NO ONE MAKES A SOUND for the entire return trip. Not a whisper. Not even a cough inside the yellow bus packed with players and coaches. Forty or fifty flesh-and-blood statues facing dead-ahead, steeped in the kind of quiet that asks: Did somebody die?
Every helmet remains strapped on crew-cut heads, as if the game has yet to start, or is still in progress–not over. Win or lose, players aren’t permitted to remove helmets from the moment we step on the bus, until after we step off. On this night, no one dares break a rule.
My head features a choppy butch cut–another team rule–buzzed by my dad, a veteran. I fancy myself a surfer boy with longish sun bleached hair, so shaving my head during the Hippie fashion heyday is teenage culture shock. But I shave it anyway.
Tonight, instead of a helmet I wear a cast on my left arm, shattered after falling from atop a climbing pole on a PE field. Naturally I stick with the team, though I won’t heal in time to play any more games.
This is five decades ago, and the Los Alamitos football program is only four years old. The Fountain Valley Barons have just embarrassed our sophomore team, 36-0. It feels like somebody died. It feels like every time they touched the ball, some massive back rambled to the end zone, swatting would-be tacklers like pests. Fountain Valley is billed as “the largest high school west of the Mississippi,” with some 5000 kids. Big boys. Fast. But on a mission to build a football tradition, our coaches tolerate no excuses.
Well after dark, the yellow bus hisses to a stop, a giant beast exhaling pent-up pressure. In the dark, we hear the hand-cranked mechanical door fold open, and Coach Fitzpatrick is first off. We follow, single-filing onto the parking lot next to our home field. Fitz blocks our way to the locker room, instead directing us to the field with a rigid straight arm and stiff index finger.
A 440-yard red dirt track circles the dark football field. An assistant coach herds us to the nearest goal line, passive lambs to slaughter. Not even a bleat.
Fitz is pissed and fixing to prove it. About to send a simple message: This is not acceptable. Not here. His direct, brutal tirade lasts less than a minute, every word true. The same rant and subsequent punishment fifty years later might cost a coach his job. But this is 1971.
It’s time for the actual lesson, the good part, something to make sure all the lambs get the message. Fitz follows his diatribe with about a million whistle blasts. The first whistle screeches GO! and we bolt off the line. The remaining however many blasts, 10 or 12, or 20 per hundred yards, mean hit your stomach, bounce up, keep running. We call them up-downs, or suicides, but they feel like murder. Whatever, they suck, especially in full pads.
Up and down the field we go. Down and up, down and up, down and up, we go. Repeat, to infinity. Soon, the silence of the lambs is ruined by groans and gasps and guttural desperation. Someone hyperventilates. Another goes down hard between whistles. The cacophony includes all the frantic sounds you might expect from tortured boys facing eternity. Even the captains quit leading, switching to survival mode. But no one quits the work. Corny as it sounds in 2021, in 1971, punishment will actually kill you before you quit.
No coach tells me to skip the up-downs. No one says, you’re injured kid and you didn’t play anyway, so carry equipment to the locker room. No coach lets me off because we are one team. All in this together. No one expects special treatment, and no one gets it. Not even the kid in a cast.
So, I run with my teammates up and down the field, dropping, scrambling up, stumbling forward, quads on fire. A wounded animal, life fading with each length of field.
I slam my cast into the ground on every whistle. The quick whistles, say within five yards, are the worst. My semi-healed wrist throbs inside its disintegrating armor. After the season when I have it removed, the doc tells me he’s never seen plaster so thrashed. Says it looks like tired tube sock and smells worse. Says he can see my skin through the mesh.
Fitz is laying hard on the whistle, to be heard over the din of suffering. By the end of it, maybe 10 or 12 field lengths, or an hour, or however you measure agony, we can barely climb to our feet. Not even the best of us. At least I’m not wearing pads, something maybe resented by a few teammates. The tortured can hold a grudge.
1970’s football pads must be what you wear in hell. Heavy, bulky, restricting, chaffing, and hot. We never have a day-off from pads. No helmet-and-shorts walk-throughs. No hiding knee pads in your locker. It’s full pads and full contact every day. Even on blistering August two-a-days. Even the days you can reach up and scoop a handful of Orange County smog.
A football helmet is a weapon. Our coaches expect us to use the crown to strike a blow, always barking, Use your hat! They explain that it doesn’t hurt when you’re the one dishing, so dish it hard. I find this to be mostly true. This is before concussions and spinal cords really join the conversation. It’s decades before such technique draws a yellow penalty flag, or lawsuit.
We don’t get water until after practice, so the hot pads of hell team-up with dehydration. A dry two-hour practice feels like six. When coach finally cuts us loose, we bolt for the locker room and race to the coldest water fountain, or the one with actual pressure. The backs and receivers fly, so we linemen lose the race. But we don’t care. We elbow our way to sinks and showers. We’re animals.
An older buddy on varsity, he explains a special varsity perk. About halfway through practice, players are told to remove helmets, flip them over and form a line. A coach walks the line, spraying hose water into steaming helmets. Personalized, mini oil-slicks. Heated dudes slurp at the salty water, guzzling down any frothy blend that doesn’t escape through helmet holes. It’s good to know we have perks ahead.
Following practice, after wide open group showers, we stop by the equipment room. Our equipment man, Archie–think Popeye–peddles five cent lemon popsicles through the top half of a Dutch door. Those of us with a nickel suck them down to the stick, lickety-split. A tiny piece of heaven to a soggy-headed, zit-faced teenager, fresh up from hell.
At Los Alamitos High School there is no car parade of parents collecting sophomores after games or practice. Most of us, even after dark, we’re on our own to make it home however we can. On Stingrays or skateboards. Or hitchhiking thumbs. Or legs. It’s the ‘70s, a decade when Southern California is lousy with serial killers. Still, helicopter parents don’t come hovering for years. We’re just expected to survive, without backup.
I make it home the night of the Fountain Valley game and recount the abuse inflicted by our coaches. I know better, but I naively hope for a speck of sympathy. My folks, both of them WWII army vets, shrug. It’s years before parents make a beeline to the Superintendent of Schools.
There’s this enduring battle. Old men compare old school to present day. Young men roll their eyes. It probably started when man first walked the earth. When I was your age, we didn’t have fire!
Some old school ways have disappeared for the better, replaced by sensible ideas, like, hydration. Like, a helmet is protection, not a weapon. Or like, a parent fighting a kid’s battle is sometimes necessary.
But plenty of good can be excavated from an old football field. Toughness and discipline are mixed in that old dirt. So is respect–for coaches, for expectations, for each other. If you dig a little, you’ll see the value of hard truth over sugar-coating. You’ll find that consequences get a boy’s attention. That suffering is a path forward, and punishment is an effective motivator. Look deeper and you’ll recognize that a kid fighting his own battle adds bark. And you may even find independence and courage in a kid dodging serial killers.
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