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John Reed
Not Going Out for Football
My father died recently, and I inherited the color slides he kept, dating from 1948 through 1965. Looking them over I have been struck by how the bad vibes between my parents have been rendered in many of those photos, which leads me into a different subject, seemingly unrelated: that of football, high school football.
Occasionally at reunions I’m asked why I didn’t go out for football senior year. I’ve waved my arms a little and sort of dodged the question, but now I think I can give a fuller answer – now that we are all closer to the end than the beginning -- not that it has any significance to the overall grand scheme of things, in addition to being rather a sordid tale.
Some years ago I worked as a paralegal in a law firm, where one of my tasks was summarizing depositions; most of those were personal injury cases, and most of those were automobile accidents. After a while I couldn’t help noticing that often a serious automobile accident would result in a divorce. As it happened in 1959 there was a death in the family: a daughter my parents had died in infancy. My mother, who was somewhat mentally unsound, shall we say, started to fall apart completely after that. She tried to hang on for a few years, but eventually she threw my father out of the house. And on occasion, during that interval, she beat us (myself and my brothers). And as my father wouldn’t give her any money, she was forced to sell the house in La Canada and we moved to another section of town, much lower on the socio-economic spectrum, my parents having been divorced in the meantime. We weren’t there very long, however, when my mother developed an illness requiring surgery. So one day she packed us up into a limousine and sent us to my father, who was living in an apartment in Glendale. It was a surprise to him, but it was shortly decided that he would move into the new house and enlist his mother to watch over us. She didn’t want that role, however, and she didn’t like me. So my grandmother and my father conspired to send me to a military school in Altadena to get rid of me. Then my father, who was from Flintridge originally, decided he would rather move back to La Canada, taking his mother and my brothers along with him.
If he had sent me to a real school, like Webb’s School for Boys in Claremont, it might have helped me, but the military school wasn’t much of a school, it was basically a prison. Before too long I asked to be taken out of there, and was refused. But my mother lobbied for me and eventually I did get out, moving back to La Canada into the new house. One curious thing might be mentioned here, and that is neither my father nor my mother came to collect me at the school. Jeff Sink’s father did. It was right after the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show; so I missed that (along with missing seeing the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the 1963 World Series).
I didn’t know what was happening under the surface for many years, but there were other factors, shortly to be considered. It wasn’t too bad for two or three years after that, but then the woman my father had been having an affair with left him for another man. My father had a pretty cushy life, for the most part, although to be sure he worked hard in school to get ahead. But my mother throwing him out and his lover leaving him represented the only Great Big Fat Bad Thing that ever happened to him. That put him in a difficult spot and he decided to try to find a new partner by going to a singles skiing event in Sun Valley, Idaho. It worked out for him, and he remarried. That was in early 1967. Both my parents had what might be called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personalities, and after my father remarried he became a kind of ogre, and was occasionally abusive. I don’t use the term lightly. That’s what it was.
Later that year I went out for football (varsity). Up until that point football had been an important part of my life, and always a very positive experience…which is probably an understatement. But the atmosphere on the varsity was very bad. The coach was used to having winning teams, and we weren’t that good. He was also an ex-military person, and brought the underlying brutality of the military mindset onto the scene. One day he threw a football at me. I can’t remember if it missed me or bounced off my helmet, but at any rate it was a surprise. And as far as I could tell the mentality behind the action was a combination of hostility and mockery. Life in the Big City, eh? I think somebody, or more than one, complained to the administration. Toward the end of the season he seemed confused and miffed for some reason or set of reasons. One vital realization developed from this, and that is when the prospect of Vietnam rolled around I knew I wasn’t going into the military for any reason. In the event it didn’t matter, since I had a high draft number. Perhaps an instance of the economy of grace.
So I thought it over during the summer. I anticipated that it was going to be a difficult task just getting through the year, and football was probably going to be too demanding. As it happened I would have been first string, or at least started off as first string, and thus even more exposed to hostility and mockery than the year before. I wondered if someone were to throw a football at my head whether I would throw it back at him, hitting him in the face at close range, as it were. That wouldn’t have been good for him, and it wouldn’t have been good for me. So I decided to try to keep a low profile senior year, and not go out for football. It was a difficult year, and in retrospect if it had been only slightly more difficult, at home, something very bad could have happened. It didn’t, and I probably should be thankful to the grace of God that it didn’t. One other result though, was that I didn’t go out for football in college (I went to college). If I had I could have played in the Rose Bowl, or at least suited up. I regret that. I remember sitting in the stands one year watching, and pondering that very thing.
That whole interval, 1959 through 1969, was marked by intermittent abuse, and neglect, too. And the bad feeling between my parents never really went away. It hurt us, no doubt. That’s probably one reason why I couldn’t be more normal and sociable during those years. It took a long time for me to get into a mental frame of mind where I could even work – 1984, or so. I sometimes wondered why, after all that background, my father was willing to spend his money on our college education. He expected us to do well in school, which I did, but perhaps wasn’t too enthused about my doing so well that he would have to pay for an expensive college. Years later my mother confided to me that she told him that if he didn’t pay for our college she would kill him. She was crazy. That’s basically why I couldn’t live in Southern California after I got married. I had to move away: Oregon. I live in Washington now. But it turned out that all that college I had didn’t really help in terms of finding a job; I had too many problems. It did work for most of my college classmates, though. According to official statistics 29% of my class became MDs, and 32% became lawyers. It used to bother me, but it doesn’t now, since I don’t believe in the ultimate promise of technological society (it’s a Tower of Babel maneuver all over again). Me becoming a doctor or lawyer, and being intimately bound and connected to the system of this world, just wasn’t meant to be. I mentioned the grace of God before, and I think throughout God was watching me and shepherding me all along, and after I converted (became Catholic – St. Catherine was Catholic and that’s why I chose that path when the point of decision finally came) my life improved significantly, even if it was rather late in the game.
I remember watching the 1969 Cotton Bowl on television, where Texas beat Notre Dame to win the National Championship. James Street quarterbacked Texas to the win; it was almost a fairy tale of a victory. It was meant to be for him, one might say. But he has passed away, and I am still alive. Now I write.
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