To talk about football with passion, wonder, and appreciation is to exercise the talents of denial. A casual observer would and should recoil, as when one hears a military person espousing combat, or even a boxer speaking of the sweet science of devastation.

Football damages bodies and, make no mistake, minds. It is a difficult sport to defend but in my opinion, not impossible. I am intrigued by the complicated, the contradictory, and the paradoxical. I do not care for symbols anymore, preferring instead the organic, shifting vitality of metaphor. The way a thing is, but also the way it isn’t. I’m interested in the way football is changing its own self, the players and coaches, the fans who watch it. Metamorphosing.

To me, football is a living system, and what I love best about it—where the addiction comes in—is that always, first and foremost, the game is about problem-solving. It’s like writing a novel, except you get to use your body, and you have a clan, a band, a loyal family, helping you.

This article appears in Issue 30 issue of Alta Journal.
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I see and understand all the bad and dangerous stuff. But when I say that I love football, what I’m thinking of is the incredible meld of the physical and the mental. It’s also like the world’s best soap opera: From the official beginning of the season in early September until the culmination of the 32 teams’ journey, the Super Bowl—where there will be one winner, one loser—happening sometime in early February, the storylines and plots change daily. Coaches and players who were fired from one organization reunite with their mentors and former teammates. Star players who have spent months or even years battling their way back from the most gruesome injuries make their way out onto the field, achieving the sole focus of their long isolation and estrangement, the long rehabilitation. Future Hall of Famers play on the road in what will be the last game of their career, to applause.

On any given play, the most amazing things can happen. A Hail Mary, an Immaculate Reception, a Music City Miracle. The Catch. There is no end to it. But it’s not soap opera; it’s all real—and the offensive, defensive, and special teams coordinators, chess masters all, plot and scheme. They correct and adjust game plans on the fly, in real time, and no one ever knows how it’s to turn out, other than perhaps gods high atop a mountain, looking down. The rest of us simply have to wait and watch for time to reveal all—which it always does.

I even love the hoary clichés—each containing nuggets and kernels of life wisdom that transcend far beyond the 60 minutes of any one game. You are what your record says you are and Father Time is undefeated.

In 2015, my best friend since high school, Kirby Simmons, was volunteering as a trainer for the semiprofessional Texas Express: wrapping players’ ankles and wrists, treating their sprains, icing muscle pulls, splashing hydrogen peroxide on their wounds. The team was based in Brenham, about an hour’s drive west from Houston. Kirby told me stories of each week’s exploits, the heroic and the humorous—and of the tempestuous passions, the pride, and the fury of the coach, Anthony Barnes, then 50 years old, an ex-player whose tough love most of the team had looked for all their lives, and which they craved. No small number of the players were refugees from the gang-grip of a city—usually Houston. Coach Barnes worked three jobs: garbage truck driver, dogcatcher, and city water inspector. A devout Christian, he was also a voluble and creative curser.

I was teaching at Montana State University as a writer in residence at the time, and the position included a robust use-it-or-lose-it special project budget. That spring, then, I flew down to Texas a couple of times each month. I’d arrive Friday, rent a car, and drive to wherever the Express was playing.

The year before, they’d been magnificent, advancing to the Dynamic Texas Football Association playoffs. Coach had never had a losing season in 17 years of coaching, and he’d had success helping various players get scholarships to four-year and community colleges around the country. One of the bullnecked fireplug running backs, Jarvis Brown, was the brother of an NFL Super Bowl star, Malcom Brown.

To call them semipro, however, was a misnomer. In their best moments, when all the parts of the offense or defense whirred and clicked into place, the Express looked professional, or partly professional. That was a rarity, though, and despite being a longtime fan, I was fascinated to see how interconnected the parts were, and how a failure to execute by even one part of the puzzle rendered the whole thing awkward and ineffectual. At which point Coach would lose his mind.

In theory, the players would share some ghostly percentage of gate receipts and merchandise sales after paying the referees, but there were rarely any profits.

The games were played in the spring—as though the team were in a shadow league—seen by almost no one and making me think of the way the Southern Hemisphere’s springtime is our autumn, and of the way, too, that at any given point in time, while half the earth is bathed in light, the other half lies in darkness.

Something I had noticed about the team, that year when they were winning so many games, was how small many of the players were: almost slight. The linemen, of course, were massive, but players in the skill positions that involved speed were not big at all. I had played for a year as a walk-on at Utah State University, first as a flanker and then, when they realized how slow I was, as a tailback at the very bottom of the depth charts. The Aggies. It occurred to me how nice—how wonderful—it would have been to know about this league as a young man, just after college, instead of waiting 40 years.

