The following is a text exchange I had with a cousin in Mississippi as I was watching, intently, a high school football game. It was a beautiful September evening. Both teams were on the field. The field was synthetic. Fake grass. Anyway, our text messaging went like this:

Me: Sent a picture of players

Cousin: Future Big 10 players

Me: I don’t think so. Every egg in the state of Mississippi would be safe on the field with this bunch (playing).

Cousin: (Laughing emoji)

Me: Seriously. The best pop I heard all night was when a punter kicked a line drive and hit the right guard in the back.

Cousin: Better run some Oklahoma or bull in the ring.

My cousin and I may be more than 600 miles away from each other. We may not remember the last time we saw each other (probably do). Still, we’ve got football to enjoy and the memories and jocularity that can only be produced by guys who were intimately around the game at the same time. My cousin and I share a sense of football “tradition, legacy, and history” as spelled out so eloquently by Keith Jackson as he waxed poetic about what The Rose Bowl means. Imagine what Keith Jackson would have said introducing The Rose Bowl we just had between Alabama and the Indiana Hoosiers.

“We’ve got the Alabama Crimson Tide taking on the favored Hoosiers from INdiana. That just seems to come out kinda funny. But it’s the SEC vs. the Big Ten here in The Rose Bowl. It should be a good one.”

I digress. We started this fun time talking about blocking and shoving, pushing. At the risk of sounding like Joe Namath calling a game on Monday Night Football saying, “Well, back when I used to play…” well, back when I used to play, the offensive line came off the ball popping pads. We couldn’t push. We couldn’t shove. Our arms could not be extended. We looked more like submarines firing off the ball than a modern-day offensive line.

Say in 1984 a high school center, the guy who snaps the ball to the quarterback, has a nose guard head up on him (that means right in front of him). That nose guard has been eating wild onions and his breath stinks. The center yells “Over!” to let the right guard, the chap lined up to the immediate right of the center. The center yelled “Over!” to tell the guard to hit the onion eating nose guard high (above the waist) while I aim for his knees and effectively we both take him out of the play that is being run off tackle to the right in a “Power I” formation. All this truly reads like poetry if you have been there. Not one of us on the offensive line put our arms out to push someone during the play. Hands stayed in. Elbows stayed out. Contact, for better or worse, would be made.

Understand this: The defensive nose guard, the onion eater, was allowed to use his hands to evade the block. He could push. That was legal. It was not legal for onion eater to grab a handful of a different colored jersey and pull or use that kind of leverage to throw an offensive lineman down which happened and was uncalled by refs often compared to an offensive lineman even thinking about trying to pull that knowing it would cost the team fifteen yards in the wrong direction. That football crime also meant that the lineman would be spending extra time the next week with a coach, not of his choosing, counting off the number of hills the player had to run to better himself for next Friday night. At least, uh, my high school had a “Hill”. We also had a walnut tree next to the tennis courts. It is still there. When a player screwed up during practice, it was not uncommon for the coach administering that particular drill or scrimmage to tell the player to “Go kiss the tree”. You ran there and back hoping you did so fast enough to not hear the coach say, “That tree misses you. Go give it some more sugar.”

Last fall, as I sat there in the stands watching that high school game and witnessed at least seven plays in a row where no more than one or two players hit the ground, I started to remember games of two-hand touch that were rougher than what I was watching played out in pads before me. Like the time “Jimmy” tugged on his bottom lip after a play and asked that dreaded question that rarely ends well, “How bad is it?” Four of us looked at each other wondering which one of us was going to tell Jimmy he had just bitten a hole below his lip. I’m saying you could see daylight on the other side. The rest of us kept playing. It wasn’t dark yet.

Oh well. I sound like Joe Willie. Maybe worse. As much as I love the game of football, and I do, know that I am delighted that I played before offensive linemen were allowed to push and shove…by one year. The juniors on that team started pushing and shoving on the line the next year. We old submarines are just a thing left to football lore.

When it was time to swing a leg, I was not a submarine. Not a punt was blocked that year thanks to the line play. I got to watch the ball go, as I followed the guys down the field.