Dat Foosball is da Debil

There is a special scent of woman’s perfume that has always captured my attention like no other. Romance by Ralph Lauren can sway my ship like a giant rudder and will cause me to actually float through the air and be lost like a love struck houndog. Its borderline obnoxious how possessed I become by the scent, but there is another smell that possesses my soul in a deeper realm and I would take any day of the week. It’s a scent that I usually only find the final weeks of July and most of the month of August. Unless you have a shared and like experience you probably can’t connect but this time of year I always catch a whiff of the humid dew rising off of fresh cut grass and it brings back a million memories waking up early to get to the field house to strap on 25lbs of football pads and helmet to walk into the hot morning sun for preparation on the field of battle.



The memories are so thick you can do your best to waive them away like flies but they won’t subside. The awkward feeling of the football pants washed in a hot dryer till they have shrunk to a size that you almost need Vaseline to squeeze into them. That jersey that you didn’t wash from the day before and the smell of the sweat that has soaked into it along with the early smell of mildew forming on the towels in the locker room. The cleat shaped clumps of dirt and grass dried hard on the cold concrete floor, which break up under your bare feet and you are forced to brush off as you slide on those hot socks fresh from the drye. The tightness of the helmet that is banded on your head and provides protection, but is so covered on the inside with padding you almost suffocate. I can still smell the sweet stench of Coach Price’s wintergreen tobacco, and see the brown string of spit that usually accompanied it as he screamed in the ear hole of your helmet when your actions were found less than desirable in his sight, and for me it was quite often. The grass, the sweaty jersey, that metal taste of blood in your mouth from the cut on your finger you just licked off to keep the ref from making you bandage it up…all these memories sink deep into my soul and summon the demon of football past and it comes relentlessly like a black magic voodoo woman haunting my dreams with her lustful and temptress thoughts of running at full speed and crushing the very bones of an opponent carrying that treasured brown trophy of pigskin and autographed signatures of former football greats. I have recently discussed these dreams out loud and to my anguish, my black magic lover visited my dreams again last night. I awoke to find myself racked with tension and the jet-fueled infusion of testosterone that always accompanies such things. It’s like that dream you have when you are flying, and even in the dream you know it’s not possible to fly but when you do and you are soaring… you wake up excited that you got to do it, but a little sad that it wasn’t real.



So where do I go from here? I was relating to a friend recently, you can’t just strap on pads and strike an unexpecting victim, because honestly, you’ll break out in a bad rash of hand cuffs. You can play a pick up game of basketball or join a softball league or even croquet somewhere, but why would anyone invent a sport with amazing weapons like bats and mallets where you aren’t allowed to extract any blood from your opponent. Fight clubs are illegal, and any kind of contact sport is simply off limits to guys like me. Granted you probably will never find a kinder more docile soul with giant paws of strength yet a heart of compassion and gentleness. Sort of a Ferdinand the bull if you will with a heart to see broken people healed and hatred of bullies. I’ve never been deer hunting even once as the sadness I would feel in taking the life of one of those majestic creatures as a sport or for a trophy would be gut wrenching. Many of my friends enjoy the hunt and the kill and live for the season, but for me it wouldn’t be a reality. So I find it odd the walking dichotomy of which I have become always desiring to fight for something I believe in, yet being a giant teddy bear with a gently touch. It occurred to me as I drove home from church today the generation of my grandfathers fought in a great war and their fathers fought in a war of nations before them, the men my fathers age fought for our country in Vietnam, but the men and boys of my era have never had anything they have felt the need to stand and fight for. They have nothing of which they can empty their passion into except their jobs. We have taken the warriors and hunters from the battle fields and jungles and reduced them to managers and factory workers who purchase their kill on a piece of plastic wrapped Styrofoam with a blood napkin which insulates us from remembering who we really are. Provision for our families is no longer the battle for survival but it is the accomplishments and the climb of the ladder to see how much air conditioned leather we can wrap our backsides in as we travel in a steel covered jukebox on our way to the next sporting event where we consume fatty foods and beer. We have twisted our need for purpose to a place of consumption and if we look around, the once great male of our species has left the place of muscle sculpted provider and high protector of the family to pasty white flab covered arrogance looking to be served as we drive around to the 1st window. I am disgusted by the figures of leadership in our nation, and many businesses and churches, although not as judgment as it seems to come across in my words, but in sadness as we have left the integrity of a way of life where men were men and our sons longed to be like their fathers who were their personal hero’s for the amount of provision and leadership they brought to the table.

I have found recently in my prayers and study of the gospels, that to be a leader of anything means to serve, not to be served. To be a father or husband is to be like the example Christ gave us to lay down our lives and die to ourselves. It will never matter the response we receive from those we serve, we should continue to tirelessly serve until our death, never expecting a certain outcome. Our service should be in love to give until it hurts for those we love because love isn’t an investment to receive a return like stocks. It is a commodity we give a way. It is never selfish, its very nature only exists to give itself away…period. Jesus ministry on this earth at the time of his death in anyone’s opinion was a complete failure. He had ministered to thousands of people, teaching and healing and yet at the final day on the cross at his feet gathered only his Mother, his best friend and one grateful woman. Yet it was in the completion of his death that we find his victory and the next book to the right in the Bible we find the disciples forming the church that has changed the world completely since that time.

As men we will serve our families tirelessly, always giving, always providing, always teaching and in our lifetimes we may not see the fruit of our labor, and God bless those with long lives and fruitful offspring who love them in their old age because more times than not we fail to see what God was doing with our lives while we are on the Earth. I know that in my passion to be male I will pass on the wisdom I’ve acquired in dying to myself, and I will spend the rest of my life serving my family teaching my boys to raise the banner of Christ high, and learning the fine art of dying to my selfish desires. The fight we rage in my generation is not one of men and nations, but the fight to find daily that our wives and our children and our families will know that if they have to etch our names in a granite memorial that it will be because we fought trying to preserve the principals of the walk Christ taught us to share with him on this earth. Superman is a hero of the people. Little boys don’t wear the blue shirt with the red S because he celebrated touchdowns and shouted “look at me”, he stopped speeding trains, and flying bullets and rescued kittens in trees. Serving others with no thought of personal gain is the greatest battle we can wage. If I never play another day of that debilish foosball, that’s okay, but I pray the battle to be more like Christ and die to self daily will mark the rest of my days and they can brand a large S on my pine box when they lay me in the ground and print “he served” on my headstone. I can only pray I’m found worthy…

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