But what most got my attention about the Express was that this was not a recreational league but rather, in some ways, a life-or-death league. The players loved the game but did not need it. What they needed, I think, was Coach.

And how much pressure would that be for any one of us, even if it was what a person asked for—to be of service to the poor and broken in spirit, the long-suffering? Be careful what you wish for. When one is strong in any way—physically or otherwise—one can become accustomed over time to shouldering more and more of the thing one seeks to carry, or the thing that seeks to be carried.

Here’s another football truism that’s applicable to life: Winning makes everyone get along fine.

For whatever reason, the year I started traveling down to Texas, the Express began losing. Maybe it was the retirement of the team’s star, cornerback David “Florida” Hallback, who, with his fiery passion, had clashed with Coach often. Maybe it was the loss of nimble-handed Doran Toussom, with his full-ride scholarship to Texas Tech. Sometimes even the slightest, smallest perturbation can be a tipping point, in football as in life. With so many moving parts, there are always unintended consequences radiating in all directions. Once that tipping point is crossed, trouble can compound quickly, not unlike a contagion. Another football-and-life truism: When in trouble, simplify. Go back to the basics. Block. Tackle. Run the ball. Three yards and a cloud of dust. Don’t get fancy. Fancy will get you in trouble every time.

So Coach was carrying a lot. It always impressed me that while he could cite you his won-and-loss record in any given year, when it came to the lives of his players—the young men who were holding on to the rope he had thrown them—it was the ones he’d lost that he tallied, not the successes or victories.

Those—with his indomitable confidence—were to be expected. I think in Coach-mind, the losses were what graveled him. “Nine to the penitentiary, two to the grim reaper,” he said. “Only two.”

Implicit in his use of the word “only” was the high number of near misses. The ever-present danger. And again, the accumulating stress of that responsibility.

I ended up playing for the Express that year. Injuries had decimated our ranks. I don’t recall precisely how it happened, but I do recall, in shuttered, fractured vignettes, suiting up with the ever-diminishing number of my guys. Walking in my cleats across the tile floor of the bathroom at the Rock, the ragged field and stadium in Brenham—the locker-room door torn off the hinges, the rust-stained sink, water shut off to it years ago—putting my contacts in, in the dimness, then going back out into the bright sunlight, tottering in my cleats as if wearing high heels.

There was a part of me that wanted to build a bridge, wanted to be part of a clan, a tribe, in my home state, and so I, a middle-aged white man, walked right into the middle of a group with whom I had very little in common. They were young men, nearly all of them Black, and I asked to be admitted—asked if I could cross that bridge—and they welcomed me in, placed their arms around me. They fought for me, and I fought for them, and we laughed, and we all fought for Coach, and for his approbation, hard-gotten and rare. And for our own, just as hard-gotten.

I remember running downfield on kickoffs, angling to throw a block—squaring up and hitting, and being hit, for the first time in more than 40 years, at the somewhat desiccated age of 60. I remember how, as I sailed through the air, I was surprised by how light I felt—like a styrofoam glider—and realized it was because I was lighter than my college playing weight by 25 pounds.

It was a year of pulled hamstrings, calves, and groin. After a home game, I’d hobble back to Kirby and his wife Jean Ann’s house, barely able to walk, yelping sometimes as a stab of pain gripped me, even as I tried to do the most mundane tasks: sitting down on their couch, for instance, and leaning forward to receive a plate of food or a glass of wine. This would prompt a look of concern from both of them, though as the season wore on, their expressions of compassion could not be held long and would invariably give way to mirth and then outright laughter, which I could not argue was in any way undeserved.

My recollections of that time are that I spent vast stretches of it either atop a lumpen miscellany of ice packs or floating like a pale frog in a steaming tub of lavender-scented Epsom salts, existing in a not-unpleasant fog of limbo as twisted old muscles loosened their swollen knots. Too wracked to sleep the night following a game, I’d eat a banana and a handful of naproxen, then drive in my little rental car to whatever airport had been nearest the game that week, and fly back to Montana, to my secret life as a college professor.

Why?

