My love affair with sports has a lot to do with football. My passion has always been football. Growing up as a young kid with my dad I always loved watching it all the way up till I was 8 and decided to play football with the JV team. It has always been a love of mine whether it was watching or playing, it grew so much that I began to get anything that had to do with football I would buy it. Living in a house divided in sports team except baseball is a hard decision at best. Growing up alongside Bear, Packer, Colts and Ram fans just isn’t exactly what i'd call a great time. My dad was a pure 49er fan, growing up a Vikings fan and my granddad a Bear fan was a huge win for my dad but after betting on them to win the 1976 Super Bowl against the Raiders and losing, well he decided to change teams and become a 49ers fan which paid off for him in the long road. I wish I was that lucky, anyways next is my mother who is a Chiefs fan at heart. Only time she watches football is when the Chiefs play the Raiders and that time is rare as ever now a days. Next we come to my little brother Andrew who has been a Packer fan for as long as I can remember. His idol has always been Brett Favre. Why I’ll never know nor do I want to. And last but hopefully not least is me, and my Oakland Raiders, the main point for me being a Raider fan is that they always played dirty. I would watch NFL network all the time to see old highlight reels from the 70’s and 80’s when football was actually a sport worth watching. I would sit there and watch my idols Howie Long and Ted Hendricks kill defenders and watch the other teams get demolished. Then after the defensive reels the offense would come out onto the field and Marcus Allen, Bo Jackson, Ken Stabler, Jim Plunkett, and Fred Blinkitnikoff would light up the TV with their marvelous passing, catching and running shows on the field. Making the other team look like idiots out there trying to show up the Raiders defense.
I gave up on trying to convince my classmates and friends that the Bears aren’t going to go anywhere in the NFL, and they would flash back into my face that the Raiders aren’t either, which I already knew but every season I hear the same old speech about the Bears winning the Super Bowl which is a load of nonsense. And then seeing them make it all the way to the Super Bowl and lose to the Colts was just icing on the cake for me because it brought a sense of reality to the Bear fan s of RHS that you aren’t going to win like you did in 1985 but they are hopeful for their Bears as I am for my Raiders but alas there is the common thing going around back then when the Bills were having a better shot the Chicago but I always let them believe in what they like.
Playing football was a huge deal to me I had always wanted to make my dad proud of me while I played football he would brag to his friends at work that his son was starting to play football for his school’s JV team. I tried my hardest to live up to his standards, which I never really found out if I did or not. I remember first year I played nose tackle and I was small at the time and the position worked out for me. But second to last game of the season against EPG the fat center hit me helmet to helmet and I had suffered my first concussion. It wasn’t exactly painful but I got up from it and I was out for the year, the concussion isn’t what hurt the most. Seeing my Dad’s face as I walked off the field to get checked for head damage he was frowning at me like always and I couldn’t bare to look up at him. We came home in silence I told mom what had happened and she asked if I was okay. Physically yeah I was fine, inside of me my pride was broken. I vowed that next year I would make it up to my dad and make sure that I was the one injuring people.
That following year I had grown from a 105 lb nose tackle to a 155 lb right end. I chose the number 54 because it was one number that everyone around here knew by Brian Urlacher and starting off the season I had 2 sacks and 4 tackles. And every time I would make a tackle or sack or even deflect the ball I would scream and cross my heart and I would look down at the front row of seats and see my dads smiling face. I felt proud of what I had become to my dad, I felt like I had made up for the past mistakes of last year. The second to last game was against Heyworth and it was for 2nd place in the conference. The only teams I hated more were Lexington and EPG the two teams we already defeated, in the last 2 minutes of the game we had to keep them from scoring and it was a QB flick and It was to my side then QB ran right into me and I had stopped him cold. The only thing different about this play when I got up from the impact was I could hear the whistles blowing for a flag and naturally id assumed that it was for the other team since they had more of a chance to get called on a play then I did since I was the defending player on the play. No I was called for grabbing the other player’s facemask and the play was called for an extra five yards for me throwing up my hands in the air in disgust for my poor actions on the play. I was hauled off the field by Ray the coach at the time for my turn to take a rest and we lost the game because of my mistake. I looked up at Ray and he was giving me it’s not your fault speech and I looked into the stands and saw dad with that same expression on his face whenever I did something wrong on the field. I walked off the field the night sky was my only actual comfort the whole ride home. I keep repeating this process over the next couple years of getting better and trying to please my dad in the one sport he and I both loved dearly.
I had tried summer league baseball as a kid along with my other future football teammates but I was never really good at doing that, so when I gave up that dream of impressing my dad and to make him proud of me I went out for football and the rest is a history of concussions legs, hands, necks, and many other parts of my body had been injured trying to please the one man that I had tried to live up to my whole life. Freshman year was the last year I had decided to play football because my grades were terrible for sophomore year and on the last game of the jv team I had been allowed to play right end again for the last time and I made the winning tackle to win our last game and I actually felt proud of myself to make it this far and still accomplish of making my dad proud of me which I had never seemed to do even when I left 8th grade year to move up to freshman and high school football, but on that last drive to win the game with the crowd screaming and the fans and banners flying for us as we one as a team I looked over at the sidelines one more time and saw my dad smiling like he used to when we would go fishing and id help him reel in the big catfish that we would eat later that night. After seeing my dad smile and finally say that he is proud of me for what I have become that made the idea that I had failed him at the beginning of the years of football I had always had the idea of that being my problem with sports, but it turns out that i was just the way he wanted me to be.