The Crimson Tide rolled over Virginia Tech Saturday night, grinding them into Conecuh County sausage. I had trouble focusing on the game. My concentration problems stemmed from a severe concussion I suffered during my freshman year of high school football, in a drill called “Bull in the Ring.”
“Bull in the Ring” was popular in the ’80s and ’90s, and is now verboten in the state of Alabama. Here’s how it works: one player — the bull — stands in the middle of a circle that is made up of the entire team. When a player’s jersey number is called, he sprints into the middle of the circle and locks horns with the bull, delivering the harshest blow he can.
“Football is not a contact sport!” our coach would yell into his megaphone, his voice crazed with rage. “Ballet is a contact sport. Football is a COLLISION sport!”
That fateful afternoon I was appointed to the position of “bull.” I had received a grade of “C+” on a Geometry test that afternoon, having failed to grasp the finer points of Pythagoras’s theorem. I was seething. I hit each player as hard as I could. I went balls-to-the wall.
I knocked the starting right guard on his ass and took the wind out of the place-kicker — he keeled over and began making sucking noises like a pig. The drill usually lasted two or three hits, but the brigade kept charging, like the bayonet assault at Little Round Top. And I kept laying licks.
Two hits later coach called 57, the number of Sage Arnold, the pillar of our defensive line. Arnold was a hulking brute of a nose guard. He’d come up in Mims Park’s vaunted football league, where for years he’d swapped blows with some of the biggest hicks in town.
Sage stood less than 5’6,” and his facemask extended below his neck, giving him extra protection. I can still see him charging at me. He came at you low and hard, with a bit of a waddle reminiscent of the Penguin from Batman.When we collided his facemask hit the underside of my jaw, jolting my brain into the base of the skull ….
I got my start playing Little League football for the Cottage Hill Rams. We won two games that season. We got our butt waxed (twice) by the inimical Municipal Raiders, then the juggernaut of the Mobile park league. The Raiders were coached by an arch-villain named Lamar Waters. He chain-smoked Marlboro Reds and sported mirrored aviators on the sidelines. He was a badass.
He once commanded his biggest linebacker to dive over the line of scrimmage and spear our quarterback before the ball was snapped. It knocked our star player out of the game, and the Raiders were penalized 15 yards. But it was worth it to Lamar. His point had been made.
The Raiders had it all, back then. The bedrooms of each player were lined with trophies of plastic little football men, and cheerleaders accompanied them arm-in-arm when they snuck off in the woods for cigarettes. The future was not as bright. Most of those players are either washing cars and/or selling Oxycontin. Their brains were damaged by one too many sessions of “Bull in the Ring.”
That season I was forced to take ballroom dancing lessons on Monday nights. The rest of the team snickered when the three preppies had to leave practice early for the dance floor. In three short weeks I mastered the Fox Trot and the Cha-Cha-Cha. Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” was played so many times I still hear it in my sleep. Afterwards the dancers rolled over to Colonel Dixie, a fast-food restaurant off Old Shell Road with the best chili dog in town.
Years later, high school football provided more fireworks. Friday afternoons were marked by pep rallies and all manner of fanfare. We wore our jerseys to school and laid off the Mello Yello. We ate pre-game meals at Shoney’s, where we were limited to two yeast rolls and one serving of ice-cream.
During my sophomore year we got our butts kicked by Grand Bay, after the entire offensive line overdosed on caffeine pills. The hogs looked great in warm-ups, bursting with energy and bravado. By the second quarter the pills had begun to wear off. I can recall our right tackle lumbering around the field after missing a critical block. His legs had turned to jelly, and he was moving like he’d just come down with a dose of the clap.
Grand Bay was one of the worst teams in the region. The combined IQ of their starting defense did not break 1000. “You got out discliplined by Grand Bay,” our coach said after the game, amid the sweat, tears and lunatic ravings of our senior fullback.
The bus ride home after a loss was always a dreary affair. Talking was not allowed. Just sit quietly and think about how you let the school down. Maybe bum a dip of Copenhagen from Tolbert.
We rebounded from that loss. The next year we reached the state finals, where we battled Colbert County at Legion Field. We lost a heartbreaker, in overtime. But that is a story for another time.
We always partied after games, usually at Staple’s Lot, a deserted piece of acreage off Dauphin Island Parkway. The parkway, all aglow with the lights of the petro-chemical factories, seemed worlds away from the cool, blue lawns of Springhill. The Lot saw the occasional fight, as well as a lot of fondling in the backseats of Ford Broncos.
We bought beer on the Parkway (if not there, then from a Vietnamese man in Toulminville), with fake IDs that were meant to replicate those issued by the state of Florida. This was back in the days before the Patriot Law, when holograms were not required on licenses. Any fool with a Commodore 64 and a roll of Scotch tape could make one in hours. It was a great time to be a teenager.
Caine O'Rear 