Vol. 2, No. 3: The Goal Line Extends Through Infinity

The teams assemble at the 50. The ref points to the visiting team captain: Call it in the air. The visiting team captain calls “tails”, and waits for the coin to hit the turf. But the coin hovers, spinning at the top of its arc—suspended first a second too long, then three, then ten. The players stand watching it, mesmerized. This is not a trick of the wind. This is not some drone quarter, operated by remote control. This must be, the visiting team captain thinks, a breach in time. The ref doesn’t have a rule in the book for this; he’s satisfied to let it play out. It continues for several minutes. The fans grow restless. They hurl things onto the gridiron: trays of nachos, souvenir drink cups, bobblehead replicas of the home team’s quarterback, a giveaway for the first 15,000 lucky fans. Hours pass; games in other cities reach halftime, the fourth quarter, and enter the books with a winner and loser (excepting the tie in Pittsburgh). Fans file out, cursing their ruined Sundays. Players return to locker rooms to wait for updates. They keep warm, riding stationary bikes, lifting weights, booting kicks into nets, slamming bodies into blocking sleds. The commissioner stops by to say there’s nothing to be done: each game must, per league bylaws, start with a coin toss. Once the process has begun, it can’t be interrupted. It’s like giving birth, the commissioner adds, strangely. By the following week, a new crowd has filed in, a new visiting team has arrived—but the visiting team captain refuses to leave. The league has halted all play until the situation can be resolved. On television, an ex-ballplayer and a newspaper columnist pontificate about what the hovering coin might mean. The show is designed to draw ratings through fireworks, so the discussion is conversation by combat. The newspaper columnist is convinced the coin is emblematic of everything wrong with the sport: players are too coddled and greedy, games too boring and bloodless, and this “interruption” is a form of “karmic punishment.” The ex-ballplayer disagrees, saying that the coin is just “one of those things” and the columnist suggesting otherwise wouldn’t understand because “he’s never played the game.” The columnist takes umbrage at this; he makes a huge show of repeating that word, “umbrage”, until it almost appears to float on-screen in a giant, cucumber-shaped cartoon bubble. The two nearly come to blows, which might have goosed ratings to network-pleasing levels. Instead, the show, as well as the remainder of the season, is canceled. Thousands of people—stadium vendors, administrative staff, assistant coaches—are laid off. But the visiting team captain still hasn’t left the complex. He hasn’t shaved, he hasn’t showered, he hasn’t changed out of his uniform. Most of his meals are delivered by his team’s official fast-food sponsor—until finally, the notorious conglomerate runs out of burgers and/or patience, and reneges on their endorsement deal. The visiting team captain’s family wants face time, but he tells them he needs total focus for the coming resumption: he can’t risk the distraction of seeing them. Two full seasons go by like this. The visiting team captain is forced to confront the reality that the short window of his sporting life may be closing: time may have finally caught up, and sacked him. But soon, the inevitability of this ceases to bother him much, if at all. He stares at the football he holds in his hands: the oblong shape of it feels suddenly alien, and he seems to have briefly forgotten its function entirely. He imagines the pigskin has some ritual or ceremonial use, as in the life-or-death ball games played by the ancient Mayans, and he gets down on his knees to worship it. On the phone, his wife challenges him to recall the names of their children. When she puts them on, he calls them Lampshade and Aluminum Foil. They choose to believe that he’s joking, but are never quite sure. More years pass. When the visiting team captain falls ill, he refuses to be transported to a hospital: he must be treated in the locker room, by team trainers, some of whom have to be flown in, mobilized out of happy retirements. On the day the visiting team captain dies, his protective pads are all in place, his helmet is still banded to his chin. In the decades that follow, the sport he once played becomes a distant memory, as do all sports: the rapid warming of the planet has rendered athletic competitions essentially impossible. They’ve been replaced by convincing video simulations, indistinguishable from the real thing, and likely more addictive. But soon, there are few folks left to participate even in these events. Mitigation efforts fail. The icecaps melt. The oceans move inland. The stadium floods. Finally, the coin decides it is tired of hovering, and begins to fall. Just before it sinks to the turf, a fish swims by—one of the last who hasn’t choked to the gills on a diet of plastics—and snatches the coin up into the receptacle of its waiting mouth. With no wasted motion, the fish continues swimming—past the 40, the 30, the 20, the 10—and into what was once the end zone. But there is no celebration. No refs to raise their arms and signal the points. The visiting team captain is not there to witness this, and the home team captain isn’t either. There are no fans to scream obscenities between bites of nachos. There are no sportscasters to overhype the moment. There are no more coaches, no more journalists, no more cheerleaders. There are no more lost careers to lament, no more families to forget. Now, there is only time—and plenty of it.

