Good Old Southern FOOTBawl

It was the summer of 1967. LBJ was president. Race riots raged across the country. Nearly half a million U.S. troops were fighting in Vietnam. Thurgood Marshall would soon be confirmed as the first Black Supreme Court Justice.

Were we paying attention to that stuff? Not much. We were laser-focused on surviving a damn hot Alabama summer dominated by Footbawl, as we called it.

We have no idea what the females of the opposite sex were doing to get ready for our freshman year (August of ’67), but most of us boys were drawn to Footbawl. It’s what you did then in Birmingham and, honestly, it still is.

Our new high school had two grades in 1967 (9th & 10th), so there was a freshman team and a B-Team. The advanced freshmen were immediately pulled up to the B-Team, but a huge, motley crew of almost seventy 9th-grade boys were on the freshman team. That group of 85-90 probably made up 75% of the freshman class’s male population!

Our freshman team was a not-very-athletic bunch. Old school. We endured terrible canvas-like pants and heavy cotton jerseys that didn’t breathe. The plastic helmets were unsafe. Our shoulder pads were so big that we looked like mutants in a modern Marvel movie. And I guess we bought our own crummy cleats; who can remember?

Our entire team was crammed into a PE locker room meant for about thirty students. Uniforms, pads, helmets, and shoes for two players were somehow stored in each locker. What a stinking mess.

Outside, in practice, we were blasted with intense heat, a no-water philosophy, and “Here, son, have some salt tablets so you’ll probably die before school starts.” Back then, it was all about being tough, kind of like Marine boot camp. Brutality reigned. And “sports medicine” didn’t yet exist, not even in the NFL.

To provide us a place to practice, someone had bush-hogged a brushy, grown-up area next to the main football field. We grow some hellacious weeds in the Deep South, so our “field” contained 3-inch-tall, half-inch-thick weed stobs strong enough to impale a player. Because there was no grass, we had ourselves a dust bowl within a week or so.

Jesus could’ve spit in that stuff, made a paste, and healed blind people every day. But nobody died that summer. God was watching over us, as He had with the Israelites in the desert. But we got no manna from heaven, just salt tablets from well-intentioned coaches.

The diversity of physiques on our team was staggering. There were 16-year-olds who were shaving and driving on one end of the spectrum, mixed together with guys who hadn’t hit puberty yet on the other. There were even a few 13-year-olds who wouldn’t turn 14 until after school classes began. Ouch.

A few guys were pretty athletic; the majority were not. Some weighed over two hundred pounds; others barely tipped the scales at a hundred. Most would not be back for their sophomore season. There were geniuses and idiots, but the idiots are more memorable.

We were animals in a brand-new, very small cage. Surviving. And we weren’t even thinking about school. Not yet, at least.