The Weekend

The big story of the weekend was football-related.  The season finally arrived.

I managed to escape the unbearable lightness of being this weekend while enjoying a couple of games that I had long looked forward to.

Life is eighty-percent dread and twenty-percent something else, one reason I like to be entertained.  Quite incapable of entertaining myself, I rely on diversions to find contentment.  To not do this is to invite madness, which is always near-at-hand anyway.

Like many football fans over the weekend I was curious about the quarterback situation at Oregon.  I'd say they have a good one based on his short appearance Saturday night.

Yea!

My experience back in the day dictated that the team's best athlete didn't usually win the quarterbacking job.  The job went to the brightest fellow.  His smarts didn't have to be what are now referred to as football smarts, but the other kind.

Book smarts.  Football smarts didn't matter (they hadn't been invented).

He had to be a scholar in other words.

That policy had average kids like me confused.  Why, I wondered, did Joe play quarterback when he was neither a good passer nor fast runner?  It didn't make sense, and if the point wasn't to win why was I out there busting my ass?

My old team was regularly humiliated when I played in high school, and I always felt that happened in part because we had the wrong guy under center.

We didn't have a chance given that reality.  The final score could have at least been closer.

I certainly didn't enjoy getting thumped every Friday night on the football field back then, just as I do not like being thumped at anything today.

Who does?

My quarterback, Joe, was student body president and a straight A scholar.  He also had a great faith in God and threw up a lot of prayers that weren't answered.

Couldn't play football a lick.  Naturally, I disliked him because Tom or Don should have been playing quarterback.

One notices injustice, or should.


TS