Building a
CHAMPIONSHIP
Football Team
CHAPTER 1
Why Football?
Have you ever wondered about football? Why it’s only a game which is as fundamental as a ball and a helmet. But the sport is a game of great importance. If you take all of the ingredients that go into making up the game of football and put them into a jar, shake well and pour out, you’ve got a well-proportioned phase of the American way of life.
FOOTBALL IS MORE THAN A GAME
Football is the All-American and the scrub. It’s the Rose Bowl with 102,000 cheering fans, and it’s the ragged kids in a vacant lot using a dime-store ball. It’s a field in Colorado ankle-deep in snow, and one in Florida sun-baked and shimmering.
Leaping cheerleaders, a brassy band, and the Dixie Darlings are a part of the wonderful game of football. It’s a rich guy being chauffeured to the stadium gate, and a frightened boy shinnying the fence and darting for the end zone seats. It’s a crowd which has gone crazy as it rips down the goal posts. And it’s a nation stunned and wet-eyed at the news of Knute Rockne’s death.
Football is drama, music, dignity, sorrow. It’s exhilaration and shock. It is also humor and, at times, comedy. It’s a referee sternly running the game. It’s an inebriated character staggering onto the field and trying to get into the action.
Football is the memory of Red Grange, the Four Horsemen, and the Seven Blocks of Granite. It’s a team’s traditional battle cry, such as, “War Eagle,” in the middle of the summer. It’s a crisp fall day, traffic jams, portable radios and hip flasks. It’s train trips, plane flights and victory celebrations. It’s the losers moaning, “You were lucky, just wait’ll next year!”
Names are football, such as Bronco, Dixie, Night Train, The Horse, Hopalong, Bad News, The Toe, and Mr. Outside.