Sometimes I wonder about the way memory emphasizes certain parts of a moment at the expense of others. September 8, 2002, the Houston Texans played their first game ever. It was against the Dallas Cowboys. I remember Texans tight end Billy Miller reaching across the goal line for the team’s first touchdown. David Carr, the rookie making his first career start. I remember the final score: 19-10. And I remember watching the game in my grandmother’s bedroom. She was drifting toward sleep, but let me keep the game on. It was a school night, and she said not to tell my parents that she was letting me stay up late to watch.

But what I didn’t remember—not until years later—was that the game was just a little over a week after my grandfather died.

***

I’ve never been good at understanding time. My last year of undergrad, I wrote a poem called “2003” about my grandfather’s death, and it wasn’t until years later when I was told by my dissertation committee that I should consider a stronger title—it’s now got the same name as this essay—that I realized I’d had the year wrong anyway. In that poem, I wrote about what happened two days before my grandfather died. He’d just been taken to a nursing home and one morning he was staring at a blank wall. The nurse asked him what he was doing, and he told her that the Cowboys were playing. She asked him how the game was going, and he told her the Cowboys were losing. He paused.

And they have to win this one, he said, or it means I’m going to die.

It was the fourth quarter. The Cowboys were behind.

***

My family didn’t tell me that story then, so I didn’t have that context when, one week later, I watched in awe as the new team from Houston beat the Cowboys. I was a Texans fan from day one—even though a lot of people in my family were Cowboys fans, Dallas felt so far away. At 12, the only world I knew was Texas, and Dallas was this distant place up north. Of course I’d be a fan of the team from Houston. My civic pride for the city an hour away topped a family history of Cowboys fandom.

***

The way I realized that my grandfather died in 2002 was that I googled his name, where I found a photograph of his grave on a website devoted to photographing graves. It’s not that the grave is of any particular interest to the general public—it’s just that the website believes in creating a fully complete directory of graves in the United States. I’m both grateful for this discovery and afraid of it, of the way a website knows more about my family than I myself do.

But it’s there, the picture:

 

My grandmother’s name was on the grave before she was in it, a blank space over where her date of death would be one day. I know this is common, but it was still weird, as a teenager, when my grandmother and I would visit the grave and she’d stand there in front of where she’d be one day. Sometimes she’d joke about it, and every year the jokes became less funny.

I don’t have a sports anecdote about my grandmother’s death. We used to play football in her yard, but it’d been at least a half-decade since the last time.

***

I live in Iowa now. This weekend, the Texans and the Cowboys play again, and it will be the first time I haven’t been in Texas when the two teams played. I don’t know if that matters. At one point, maybe, but childhood’s another year away every year, and the connections to that place, to that game—it all feels like it’s slipping away. I won’t even watch the whole game, another first. RedZone will show the highlights, which likely means I’ll see a lot of the Dallas Cowboys and none of the Houston Texans. Dallas is better this year, and the Texans just un-benched a quarterback that they’d already benched.

Sometimes, though, I think about the final days of my grandfather’s life again. It’s Thursday right now. Would this have been when he stared at that wall? Would tomorrow be the day? Memory’s a hazy little thing, and I don’t want to call my mother up and ask her when did my grandfather think there was a football game happening. Maybe she won’t even remember what I’m talking about. Maybe it wasn’t really a moment, a thing, for her.

Before I moved to Iowa, I spent eight years in the Dallas area. First grad school, then just kind of…there. I used to go to a bar, and on Sundays everyone who worked there would put on their Dak Prescott jerseys and one guy would scream, as loud as he could, COWBOYS NATION, over and over. It was so loud.

And those final moments of my grandfather’s life. They were, maybe, so quiet.

I wonder what the fourth quarter of my grandfather’s football game was like. If the Cowboys moved the ball down the field and had a chance at a game winning field goal, or if it was hopeless by that point. I wonder who the quarterback was. The opponent. If it was the Super Bowl or just another game. And if they’d won, what then? Would the same game have played out the next week? The next? Could the Cowboys have won inside my grandfather’s head forever.