Friends and family were concerned, but the mind, for better or worse, is powerful. I craved the problem-solving pathway, the neural pathway and body memory of those shifting plates of light shuttered, the fractal gaps and gashes of discovery, which the runner, in synchrony with his blocker, perceives but also helps create. I wanted—needed—to know it one more time. Not to talk about it, or write about it, I realized, after some 40 years, but to do it, however awkwardly. To be in life. And, as well, the players were struggling. It would be fun. It is, after all, or should be, a game. I wanted to demonstrate I cared enough about them, and their efforts—their gambit—to show up.

My father and his wife, Maryanne, drove up from Houston for one of our games at the Rock. They were nervous, I could tell, and puzzled, but accepting. As I jogged onto the field with my teammates to run our pregame drills, our stretches, and then our pass routes—our dedication to a larger purpose—I wondered whether the two of them thought it was as if I had joined the armed services. Did it appear to them I had been scooped up by a cult?

Up in the stands, they visited with other families, beneath a single umbrella, in a cold, hissing rain. Out on the field, we began to crumble.

The slippery grass was dangerous. One of our immense defensive linemen, David Bratton, went down writhing and gripping his knee, and play ceased—we could hear his groans—and it took Kirby and Coach Barnes as well as Coach’s friend, come-and-go Coach Eddie, and two other players to help David off the field, his leg dangling horrifically, with David unable even to let his foot touch the ground.

An ambulance was summoned. After some time, it arrived and carried him away, with his patella torn all the way off, and when I looked back up into the stands to see how Dad and Maryanne were faring, I saw that they, too, had left. They’d followed David’s family out to the ambulance to offer what consolation they could and then driven back to Houston, having seen enough.

Another game: Chandler’s shoulder separated, Wyatt (our quarterback) got concussed and then—playing through the concussion, but loopier than shit—sprained an ankle. Ernie twisted an ankle, Big David Fontenot twisted his back—we had to suit up Coach and Coach Eddie at halftime, so that the second half was as surreal as any dream. It was plug-and-play at any and every position, just to get 11 players out on the field at any one time. At one point, I was the only person on our sideline, and still we had but 10 on the field; Coach Eddie had come out with a broken finger.

He pointed me toward the huddle where we were backed up, defending our goal line. I ran out and took a position on the defensive line to rush the passer—in no way did I want responsibility for covering a speedy receiver.

I adjusted myself to fit between two giants before me, like a slip of paper through the mail slot. And it worked. They lunged at me, but I was too small, their aim was off, I was crawling under their legs and then up and running again, and then into the backfield, chasing their quarterback, hot on his heels as he ran a bootleg. I was so close to catching him, and my pursuit forced him to throw early and high and on the run, an incompletion, and we held them without a score on that drive, though the game was already out of hand. The goal was merely to finish, and with pride, and to stand in a struggle with one’s friends.

During the previous season—the magnificent one—Coach had gathered the players around him after a particularly close and hard-fought win. The team was much larger then, and there was a lot of clowning around, the specific good camaraderie just after a game when it’s still so fresh in the players’ minds that it’s almost as if the victory were still happening. They can remember every play, every gesture within each play, the incandescent lighting of those details having a photographer’s-flashbulb quality to it; the game is over and won, but the body is still feeding on the adrenaline. There is joking and, already, a retelling of the battle, players complimenting, praising one another, as I’m sure it was for our kind, our species, after actual battles or long hunts.

“Gentlemen,” Coach said, trying to quiet the swarming hubbub of the postgame sideline celebration, the crowing and strutting, the pantomiming of tackles broken, hits delivered. The chronicling and portraiture for the iPhone. Coach himself had raged and howled throughout the game, had known both agony and ecstasy in the cauldron of his soul—and he, too, was still riding high.

“Gentlemen,” he said, wagging his finger at them. A coach still, even as a celebrant. A teacher. “Gentlemen. Tonight, the Ugly Thing reappeared. You won—you men played hard—but the Ugly Thing reared its ugly head. It came back. It must not come back.”

The players, still jubilant, looked at one another, the carbonated fizz of their joy seeming to dissipate a bit.

“We will not speak its name,” Coach admonished, “but it came back.”

What the heck? I wondered. He was definitely in his preacher mode. Which of the seven deadly sins was it? Rage, sloth, envy?

Whatever it was, it seemed to me it might be the only thing in the world Coach could be cowed by. It’s said that all anger is fear, and if that’s true, he was often a most fearful man, though the word anyone would use to describe him would be “fearsome,” not “fearful.” And yet, there on the sideline, as he was watching his players celebrate another championship—another year in the playoffs—I thought I detected a flicker of nervousness, and of caution, in this most intemperate, passionate of men.

