we played small pickup on the courthouse lawn, if more boys showed up we'd walk around the block and play on the high school lawn sometimes people would even watch... never happen today, somebody might hurt and sue
Posted on 02/07/2016 8:45:16 AM PST by MtnClimber
I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where I could walk with my football to the field near my house, kick the ball around a few times, and - within minutes - my friends would be pouring out of their homes ready to play for hours on end. Those were some of the greatest times of my life. On that field, a skinny, nerdy kid who was more comfortable with graph paper and 12- and 20-sided dice could learn how to take a hit and - just as important - how to deliver one. I gained confidence, I was humbled (more than once), and I fell in love with America's new athletic pastime. However, there are some on the left who want to deny kids those kinds of days, to turn America against its favorite sport. To them, football is just too male, too martial, and too darn American.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
The left wants men to be women.
Ping
In my time also, you could walk outside with a ball, a bat or a basketball or in the winter with a hockey stick and skates and always scare up a game or what resembled a game in no time. Sayonara the old America.
Children are rarely allowed to play by themselves now, whether it’s football or hide-and-seek. Someone calls the cops.
we played small pickup on the courthouse lawn, if more boys showed up we'd walk around the block and play on the high school lawn sometimes people would even watch... never happen today, somebody might hurt and sue
Same here...
Today, though, everything has to be organized...an association...a director...schedules...
Kids today would not recognize the word “sandlot”...
I miss the days when a six year old kid could walk 1/2 mile home from school and the parents not worrying or panicking over something happening...
TV commercials show men as being slow and stupid...Women taking care of problems and the men just standing there nodding their heads...
One neighbor had a huge backyard. That was the official gathering place. I can’t count the number of hits I took and gave. But it was such fun.
The biggest hazard? They had a big dog. Sometimes, when you got tackled, you’d get up smelling funny because of a hidden “dog bomb” we missed on the first scan of the “field.” You kept playing anyway.
Those were the days.
As Americans, we’ve lost that “toughness” and fighting spirit that these games teach. Yeah, your knee kinda hurts and your nose is bleeding, and you’ve got dog crap smeared in your hair......do you stick it out and keep pushing for the endzone? Or do you go home cryin’ to momma? No one ever went home....it was unthinkable.
Nowadays? I weep for our children who are not being taught this.
Football is also one of the best training grounds for the Armed Forces. It teaches teamwork, sacrifice, working with pain and the importance of victory.
I think this is no small part of the plan to get rid of football at all levels of play.
1. It shares one flaw with soccer, as the only sports where the clock runs after the whistle blows and the ball isn't even in play. The average NFL game has 11-15 minutes of actual "live" play in a 3.5-hour TV broadcast, which pretty much makes it nothing more than an advertising con game.
2. It has developed to the point where grotesquely oversized humans have become commonplace in the game. Is it any wonder that performance-enhancing drugs are now the norm?
3. It's become so specialized that professionals don't even really play "football" anymore ... they play one position on the field on a part-time basis, and they're completely unsuited for almost any other position on the field. A decent high school quarterback, for example, would probably be a better NFL quarterback than an All-Pro linebacker would be.
I disagree with the points you made.
1.) That time in between plays is not like a pause in baseball where the pitcher scratches his crotch, steps on and off the rubber, shakes his head up or down, etc. That time in between snaps is the setting of the chessboard for each and every play. In between the plays is often where the most cerebral work in the game comes. The players don’t know or care what is going on with advertising, if anything, it annoys them.
2.) The size and speed of the athletes in every sport has increased over the years. Hockey and basketball are good examples as well. Performance enhancing drugs are a problem in every single sport, bar none. If you want to damn all sports, that would be fair. To single out football out of context with other sports isn’t.