I am a football for Fate

who knows how to kick my back

That damned soul is never late

when there's a chance to attack

 

Sometimes it is my darling wife

who pushes me with a header

whenever there's a trivial strife

and I fall off the top of the ladder

 

My son dribbles with dexterity

and I can't but have to comply

I am a prey to his agility

I run or else I would die

 

I am a football in my office too

My boss shoots a penalty

and usually makes me go through

long hours without any royalty

 

But I have no qualms about it

It's life and everyone faces this

You get a mix of sweet and shit

a plate with a punch and a dulcet kiss

 

The earth is a huge football of course

which spins and moves with revelry

with the kick of an unseen force

guided by a supreme referee

 

And everyone here has to face

the kick and roll and forceful head

in every country every place

either for love or for bread

 

FIFTEEN FOOTBALL MINUTES

When I was a kid, I knew time

Moved slower on football fields

But even then, assumed it perception,

A failure on my part to understand 

Space and time. Tonight while

I watch the second tick and stop

In a box at the bottom of the screen,

I pray for more time, the clock

To grind to a stop, for out-of-bounds

Or fast-spiked balls, a quarterback 

Literally controlling the universe,

Bending physics to give themselves

Another shot to stay alive, to throw

Or run or kick into history, to hold

Not only the win in their hands, 

(In our hands. The fans let moments

Sift through our fingers at the beginning

And then clutch our fists in solidarity

In the end) but to succeed, for a minute

At stretching life a little further, at

Driving toward hope between ten

Seconds and two. 

 

 

IN APPRECIATION OF RICHARD SHERMAN

For years I’ve echoed you in triumph

—don’t try me with some sorry receiver—

because even at corner, your hands

were fast and your legs faster. I love

 

fire and poison combusting into joy

the way you play football like chess, angled,

defensive. Now you host Thursday games

and I watch more for your commentary

 

Than the game itself. The night the Broncos lost

your eyes, widened with anxiety and frustration

mimicked your words, “Learn from your mistakes!”

It’s been a hard time for all of us, Richard. 

 

I have lost things I cannot count or explain,

even though my Cowboys are having

a winning season. Teammates and friends can be so

complicated: it was like for a moment, I dropped

 

back in the pocket to see the field

and there were no holes in the coverage 

and instead of handing it off or getting rid of it

I allowed myself to be sacked for the loss. 

 

Then I rewound. I watched your face, your hands shaking. 

Learn from your mistakes. Come on, man. 

Learn from your mistakes. Sometimes I need to learn

To let go before I take the hit. Let go.

 

 

Portrait of Ballet as a Fistfight

—it’s all beautiful lines, angle/control
The extension, the bowed back, the feet
Always bleeding into wooden blocks 
Disfigured, lovely. When I was a girl
I was so flexible I could swallow
My own heart and still smile. 
Ballet is camouflage for a woman 
Like me, someone who can throw
A punch or stick a landing. I called
My sister today: she’s a kickboxer
And I needed to know if our genes
Are feral. She’s never hit someone in the wild. 

Lace up the toe shoes and wait for extension:
This is how you count backward from ten. 
This is how you watch a spot on the wall
In pirouette so you don’t get dizzy. 
This is how you uncoil the tightness
(It lives electric in your fingers) and while
Your sister learns to protect herself
You dress in the soft hues of femininity
With ice in your paralyzed face, “relaxed,”
Blood rushing through your ears—
                   — first position.

Crack open the femur of an offensive lineman and you’ll see concentric circles, like tree rings. They aren’t earned annually, like trees. Instead, hours, months, and years spent in a 75% squat, pushing people across the sand at fast speeds for long intervals of time. Our legs look great. Underrated, at the very least. Usually though, no one knows who we are unless if we mess up. Even then, most people are wrong about us. 

This is gonna hurt is something I’ve been told more than once while bent over outside with a bunch of other large men, but especially footballl. The pain doesn’t feel like a hurt, it’s more of a burn. Yet every time I stepped on the football I assumed the same position—the one designed to put you in so much pain that you can’t help but quickly explode after the ball is snapped—every single play for ten years.

The lineman’s stance is one of the most defining parts of American football. Lineman are put in their stances for hours and hours, so they get it right. In college, we called this stance and starts. In high school, we called them bird dogs. No one knew why they were called bird dogs, we just never stopped. Bending and creaking, each elongated coil came with the hope that doing so will fulfill football’s promise, not far off from the country that gave birth to the game: if you work harder, you’ll win.

People love comparing football to dance, yet in my decade laying and coaching I never encountered a football ballerina. Yet, most people who’ve played the sport would understand levels. By that, I mean the height of bodies in relation to the ground. In football, some of the tallest players on the field are responsible for making the levels happen, painfully altering their bodies—sometimes for life—for the sake of successfully performing a routine.  

To get in a stance, you’re gonna want to start with your feet just wider than shoulder with. “shoulder with the part” becomes one of those phrases people say all the time but no one will really know what it means. So it’s a lot like lyrics to the national anthem. There’s probably going to be a stagger on your feet depending on where you’re lined up. The stagger should rarely ever be greater than your big toe at the midpoint of your anchor foot.