“We do not speak its name,” he whispered, now that he had their full attention. “Now then, you are to be congratulated. You men did a great number of things well on the field. In the fourth quarter, when they were trying to come back, you kept your foot on their throat. Yes, sir,” he said. “You kept your foot on their throat.” Smiling, now, with the pride of a craftsman, pleased with the immaculate aesthetics of his work.

He gathered them around in a circle, heads bowed, and gave a heartfelt prayer, Southern Baptist–style, raising and then lowering his voice in cadence with the tempest within, and the players, now meek and humbled, nodded, eyes shut. Some murmured “Amen” at certain points, while others shouted it. The heart of the prayer was gratitude for being alive—at one point, Coach went into graphic detail about all the things that could have happened—but what seemed to resonate most, with the greatest number of players, was when Coach spoke of the unbridgeable gap between the Lord’s goodness and the team’s irredeemable (except through the blood of Christ) unworthiness. A distance too far. A distance so vast as to seem to be the definition of sorrow, alienation, estrangement, loneliness.

But the game!

The dynamic between Coach and the young men who’d sought him out reminded me of the “muscular Christianity” proselytized by Teddy Roosevelt a little more than a hundred years earlier. Writes Karen Abbott in a 2011 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, “Roosevelt was too short and slight to play football, but he had developed an affinity for the game after he entered Harvard in 1876. It required, he wrote, ‘the greatest exercise of fine moral qualities, such as resolution, courage, endurance, and capacity to hold one’s own and stand up under punishment.’ He would recruit former football players to serve as his ‘Rough Riders’ during the Spanish-American War. As the crusade against football gained momentum, Roosevelt penned an impassioned defense of the sport. ‘The sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk,’ he wrote in Harper’s Weekly in 1893. ‘It is mere unmanly folly to try to do away with the sport because the risk exists.’ ” Yet as injuries and deaths skyrocketed, he acknowledged the need for reform in the sport. At a White House summit, he famously declared, “Football is on trial. Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.”

After the sideline prayer gathering and debriefing, the players released from the huddle and ran across the field like children, carrying their duffel bags like grade-schoolers coming back from a sleepover. Shed of their helmets and shoulder pads, they looked smaller. They were smaller. They chased one another across the field, zigging and zagging beneath the stadium lights. They had won, and they had been saved, baptized yet again by the spit and spray of their snarling, howling, whispering coach. All in all, a good night. All in all, a good year.

The first time I carried the ball for the Express was also the last. I’d been practicing with the quarterbacks, taking pitches on sweeps, catching screen passes from out of the backfield, and taking handoffs on the straight-ahead dive plays.

I don’t know why Coach sent me in, or why he called the play he did. In the intervening years, I have forgotten the name of it. It could have been something like 24 Blast, in which the tailback, the 2-back, lines up deep behind the quarterback, takes the handoff, and tries to sprint through the theoretical crease between his left tackle and tight end—the 4-hole.

We were backed up near our goal line. It was third down. It was a night game. The lights at the end of the stadium were brilliant, almost hallucinogenic. We were playing at home, at the Rock, and the grass was still green, had not yet been trammeled by a full season of war.

“Get out there, old man!” Coach said suddenly, slapping me on the back. To this day, I don’t know what he was thinking. You can ask him the same question three times and get three different answers, a quality in him that’s all the more endearing for the fact that each of the three answers will be mostly or even all-the-way true.

Little Dooney—muscled like a bowling ball, 40 years old, and our best and most reliable running back—was the fellow I would be replacing. The players were already in their huddle when I dashed out there.

There’s really not that much to think about: helmet, mouthpiece, receiver’s gloves. Remember to buckle the helmet’s chin strap, so that when you’re hit, the navy-blue helmet doesn’t go flying off, which is always a sight that demoralizes the team whose player lost the helmet and fires up the other team, as if the player’s head has been separated from his body.

But oftentimes during the season, it would seem like too much to remember. I’d be called out onto the field for special teams, or to fill some gap here or there, and would be in a panic, searching for one part or another like a man looking for his car keys. Complicating my situation were the tiny notepad and pen I kept tucked into my game pants, surely an illegality.

I ran out onto the field and tapped Dooney on the shoulder pads—he saw me coming and appeared puzzled for only a moment, then nodded, gave me a low five, and sprinted off—and Wyatt reconvened the huddle and called the play, “On two,” and we clapped our hands in unison and broke the huddle, trotting into our positions.

