For the entirety of this article I am going to be using the word football and this time I mean American football when I am saying it. Let's leave the debate about who is correct about the title of the sport on the sidelines for now ok?
I grew up in the 80's and lived in a suburb that had a lot of families. Most of us kids attended one of two schools so there was a better-than-average chance that we knew or at least knew of everyone in the neighborhood. This is pre mobile phone days we are talking here, so if we wanted to get a big game of anything going on we needed to either remember a ton of phone numbers, or ride our bicycles around the neighborhood stopping at everyone's house to see if they are interested in getting involved in a game. Well on one particular day that still stands out in my mind we succeeded massively and as time went on a guess word spread around the neighborhood and more and more people just kept showing up until we had at least 10 per side, which was something that only happened a couple of times in my childhood. It was only for one day but it was so special that I can still vividly see it in my mind today.
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Normally whenever we were playing neighborhood football there wouldn't be enough players to have any offensive or defensive line so we just did the common "5 Mississippi" rule which means after the snap you have to count out 1-Mississippi ,2- Mississippi, etc until you got to 5. If the QB still had the ball that point you could rush and tackle him. But on this particular day we had such a huge turnout that we actually had real lines on the field and I don't know if it was because we took the time to prep or we were just lucky but it was great to finally be able to replicate the game somewhat accurately.
One of the houses I lived at backed onto a farmland that was behind us and the farmer didn't really care if we used the land provided that there were no crops that we were damaging by being there. This particular day the crops were all gone and there was only wildgrass growing in this field. Myself and my older sister jumped over there with a lawnmower and made lines for the entire field including out of bounds and end zones. This I guess was a self-fulfilling prophecy because it was a "if you build it, they will come" sort of situation. Normally when we get a pick up game of football going in the neighborhood we just kind of have to imagine where the endzones and out of bounds are but for the only time that I could remember in my childhood, we had a makeshift field as well.
Teams were chosen by the normal alternating picks from captains and I ended up on a team with my brother who is 4 years younger than me. He was not the rough and tumble type like I am, so I felt as though he needed to be protected. I was surprised that he even decided that he wanted to play because while the ages were varied, he was substantially smaller and younger than the middle and high school kids that turned up to play. This was the 80's mind you, so we didn't have any rules like they likely do today. This was FULL CONTACT full tackle ball we were playing to yeah, there was definitely a chance for someone to get hurt.
I distinctly remember playing back on a running play and trying my best to get my younger brother in on a play for a TD. I pitched the ball out to him and then did my best as his much larger older brother to block a path for him to the end-zone. There were no favors being done by the other team though and I am just one person. I did a pretty good job of making a hole for him to run through but in the end it was going to be up to him to cross the goal line, which he did.. He also took a really hard hit in the process and it snapped his neck in a whiplash type of way. I could see some tears start to form on his face so me and the other players immediately started cheering for him on the great play and this chased the pain away for him and let him be the hero that he was on that play. He continued to make contributions on the field for the rest of the day.
One of the stars of the day was my older sister of all people. She was very athletic and was a few years older than I think everyone out there. The idea that because she was a girl she was goin to be a pushover was a very bad mistake to make. Although she specialized in basketball she was extremely athletic and could move really fast. She was excellent on offense but not so much on defense because she was (and is) short. I'm pretty sure that she and my brother were both on my team but since we changed teams frequently as the day went on I am sure this changed a lot.
We don't do kicks in neighborhood football so all touchdowns were just automatic 7 points. There were no field goals because come on! How are we going to build the uprights?
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These pictures are not of the event because it was the 80's and nobody had a camera like they do now. If your family had a camera at all it was probably locked away in your mom and dad's closet and even if you did take some pics it would be weeks before anyone would get to see them. The system was essentially the same though. Tons of dirty outfits and people working together.
The best part about this particular gathering was the fact that it ended up having so many participants including a few of the kids that very rarely hung out with the other kids in the neighborhood because they attended a different school. Even though there was no adult supervision at all, nobody got seriously hurt either - in a full-contact sport at that.
In the future we would tray to recapture the glory of this one fine summer day but were never able to. There was always some factor like families out of town on vacation, school not being out for both schools, or the farm had crops in it. I will still always look back on that day with glee though because on one day, we made neighborhood history and for me, that one play where my brother scored a short-distance touchdown on a running play despite being a lot smaller than those around him are fantastic memories that I will hold in my mind forever.
I don't know if kids these days get together and do stuff like this anymore. I certainly don't see it but I now live in a metro area. I can only hope that in the suburbs that there are still neighborhoods where the youth get together and do stuff like this instead of just living in electronic devices all day every day.