Stances will vary from team to team and they certainly vary from offense to defense. Offensive and defensive lineman are different people. Even at smaller schools like my high school where everyone had to play an offensive and defensive position, you’d literally become a different person. Offensive linemen are the teddy bears, the goofballs, the fats. Defensive lineman are big, too, and objectively more athletic. They have more of an attitude, a bully mentality. An offensive lineman goes into every play with a gameplan and an assignment, the defensive lineman is a reactor, adjusting to life’s literal punches.

Most linemen use a three-point stance. Almost every offensive lineman will do this unless they go out of a two-point, from elbows. Some defensive linemen will get into a four-point stance. The extra weight on the ground can lead to a faster takeoff but you risk losing control of your body.

To get in a three-point stance, set your feet to shoulder width. Then, put your elbows on your thighs. Use this chance to look at where the defensive linemen are lined up in front of you and to linebackers behind them. Now, pick up your eye. That’s what they tell you at every age from middle school to college. The hand that goes down depends on you. Sometimes lefties and righties prefer different hands on the ground. Some players will alter their stance depending upon a direction. There are teams that dictate which hand goes down for a lineman, it could be depending on which side of the center you lined up at, for example.

Your hand goes on the ground in the spot your eye would fall onto the grass. Directly under it, unless if you’re playing defense. Then, the phrasing is, now imagine that your eye fell a little bit in front of you. More weight forward for those faster, chaotic takeoffs.

In practice, they’ll keep you in this position for literal hours, until you hear “up.” I understand why, but I also don’t understand why. Something about iron sharpening iron, and flames forging metals. Everything feels heavy when you’re down there. Your feet, neck, and quads burn the most—they burn baby, burn. The rest in between reps only gets briefer. Feet. Elbows. Hands. Down. Stay down. Minutes later…up.

What makes this burning around my legs worth it are the young men growing, grunting, sometimes screaming as we remain in our stance. No space: in sport, in art, in queer spaces, has replicated the camaraderie and acceptance I felt for being the size I was better than the linemen I played with in college. High school was great, too, but in college, our line averaged 275lbs, we were huge. No other sport is more welcoming to fat people, especially kids. This is the only place we’re welcome, and they don’t know what to do with us when they’re done with us, like horses.

A lineman’s first step will vary between offense and defense. A defensive lineman will often shoot their hands right away. Cause chaos, get their first, foil the plans of the offensive lineman in front of you, and of course, react. The offensive lineman reaches their hands back. In in my hometown, the phrase was always reach for your guns. In college, my o-line coach said holster your hands, because that’s where gun holsters go. I appreciate the phrasing from the college coach, but the fact that the language of gun violence enters this already violent and painful game doesn’t sit well in my stomach. Is this the best we can do?

This is what sports folk mean when they talk about “the trenches” in football. It’s because we’re all so low to the ground and almost every play involves a pile up in some way. It’d feel nice, but facemasks and shoulder pads and spikey shoes don’t feel good on whatever body parts have nerves in a pile situation. Birddogs don’t truly end, they fades into new drills. Some teams will go right to their sled. Others might focus on first steps practicing against live bodies.

I can’t describe the unimaginable soreness one feels when getting into a stance for the first time and holding it for so long after not doing it for a while, or ever. The kind of soreness where you need to grab onto the sink to help you squat down onto the toilet, the next morning. That feeling would repeat every year no matter how many times you squatted and practiced your stance in your bedroom. It wasn’t until I started working from home that I realized the impact that my stance and years of staying down there had on me. It wasn’t the cracking bones or the soreness that got to me. Sitting in an office chair, I felt my bottom half turn into more of a two-seater. Standing for long periods of time became tough and I started to rely on my back more for everyday activities, throwing it out in due time.

In my stance, especially during bird dogs, I felt so connected with the Earth, more powerful than what I actually was. That’s why I always wore fingerless gloves. Feeling the grass made playing so much more bearable. Plus, fingerless gloves make it so much easier to hold.

I’ve gotten down into my stance a few times and it feels natural as ever, but not quite right. I’m sure an assessment would find some technical flaws in it, but I more so think I need someone else in control to keep me down there, to molten the fire that grows in your legs when you’re down that long. I should probably try doing this outside. It doesn’t have to be a game to feel the intensity of your stance, it’s just my way of engaging in levels.

River Road isn’t River Road anymore,

And that grass expanse is a proper parking lot.

No one would dream now

Of eating fried chicken and canned beans there

On the oversized trunk of an oversized Oldsmobile

Before starting the mile-long walk

You always knew I wasn’t going to finish.

Somewhere around the quad I’d ask

The question that you dreaded.