It was strange, lining up alongside my teammates on this important down. Their faces were recognizable, but not exactly the same. Inside the helmets, their faces looked smaller and more gaunt. They looked more businesslike. It’s hard to describe, but the unity of purpose on display was a real thing, the way a cloud or an echo is a real thing. But it was more than that. We were like one swirling organism.

I could feel my heart up in my throat. I was so hungry for the ball. Wyatt checked behind him to make sure I was lined up at the right depth, waved me over a nudge to the left, then turned his back to me, ready for the ball. I could feel his joy as he waited for it. I could feel each of my teammates’ joy, as each prepared to do his one assignation.

Across from us, the defense: a roving, malignant mass. Preposterously, it had not yet occurred to me that all 11 of them would be focused upon annihilating me. I had not known there would be such fury. I knew it logically, of course, but I knew also that I would have pretty much my whole team either blocking for me or pulling away some of the defense through the deception of their pass routes, which the defense would be forced to cover.

But there would be little deception, here.

The play clock was ticking. I had no idea how many seconds were left—less than a handful—but the defense could read the melting numbers on the scoreboard behind me, and they knew also that I would be getting the ball. Such a tiny and ancient specimen as myself had not been summoned for no reason.

The ball was snapped, and I lunged forward, my arms folded open to receive the ball. Wyatt had spun and was running back to meet me, his eyes focused intently on my arms as he reached the ball out and into the basket I’d made. He extended the ball to me in the way of a man touching a match to a mound of dry wood that’s been soaked in gasoline.

I took the ball—Hold on, I thought, don’t give it up—and veered toward the 4-gap, even as I saw, not at all in slow motion, but instead very fast, my offensive line swinging to the right while I went left, in what would afterward be called, mildly, a miscommunication. Only Wyatt and I had it correct.

I did not see who hit me until he hit me. The player truly seemed to come from out of nowhere.

Just before he nailed me square in the chest, up high, I did see one player hurtle past me, the timing of his launch thrown off, perhaps, by him thinking I’d be moving much faster than I was.

But the one who came in at me straight was tall, long as a javelin. It was a lovely hit, not a wrap-up-and-wrestle-to-the-ground tackle but a rocket launch, a spear into my chest with all the force he could muster.

I remember being slammed to the ground. Rather, I remember being on the ground, and chagrined that it was so, for it meant that I was no longer running and that the play was over. I was aware that I had held on to the ball, had not fumbled it. I was also aware that I was still alive.

Later, when watching the game film, the sea of white that is my team is largely absent. I’m running along resolutely, chugging, bobbing like a little tugboat into a swirling sea of dark-colored jerseys. The one place, the one direction, toward which I should not be running. Here there be dragons.

And then—in the film and, I have to believe my eyes, in life, as it happened—comes the part where I am uprooted and, miraculously, really, am sailing through the air, recumbent, laid out perfectly horizontal upon an imaginary flying carpet that’s four feet above the ground. It’s like the scene in The Big Lebowski where the Dude has been knocked out and is dreaming, flying through the clouds with a bowling ball outstretched, weightless, a big old goofy grin on his face while Bob Dylan sings “The Man in Me.”

In the game film—in the part I cannot remember happening, probably because I was already lights-out, so that the data of the event never reached my brainpan, hence technically there can be no forgetting, nor remembering—I’m on my back, perfectly parallel to the ground, stiffened as if with rigor mortis. I am still clutching the ball in both arms—again, the death grip—flying past other players at their shoulder height.

They are watching as I sail past them. Some are pivoting, turning as if to hit me again.

When I finally land on the ground, I do not fumble, and the contact with the earth is what awakens me. I bounce a couple of times, then reach a hand up to two of my vanquishers to get a lift back to a standing position. “Good hit,” I say.

They do not take my extended hand. Instead, they are dancing in a circle around me, whooping in a caricature of the Native Americans on the Saturday-morning westerns that I watched as a child, more than half a century earlier.

I roll over and get to my feet, toss the ball to the ref, pat one of the opposing linemen on his shoulder pads, and trot unevenly off the field, my head not feeling connected to my body and my upper back feeling glass-shattered.

Over on the opposing sideline, their entire team was still whooping and hollering, and from their cheering fans, in the bleachers behind them, came jubilant cries of “They killed Papa!”

Coach, busy sending in his punt team—fourth down—looked at me quickly, as if seeing either a miracle or a ghost, or both: “You all right, old man?” And when I nodded and said, “Oh yeah,” he shook his head and turned his attention back to the game, aware, I think, of how close both of us had skated to true disaster—ambulances, or worse.

