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Sept. 26, 2005 All right, here’s the deal. You see I’ve been around long enough to have seen Bart Starr and the Green Bay Packers win the first two Super Bowls and understood what it was all about when it happened. I worshipped Starr and his team; I knew the names of every player, their position and jersey number. Donnie Anderson, Carroll Dale, Ray Nitschke, Willie Davis, they were all as familiar to me as looking in the mirror. I actually thought that if God retired Lombardy was a shoo in for the job. I was born too late to see some of the greats from back in the day; Frank Gifford, Sammy Baugh, Tittle et al. Back before they finally figured out that the game was infinitely more enjoyable for the participants if they were not compelled to either spit out or swallow their dental work after every play. When it took a real man to play without a face guard. That a good number of these guys would only end up looking real stupid when they smiled not withstanding. Given that you can probably extrapolate my approximate age. Not that I care mind you, it’s just that I feel that if I have to spell everything out you are most likely not going to be caught reading this in the first place. I followed the game closely through most of the seventies, then I found other things to hold my attention. If you know anything about the era at all no further explanation will be required. By the time I got out of high school I had become (Heavens to Miregatroid!) a Raiders fan. I know, I’m not proud of it, but you know what they say…the first step is admitting it to yourself. I saw Lamonica, Plunkett, Jim Otto, Upshaw, Stabiler, the whole gang. I watched George Blanda play when his career had been reduced to being little more than an oddity and footnote in NFL history. I clearly remember seeing Tom Dempsey boot an impossibly long field goal on Monday Night Football. So when I sort of drifted away from the game in the latter part of the decade from hell, everything could still be characterized as more or less traditional. The only time I really noticed football in the next thirty years or so was on the occasion that the ‘us vs. them’ syndrome bloomed and there was no football. I never did care for college ball, thinking it amateurish and lacking in substance. I have since learned the error in my ways. Hey, what do you expect from a recovering Oakland fan? In the last few years my interest has been rekindled as I find less and less reason to leave the recliner on weekend afternoons. Actually there are plenty of reasons why I should; I have simply developed the skills that allow me to justify a more sedentary life style. Yeah, I know, but wait… Last season I found myself with a tremendous amount of time on my hands and no way to put it to use aside from watching television. I’d gotten myself into a very serious motorbike wreck that came uncomfortably close to amputating both of my legs and nearly bled to death while in repose under the guard rail that perpetrated the damage to my person. That event transpired in the early part of September, by the end of the month I was home and confined to a rented hospital bed. Ya just gotta love a guy with good timing, right? So baseball and football suddenly became a bit more than a passing interest. I started watching and learned to appreciate the NCAA version of the game, although like so many of us I will never ‘get’ the BCS, I mean I really like the things in my life to make sense and have a rhyme and/or reason to them. The more I watched the more I came to realize that something has been fundamentally changed. The most obvious evidence of this is in the jersey number system, or lack there of. Now to my knowledge there never has been a code set in granite that certain positions must wear specific numbers. Back before World War Two the pros still followed NCAA rules. You went on the field and stayed there until they carried you off, preferably on the shoulders of your teammates, but as often as not on a stretcher. Going both ways had an entirely different meaning back then. Numbers didn’t serve much purpose other than telling you who you might be obliged to boo at. Then after the war the rules changed and unlimited substitutions became the norm. There were still an occasional anomaly, but for the most part a semi-standard system developed in which one could actually tell if not the players, at least their position without a score card. Quarterbacks were generally numbered below 20. Halfbacks in the 30’s, Fullbacks the 40’s. Guards came in the 60’s, Tackles 70-79. Ends wore 80’s if offensive, 90’s if not. Defensive backs carried 30’s and Safety’s 20’s. Linebackers and Centers usually had 50’s on their backs. Now the distinction between Half and Fullback is blurred, everyone is a ‘Running back.’ The defensive backfield has gone the same way. We no longer have Guards and Tackles; it’s offensive and defensive linemen. No one has been referred to as an ‘End’ since the Carter administration; they are all ‘receivers’ these days. But the most disturbing trend to me is that the modern player seems to just pick whatever number suits them and the closer to #1 it seems, the better they like it. Now there have always been those who have cut against the grain, usually players that got whatever number came out of the box in a high school gym locker room. Athletes are a superstitious lot and would sooner eat bat guano than take the field with anything but ‘their’ number on their posterior. Jim Otto and Ray Nitschke are two notables of the genera. Otto played his 00 off of his sir name; it was cute and sort of made sense after you suffered a concussion or two. Ray could and would wear any number he wanted to and very few people in this world would tell him he was an idiot for doing so. Some got there number from the first position they played as a kid in grammar school or sometimes college, when they were ‘converted’ to a job better suited to their talents the number just went with them. It probably started at a grass roots level, then spread into the collegiate ranks, now it’s showing up in the NFL with alarming regularity. I saw an NCAA Defensive End today with the number 18 on his back; somehow I just don’t see a high school Quarterback making the transition to that occupation. The sad part about the entire watering down of the ‘system’ stems from the fact that football, as well as other sports, are gradually becoming less a ‘team’ effort and more a class of individual ‘superstars.’ I guess it started back when I was moving away from the past time and trying to concentrate on having a life. Spiking the ball in the end zone morphed from a spur of the moment _expression of emotion into a high art form. Now days the celebrations that are put on by people who are after all only doing what they are paid to do, are often as well thought out and choreographed as the play that got them into the position to do what was expected of them in the first place. Never mind that it took ten other people and an extraordinary effort on the field, not to mention the countless souls who remain forever nameless, yet without whose work the ‘star’ would be anything but ‘super.’ Now it’s all about ‘me.’ How would you like to see an NFL Property Manager run out on the field with a cell phone when one of his charges finds a new pair of socks in his locker? If the superstars really got their way every one of them would be wearing the number 1, along with a flashing neon sign in the shape of an arrow pointing to it, like you used to see on cheesy motels. What they have in common is the ‘no vacancy’ part. These guys that seem to think that they could win games all by themselves don’t have room for anyone else in their worlds. The NFL looked upon the phenomenon of flamboyance as ‘good for the game’ and especially good for the League’s television revenue. Everyone wanted to see what the moment’s center of attention was going to do if he scored, despite the fact that a fair percentage of us claimed to hate the guy because his behavior did not reflect the spirit of the game. Last year the player’s antics finally managed to successfully make the transition from the ridiculous to the sublime. When it started to make the organization look bad, or more than likely started to have a negative effect on the ratings and by extension the bottom line, which like it or not is the driving force behind nearly everything these days, the league threw a blanket on the whole thing. It wasn’t exactly soaking wet, but was at least damp to the touch. When certain players started getting hit with fines for their foolishness everyone toned down the rhetoric, which really has no place in the game to start with. How sad is the situation when you have to hit a man’s bank account before he’ll move a little closer toward the center of human behavior? That the scenario came to be in that manner is no genuine surprise; the majority of the guys that insist that they are the only ones on the field care for just 3 things: money, themselves and football. In that order, and make no mistake about it, if the first was not tied directly to the third you would likely never have heard of these clown college graduates. Free agency is where the feces really hit the Westinghouse. Suddenly players discovered that they were marketable merchandise and anyone in marketing will tell you that the best movers off the shelf are invariably the ones in the loudest packages. Gone are the days when a man was drafted out of school and chances were better than good that (barring injury) he would spend the next 15 years in the same city. Now even if a player does sign a long term deal for untold millions the odds are that he will pout, mope around and hold out of training camp the following year because he thinks that he is getting screwed. Funny, I would have to guess that most of them were grinning from ear to ear when they signed on the dotted line. What is in all likelihood the logical conclusion to the travesty, perhaps even poetic justice, is that the biggest, loudest egos in the game rarely seem to make it past about a half a dozen seasons. They get hurt or just plain quit to go home and count their money. One ‘fancy pants’ running back sat out the whole season last year, thinking that he had all the money he needed to become a Tibetan Monk, or whatever it was claimed to be his motivation. He was forced to come back this year or repay several million unearned dollars to the team he deserted. If it were me I wouldn't have him back in my club. Common sense will tell you that a guy like that will not give you an honest day’s work and as soon as he has a little jingle