Printed: 9/1/06
I’m a big believer in time travel.
Not the kind where you’re whisked back 300 years in a time machine and risk transcendental catastrophe if you change the past. I’m talking about when you experience, as an adult, something you did so often as a child that you’re transported backward into memories so vivid you could be reliving them.
A high school football game accomplished that for me last Friday. Specifically, the J.L. Mann-Greenville High game that annually serves as the grand finale to Spirit Week.
Since I listed Mann first, you have guessed correctly that we’re Patriots. Alas, we lost to the Raiders for the reportedly 10th time. But as my husband and I had scads of friends across the field on the Raiders side, I couldn’t dredge up the degree of outraged regret I would have felt had I been there as a student rather than a parent. I was too proud of their boys.
But I was struck by how easily the old rush returned, walking through that gate with the first football game of the season straight ahead. It’s a rush like no other. College football can’t compare – at least it never has for me, though I mean in no way to malign the Tigers, Gamecocks and Paladins who put on such grand shows for the fans every season.
That’s the point, I think. College football is just so polished, so hyped, so grand scale. Rarely would you see a 5-foot-3-inch. player getting major game time in Death Valley. But they’re on the high school rosters, and they’re good. At high school games, you see players on the field who look like Hummers and players who look like pencils in shoulder pads. They’re all cheered just as wildly. They’re our boys. Home-grown. Just a few blinks of the eye past third-grade carpool.
The stands filled up quickly last Friday, thanks to the combination of Spirit Week and first game of the year. Before long we were packed shoulder to shoulder in the parent section, doling out dollars for hamburgers and chips and endless rounds of lukewarm cola. In between, I watched the unofficial pre-game show, marveling at how little some things have changed since the days I sat in the student section.
That was in Savannah in the seventies, but the show remains the same. Top-billing always goes to The Stroll. You know: the languid, expressionless, teenage saunter in twos and threes along the length of the bleachers, eyes flicking ever so casually up into the stands. Adult faces never register. But occasionally, the eyes brighten and you know someone worthy is watching from above. Male shoulders will straighten. Female heads will toss. And the saunterer(s) will slow to allow ample time for admiration.
Down below, on the field, the visiting team labors to instill unease in the home folks, snapping through drill after drill with unflagging vigor. The home team mills around on the other end, studiously unimpressed, breaking into sporadic small groups for the occasional warm-up.
Meanwhile, the female stars warm up as well: the cheerleaders, pantomiming routines on the sidelines, and the dance team, which I think must be the modern equivalent of majorettes, who seem to have vanished from the high school football scene during the years I was running elementary school carpools.
“If you haven’t witnessed a dance team yet, get ready,” a friend warned when I inquired about a passing girl in a sequined body suit who seemed exceptionally gifted at The Stroll. “They’re really something. I tell my son not to look.”
Oh, yeah, I’m sure he takes that advice. These girls are waaaay past baton-twirling. Watching them perform at half time, I thought they must surely be where J.K. Rowling got her idea for the veela, the exquisitely enchanting females who charm the male species into a trance every time they dance or sing in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” It’s a good thing the ball players were safely tucked away in their locker rooms.
But you know, dancing veelas and ubiquitous cell phones aside, the experience of high school football really hasn’t changed that much since my days in the student section – which is amazing, considering how much else in the world has changed.
The skinny metal stands, the boomp-boomp-boomp from the band, the field so close you can read the expressions of the players on the sidelines – it’s all there, as instantly familiar as The Stroll.
I’ll let you in on a secret: it didn’t matter, in the end, if we lost or won. It was high school football all the same. For $5, you can’t buy a better ride.