Another truism: Players must have a short memory. Learn from the mistake, but keep moving forward. There’s no time to look back. Forget about it. The clock is always ticking.

I did not go back in at tailback the rest of the game. I played some on special teams but remember nothing. I do not know how I made it back to Kirby and Jean Ann’s: drove, as always, I suppose. I do not remember flying back to Montana the next day. It was as if a slab of iceberg had fractured and slid away into the cold Arctic: calving. Later that night, a screenshot from the game film, the picture of my horizontal self floating high in the night sky, through and above the sea of other players, would circulate through the Texas United Football Association domain, with the comments “They killed Papa” and “Oh, it looks like he needs some milk.”

The bulk of our offensive line—unpracticed, as the more we lost, the fewer players showed up for Thursday-night sessions—had pulled the wrong way. One by one, in weeks subsequent, they would come up to me and tell me they were sorry, and that they would do much better the next time. Team.

I kept pulling muscles in practice. I blamed some of it on all my air travel. I wondered how the bodies of the pros stood up to it: getting knocked about on Sundays, then flying home immediately after a game, then often getting back on a plane to fly again, sometimes cross-country, and sometimes on a short week, to play on Thursday night. Another truism: Playing a game is like being in a bad car wreck—afterward, every part of your body is sore from the traumatic radiant energy released in the collision.

The pros crawl into ice baths as soon as possible. They have physical therapists rub oils into them and separate the inflamed muscle tissues by hand, stretching everything to make it pliable again. They bask in hyperbaric chambers so that the broken body can be convinced it is not broken and they can go back out there and be broken again. It’s why the great quarterback Andrew Luck retired, though still in his 20s: He had rips and tears in his shoulders that simply would no longer heal. Hermes, the fleet Greek messenger, brought to earth; tragedy, and yet in tragedy, victory. Survival.

When I was running and planted suddenly to make a cut, my joints and muscles were no longer strong enough to absorb even that once-simple shock. My drying-out, twisted fibers, latticed with scar tissue, popped, stretched, separated with microtears again and again, evincing mysterious bruises even when I had not been hit. But my God, how fun it was, running up and down the field with the fellas, chasing the ballcarrier, or sprinting about looking for someone to block, in the high-speed flowing pulse, the ever-changing geometry of the return: trying to help one’s teammate break into open space for a big gain. I spent that spring swaddled in ice and reeking of Tiger Balm, always burning and tingling, until I seemed to myself an unfamiliar specimen, perhaps even a different subspecies. The goal was no longer to feel good or to be strong but, instead, only to stop hurting enough so that by the next Saturday, I could at least get back out on the field.

The long, joyous, addicting diminishment.

The game in San Antonio was the most brutal yet. The formidable team’s players towered over us, and the talent of San Antonio (seventh-largest city in the United States) rivaled that of a team in the NFL. We had no business being on the field with their aerial circus, in their gigantic stadium with all of its fans—again a night game—but we went through our drills with the belief that we could yet win.

On the very first series, I popped a hamstring and had to come back to the sideline and stretch it out. Michelle, Big Quincy’s wife, was helping Kirby with the fallen in that game, like a battlefield nurse, and she gave me this new kind of magic ice bag that wasn’t ice at all but, when activated, generated through chemical reaction a great and satisfactory numbing. I shoved one up under each pants leg, right against my hamstrings, and, within 10 minutes or so, knew no pain: a miracle.

During a game, you’re hyperaware of every little thing that happens. Your receptivity to the senses five blossoms as if to flame; everything is indelible and, immediately following the game and for days afterward, unforgettable. You replay it again and again.

Then, one day, it is gone, as if it never really happened.

I can no longer remember the play in question. I recall running way downfield, chasing the runner; the ragtag band of us were all chasing him, but he was faster than we were. It was strange that we were kicking off rather than receiving. We were getting drubbed. At some point, someone knocked me flying—I skidded across the Astroturf like a rock skipped across calm waters—and after the play was over, our kickoff team hurried off the field.

It was the end of the quarter, so there was a tiny break before the two teams went back out onto the field. And when I looked out at the great green perfect lawn, dazzling emerald beneath the space-age intensity of all the high halogen lights, and at the stadium seats on the other side of the field, not entirely filled with people, but with what looked to me like a thousand or more—I saw a strange glowing blue object out on the middle of the field, about the size and shape and color of a beached jellyfish or, I realized, an adult diaper: One of my contraband ice packs had squirted out from my pants when I’d been hit.

