the down-and-dirty boys like Al Davis, Mike Ditka, and Bill Cowher. Their ferocity is the true grit of the game.

As the '97 football season gets under way, I'm back on Sundays, watching football with a mix of marvel and revulsion. The players are always working a thin line between fragility and invincibility. The brawn, the brains, the costly mistakes. Football's a slow game where nothing more spectacular may happen in four quarters then men pushing hard and passing well. But, when it does, when someone runs back a kickoff return, or forces an interception, or does something heroically insane -- those are the moments when my breath comes short, my face flushes red, and I know I'm in love. With football.

Lisa Susser is a freelance writer living in Boston.