Introduction
"Well kid, signing casts isn't exactly my bag..."
Joe Theismann, hobbling on crutches with a broken ankle, to an eight-year-old boy who had asked for an autograph on his own broken wrist
If you saw the play (and anyone who saw it has never forgotten),I know what you're thinking. How could anyone in his right mind ask Joe Theismann to sign his cast? Theismann had suffered what is quite possibly the worst sports injury ever seen on television. An injury so bad,it's been spoofed on The Simpsons!
Well, I was that eight-year-old boy. In my defense, I did not ask Theismann for his autograph after the famous career-ending injury of November 18,1985. This was after the significantly less famous, Toronto Argonauts' season-altering injury suffered on August 3,1972. Though I work in hockey now and am known to my friends as a baseball fan, football was my first love, and Joe Theismann was my hero. (He did sign my cast, by the way, and I kept it for nearly 20 years, until it had all but disintegrated. Joe probably didn't keep either of his.)
"People break legs all the time in football," Hall of Fame lineman and former Monday Night Football analyst Dan Dierdorf told a Washington Post columnist on the 20th anniversary of Theismann's injury. "It involves the cracking of a bone, but most times, you can't see it. That night, what you saw was so graphic, and when you watch something that's so far out of the normal, you just gag, but you almost can't help watching it again and again."
Let's face it. Violence is a big part of football. If baseball is a pastime, then football speaks to our technological -- and sometimes dangerous -- modern lives. In the words of comedian George Carlin, "The object in football is for the quarterback to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use a shot-gun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line." Football has changed the way we speak, adding words and rewriting definitions in all of our personal dictionaries.
When I did a similar book about baseball last year, it was not surprising to find funny and insightful quotes on a wide range of topics. Football people can be just as funny, and equally insightful, though an awful lot of their most entertaining quotes involve pain -- how to handle it and how to inflict it!
It also becomes obvious that people take their football seriously, and that they have for a very long time. John Heisman (for whom the Heisman Trophy was named),played college football in the 1880s and '90s,then coached until 1926 -- most notably at Georgia Tech, which beat Tennessee's Cumberland University 222-0 in 1916. Heisman certainly took the game seriously, as the following pep talk illustrates: "Gentlemen, it is better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football."
But just because football is serious business doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun! I hope you'll have as much fun reading this book as I had putting it together. After all, as Bill Cowher, coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, said shortly before his team beat the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL, "Sometimes you love a play. Sometimes you don't like a play. It's an emotional game and I love it. It's three hours of fun."
So enjoy!