Calf-hobbled, hamstrung, groin-tweaked, and back-aching, I had to trot out there, the sole player on that momentarily empty field—the referees and umpires were down at the other end, readjusting things for the beginning of the next quarter—and pick up the blue object while what felt like an entire nation watched.

Desperate for the ice’s healing properties, I shoved it back down into my pants and limp-trotted back toward my sideline far away, an old graybeard: a halftime entertainer.

We shouldn’t have been playing against San Antonio. Once again, our tiny band of warriors began to splinter and fall away, broken like balsa wood gliders. Kirby was busier than ever on the sideline, tending to the damaged.

Coach must’ve been a little out of it, because once again, in a panic, when he turned to scan the sideline—“We need another!”—his eyes fell first upon me, a body, and he put his hand on my back and told me to get out there, and to hurry.

Our team once again was down at the farthest end of the field, our own end.

Because I was a tailback, I assumed that was the position I was to fill. It was a long way to the line of scrimmage. I was a little out of breath by the time I arrived, the play clock was melting down, our team was already lined up, and there was only one player in the backfield, a player I had never seen before. And I wondered where Wyatt, our quarterback, was.

“Where do you want me?” I asked the new player. He looked as confused as I did, and because he was already more than 7 yards back, it made no sense for me to line up 10 or 12 yards deep. I positioned myself by his side. He still looked confused and said, “Move out a little bit.” So I took one step to the side. The new player gestured to me again, then motioned to the line of scrimmage, where all the other players were.

“I’m a running back,” I said. “I can’t go up there.”

Our new player looked toward the sideline, exasperated. Perhaps instructions were shouted to him, which, being hard of hearing, I did not discern. At any rate, he changed position, going up to the line of scrimmage himself, so that I was the sole player remaining in our backfield, the quarterback now, or so I thought.

There was so little time left.

I moved two steps back to the right, so that I was directly behind the center, seven yards deep. I figured I would take the snap and just run with it, and see what happened.

Over on our sideline, I could now hear Coach howling, as were the players next to him.

I didn’t even know the snap count. I held my hands up, ready for it, then called for the ball silently—gave the hand movements of now.

Ernie did not snap it. Would not snap it.

A yellow flag flew high up into the night sky as if from a flare gun, too much time, a five-yard penalty—and seeming relieved, all of our players relaxed and stood up from their crouched and ready positions, and another player from our sideline, Isaiah, the big offensive lineman, came hobbling onto the field and told me I could go back to the bench.

It had been fourth down, and we’d been in punt formation. I simply hadn’t been paying attention and hadn’t realized Coach was sending me in to play offensive tackle. I’d been watching the game but not seeing. Dreaming. My own little private Lebowski-fest, once again.

I remember one particular evening on the field at Jackson Street Park in Brenham. It was early in the season, and we’d finished a great practice. There’d been a fair smattering of us, a dozen or so, and everyone had run with fresh legs, powerful in the lingering light of spring dusk and then into the night. There was the scent of our fresh sweat, all of us shining in it, and the scent of the just-mown grass, the clippings coating our shoes, our ankles. We’d all had good stretches in the early evening’s warmth, and only now was the night beginning to cool. I could hear crickets. I could hear a distant train still rumbling, down in town, passing through.

The next week’s game was in Austin, less than two hours away, but a world away from Brenham. There were players on the Express who had never been to the state’s capital. And why would they want to? Austin was a land of affluence with robust city police and county sheriff forces, and the road between our town and the big city was dense also with highway patrol cars.

After the practice, and after the prayer (“We could be dead, oh Lord! Thank you, thank you, Jesus, for the gift of life! We could have died in terrible accidents or shootings. Thank you for choosing to let us keep living, so that we can continue to praise your name!”), Coach addressed the team with an intensity, a seriousness, beyond even that which he used for explaining defensive adjustments and offensive philosophies. His most important lesson yet. And the team ceased all joking, stilled themselves so they could hear his every word, and watched him without blinking.

Wyatt was not there that night, nor was Chandler, who rarely came to practice, showing up only on game day. I was the only white player on the field.

“You must not have anything illegal in your car,” Coach said, “and you must not get stopped. You men will be passing through a gauntlet.”

“It’s just a short distance,” Coach said, “but it’s the most dangerous journey you will ever take.”