You’d groan that I was too big for this shit

But lift me over your head all the same.

 

We walked miles on Saturdays,

Across campus and up spiral ramps,

To seats that required binoculars,

But you always splurged for a program,

Hotdogs, and Cokes in souvenir cups.

I gave you hell about the cheap seats,

Parking so far away,

And only ever seeing three quarters of a game,

But you knew where the value was:

So we never rushed our pre-game picnic

And always left before the post-game traffic could catch us.

I wish I could tell you how much force it takes to break a man’s arm, how many pounds of pressure it takes before you can hear the crack of bones, but I can tell you it does not compare to this pressure in my chest: the spaces left empty between you and me.

I wish I could tell you about all those back alleys and truck stops where I’ve spent the last twelve years snapping men’s wrists, dancing away from knives pulled on me by larger, lesser men. The smell of beer mixing with the tables wiped with bleach, like the only way to clean whatever eats away at us is to kill what the body bleeds out.

I wish I could tell you that your grandpa was a liar: that the pills weren’t mine, that the nights never stretched out into years, that every letter sent was a lie—a piece of me hidden away in your mamma’s dresser drawer. For your grandpa to say I’ve been a bad father is to let me off too easily; for him to say I’m a coward or a criminal is to oversimplify the pain that’s been coursing through me since the day you were born. Because men like your grandpa know that money is power and it is also love. I’ve spent too many years believing the opposite is just as true.

But I tell you now that every man’s body is a machine and that every machine is made for a certain kind of work. What I can tell you now is that every man’s body is a machine and that mine is made to drive lesser men’s fists into immeasurable pain, into sounds of thunder as knuckles crash into tables. And boy, maybe I’ve never tried drinking oil but I’ve spent years learning how a body is a machine and all machines must be maintained, must be made new again after the pain of their labor. And I don’t measure my strength in weight but in miles driven down forgotten highway nightmares with half-asleep nods and jerks behind the wheel that are pushed away with any uppers won or stolen off of weaker men than me: I swallow them dry as the road erodes into dark horizons, into the nights curled up alone in the back corner of Wal Mart parking lots.

I tell you that every man’s body is a machine and sometimes even machines are built to destroy each other. What I can tell you is every match is at its best when there is no movement, no action. It’s like jazz: it’s more about the notes that aren’t played; it’s the steps not taken in a dance; it’s the up and over, the wrapping of my fingers over that burly fucker’s fist. What I can tell you is that once they tie that leather strap around us we will be a shared body, a shared pain, a shared success and failure that will only know one master.

I tell you that when I get into that ring—when I turn my hat around, when I flip that switch, when I become the machine I was always meant to be—you will know that I am not a man and I’m not your dad. I am a goddamn champion.

So sing the song, boys, hit the bells and let them ring forever: when I break his grip and that meaty fist drops—with blood streaming from my nose and the lightning through my ripping bicep—when I win it all, remember this: money never cared who your daddy was.

In the field,

Horses pull quarterbacks

Narrating empty land

That remains stone.

Plows pulled by quarterbacks

Also do not work.

 

Farmer, go back to your almanac.

Quarterback, stay patient for the snap.

I go to bed a tight end

Wake up an offensive lineman.

The play clock never expires

We'll wait to see who will flinch first.

 

The 20 and 50 yard line

Are all the same to me.

White and green.

Do you think the first hike was inspired

By dandelions at a stream?

 

Pigs pass by,

Mourning their neighbors.

Mascots climb over the fence.

The flood lights come on.

I wake up from a dream I wasn't even in.

if you think about it or have ever travelled anywhere but here

& I think we forget that. I’m not saying capitalism isn’t better

 

than feudalism or absolute monarchy, but that it’s all the same

beast this time dressed in granny’s pajamas & my, your teeth

 

look so sharp. I’m saying, don’t come at me for my bloodsport.

The college where I teach, its mascot is named for a fighting chicken

 

& no one even blinks. Isn’t that what college football is,

I say to no one, especially not myself. I used to argue

 

if you had a problem with Vick,

then you had a problem with the American Justice System.

 

I don’t argue that anymore. I also don’t have to.

Let’s instead discuss Jalen Hurts & his supposed “Accuracy Issues—”

 

those were air-quotes. Just look at his arms. Or don’t.  Leave them

for me alone to look at. My house here sits far from the road.

 

My Mom calls where I live a “rural area,” but it’s not. I just have room.

 

I scream, & the neighbors can’t hear me, GET HIM! GET HIM! at the TV,

and then my not yet three-year-old daughter screams, GET HIM! GET HIM GET HIM GET HIM.

 

Then, RUN.