in his pocket he’ll be gone again. I’d get my money out of him in some fashion, but he’d never darken the door to my locker room again. The refreshing part is that there still seems to be a lot more people who go out and quietly do their jobs week in and week out than there are guys who only lack the ears and tail from being a total, first class jack ass. They attract attention to themselves not by acting like an idiot every time they know a camera is on, they do it the old fashion way…they earn it. Guys like Emmett Smith; you rarely heard a peep out of him, yet he quietly went on to become (arguably) the best ball carrier the game has ever seen. He played for the same team for nearly his entire career and when it looked like he could not produce for them any longer, at least not in the manner that had become customary, he stepped aside for younger blood. He could have just packed his cleats and gone home then and no one would have had a disparaging word to say about it. But no, out of the pure love of what he could do on the field he ran his totals into the stratosphere playing for a team that is (in private if nowhere else) the laughing stock of the sport. Jerry Rice followed the same path, Brett Farve is another. These guys have had more money than they could conceivably spend in several lifetimes, ten years before they finally let someone take their place; Farve is still at it. Yet they played every Sunday while the Michael Ervin’s of the world do their best ‘flash in the pan’ imitation and quit with no more than half the time in play. All of the truly great athletes have been that way, they do what they do in as unassuming a way as possible, then fade to black leaving just a name at the top of the list in the record books. The numbers thing is just the latest manifestation of the disease known as "HLM" or "Hey! Look at Me!" The only effective treatment found thus far for this malady, which can result in the death of one’s career, has been the removal of large amounts of cash from the afflicted’s coffers. Drastic? Yes, effective? Sometimes. The victim’s heads have also been known to swell to the point where they can no longer fit into a helmet. The condition at that stage is generally considered terminal and the patient quickly finds that his name will not even garner mention in the likes of the National Inquirer and the only people that will pay any attention to them anymore are the police. The tragedy is that it is such a waste of some people that are truly gifted athletes. The only thing that seems to be able to out run them is their own mouth. I would have to say that there is never likely to be a congressional hearing on why no one in the NFL wears a number higher than 19 anymore and I suppose it really is a trivial point. The thing is I’m getting old and set in my ways. What really scares me is that the folks on both sides of my parentage are notorious for their longevity. I can foresee a day in the not so distant future when I turn to a game one Sunday afternoon and can’t fathom why everyone on both sides of the ball and the sidelines are all Quarterbacks. Here’s a novel idea – how about if we wear the numbers that Van Brocklin, Brown and the Creator found worked to their satisfaction, we do our jobs, count our millions, then sit down and shut up? Here’s another odd concept – there are almost 2000 players registered in the professional football league. For every one player on the field there are 2 to 3 people in the background (depending on the team’s organizational structure) that make it possible for that body to go out there and do his job. Should that player (God forbid) drop dead on the spot, the entire community would feel bad about it and the rest of the players on his team, if not the entire league, would have his little number on his person somewhere for the balance of the season. But, the league would go on unfettered; the fact is the game our hapless hero keeled over in would not even be prematurely terminated. However, if the NFL mysteriously collapsed over night there would be a whole bunch of people who suddenly find that they have an enormous amount of time on their hands. Even if just one franchise folds several hundred personnel would have to go fishing. You see? It’s not all about you T.O. or Randy or any one of a dozen or more others that feel that the sun won’t come up tomorrow if they don’t get the ball. It would seem the lesson of the early eighties has been lost on the new generation of prima donna’s, of course most of these guys had yet to have a cognitive thought when the team owners said enough is enough and hired replacements for the season. Was it pretty? No, not in the least. But the game did go on. ------------ About the author Keith Ian Middleton: was born in Portland OR., at age 6 his parents moved back to Upstate NY. where they had grown up. He spent most of his childhood on a farm and started working in sawmills upon graduation from high school. His natural design and engineering talents served him well and he made the rounds through several moves as a troubleshooter and hired gun with a number of lumber manufactures. Keith now resides and writes from Kentucky where he met and married his second wife. Email: kmiddle1957@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. 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