“Do not get stopped,” he said. “Do not do anything illegal. Travel together. And if you do get stopped, it’s all Yessir and Nosir.”

“Keep your hands where they can see them,” he whispered—his eyes searching those of each of the players, who were still rapt, as their elder handed them the keys and the code to survival, and as he gave them, his beloveds, the rarest thing—a vulnerability I would not have guessed was within him. The lion, the warrior, counseling his proxy warriors to be meek this time, to be submissive. That was how much he loved them.

And as they—as we—walked off the field that night, our steps were slower, our heads tipped down as we—as they—considered the gravity of the upcoming situation. Of the invisible wall that lay between them and safety; between them and joy. The veil, in every next breath, between living and dying.

Five years later, Chantel Jennings would investigate the statements of 57 college football coaches about George Floyd’s murder for Sports Illustrated. The most common word was change, while other top keywords were things like team, country, and coach. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” appeared three times. Police brutality, systemic racism, and inequality appeared only once each.

What Coach preached, and my Black teammates knew—the clear and ever-present danger of police brutality—finally began to be acknowledged by professional football. The Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes helped reverse NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s long-standing opposition to Colin Kaepernick’s return to football through a powerful montage of video statements.

The University of Texas changed the name of its football stadium from Darrell K. Royal–Texas Memorial to Campbell-Williams Field, after, unarguably, the two greatest players in the school’s long history, both Black. A tweet from Mississippi State running back Kylin Hill led to the state legislature’s (final) removal of the Confederate flag from the state banner.

I don’t remember much of the Austin game. Who won or lost. What stands out is that my teammates made it there and back—about 90 miles each way—without incident.

The specificity of the sport is fascinating to me: the elliptical shape of the pigskin, inflated taut to somewhere between 12.5 and 13.5 psi, with stitched lacings for the grip (to be a successful quarterback in the NFL, one’s hands must measure at least 9.75 inches wide). I love the intimacy of familiarity with that stitching, with the shape and nature of the ball, more deeply ingrained than that of a catechism—the way the ball seeks to be held tightly in one hand, or both hands, or carried by the self, or handed to another, or passed forward or backward to another.

Specifically, to one of the amorphous, ever-changing assemblage of players who orbit in and out of Coach’s pull of gravity. His burning, like a sun. He does not reflect, like the moon. He burns, rages, and all orbits cannot help, it seems, but seek him.

In remembering those distant practices and the games—their meaningless pageantry, when my teammates and I were paradoxically more alive, and filled with, or overflowing with, purpose, passion, and even compassion—it feels important to me to capture details of how it all went down, in that losing season, that season in which we did not win a game, when, upon first entering it, we had felt we might win them all, or at least any of them, on any given day.

And years later, I still have dreams in which we are playing, and winning—long, detailed dreams that last half the night, as if the dreaming is as real, and takes up as much time, as the doing, or having done.

What remains in the center of the experience for me now is how we were, as a team, for a little while, an entire whole: an entity, unified, and in that, our decision to be unified. What remains in the memory of that for me is how sweet that was, how it felt like not just medicine but cure.

We came together in what seems now a kind of innocence. We wore face masks on our helmets to keep out other players’ hands and cleats, but we breathed in one another’s shouts of despair and ecstasy; we held our bare fists in the air and chanted, shouted, “Express! Your-Self!” And we gathered in a huddle before every play, reuniting each time. We bled together, fought our enemies, then met them afterward on midfield to commune, to rejoin with even those who had been our adversaries.

It might seem that one shouldn’t have to artificially put oneself in harm’s way to have such a rollicking good time and build such intense trust and camaraderie with utter strangers. And yet, isn’t that the way it was for us as a species in the first 180,000 years? And isn’t that also the spirit of democracy? Which is the real world, and which is the fairy tale, a game of make-believe?

On the field, in those incandescently brilliant 60 minutes, it seems that only each moment is real. Everything else is suspended: not vanished, not proven irrelevant or insubstantial, just suspended. While on the field, and within the bounds of structure and guidance, with rule of law and logic and meaning, the world proceeds and no one is alone.•

Rick Bass is the author of more than 30 books, including, most recently, With Every Great Breath. He is the winner of a Story Prize, a James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has served as contributing editor to Sierra, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Big Sky Journal, Amicus Journal, Outside, Orion, Field & Stream, the Contemporary Wingshooter, and many other publications. He serves on the editorial board of Whitefish Review and teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program. He was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana’s Yaak Valley for almost 40 years.