3.) I don’t really see the point in point #3. All players in every sport are more specialized than they ever were before. It is fun to see a defensive lineman lining in the backfield up to block for a running back near the goal line, but why is that even important as a flaw? One of the things that makes football interesting to a vast swath of people is that to a greater degree than many other sports, the actual intricate teamwork required to run a play to a successful conclusion is far more demanding than many other sports such as baseball, hockey, or basketball. All eleven players have to do their jobs to a more exacting degree than most other sports, or the play fails. In baseball, you can have a single player win the game by pitching a no-hitter. In hockey, a goalie can stand on his head to stuff a team for an entire game. In basketball, you can get the ball into the hands of Wilt Chamberlain, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, or Lebron James, and offense takes care of itself. Doesn’t work that way in football. I don’t see this as an inherent or obvious flaw.
I also have to disagree.
Football is one of the most complex games people play. Each play is a choreographed ballet where the dancers weigh 250lbs and up.
If you watch the slow motion diagrams of the plays showing how everyone moves you get a real appreciation how these oversized behemoths have to move in unison.
most sports have designated specialty players. Thats not necessarily a flaw, imho.
We used to play tackle football with no equipment all the time. It was crazy.
Then, when I was in the Navy and began playing pickup tackle football games with no equipment, that was just silly. You could really get hurt doing that.
When I was a kid, we played smear the queer all the time. I wonder what kids call it today.
That’s why I would go with a weight limit of 250 pounds, it’s dangerous for long-term health to be so heavy, even if it’s not fat.
1. That time in between snaps is the setting of the chessboard for each and every play. In between the plays is often where the most cerebral work in the game comes.
For one thing, the inevitable result is that football has become an overly scripted performance more than a real sport. And your post doesn't address my original point on this: Why the hell does the clock run while all this "cerebral work" and "setting of the chessboard" is going on?
2. The size and speed of the athletes in every sport has increased over the years. Hockey and basketball are good examples as well.
Players getting bigger and faster is one thing. How about when many of the positions are played by men who are bigger and slower? Is there any other sport out there where this guy would be considered an "athlete?" LOL.
3. All players in every sport are more specialized than they ever were before. It is fun to see a defensive lineman lining in the backfield up to block for a running back near the goal line, but why is that even important as a flaw?
Specialization itself isn't a problem, but football is the one sport where specialization is tied to variations in physical size -- which means players who specialize in one thing are completely unsuited (by physical nature, not talent) to others. You don't see this degree of specialization in any other sport.
And the teamwork point you make really underestimates the role of entire teams even in cases where one player can dominate on the scoreboard. I don't know any pitcher who tossed a no-hitter and struck out every batter, for example.
Check out Olympic hockey to see how time should be used efficiently in a team sport. They have 60 minutes of play and two 15-minute intermissions to clean the ice, and the average hockey game has around 55-65 stoppages of play that require a faceoff ... and they get through that all of that in about 2 hours and 15 minutes.
It’s because there’s more entertainment options for kids. Back then kids entertainment was playing inside, watching TV, or playing outside. Now they’ve got the internet and game systems and smartphones. The fact is today’s kids play in pickup games all the time, they just aren’t playing sports. The modern pickup is Call of Duty, HALO, World of Warcraft. They live in a larger world than we did.
Your really using that BS “11-15” minute crap?! Come on, you KNOW football better than that. You KNOW that 90% of what determines if a play succeeds happens between the break of the huddle and the snap. Pre-snap reads, adjustments, showing looks and dropping out of them, motion, those are all part of the action, the most important part of the action. Anybody acting like football only happens between the snap and the whistle is just lying.
Grotesquely oversized humans are in every sport but baseball... oh wait Big Papi hasn’t retired. Performance enhancing drugs are in every sport.
There’s tons of multiple position players in the league, one of the big stories of last year was moving Chris Mathews. Plus of course almost everybody on special teams is also somewhere else. And really there’s nothing wrong with an all-pro linebacker sucking at QB, I doubt any all-pro LB could have passed muster at QB in the last 60 years, 2 way players were gone before most of us were born.
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