For a Football Player Dying Young

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

In the Light

All of us must die; few of us are permitted to die while doing exactly what we should be doing.

There are no easy answers to the eternal why of death. We mourn those who die in the autumn of their lives; we mourn even more those who die in their springtime. Our intellects tell us that death is the natural progression of living; our hearts, in pain, tell us that the intellect’s understanding is inadequate.

Reggie Garrett, as young and proud as one of Beowulf’s warriors, sweat-stained in his West Orange-Stark uniform, died clean and honest and good. He threw a touchdown pass to a longtime friend, trotted off the field to the applause of his teammates, and died.

For the rest of their lives a few good men will speak a little, yes, of their own time on the field, but more often they will say, with great pride, “I played football with Reggie Garrett.”

For high school football is a clean game, clean and honest and good, a celebration of young manhood at the peak of strength and speed and skill. Football is played in the light, sometimes beneath God’s sun and sometimes under the electric lights which push the darkness away for the sake of a fair field for manly sport. Football is played by teams of youths of all sorts of backgrounds who have learned to live and work and play together. Football, always in the light, is happily antithetical to the dark broodings of a misanthrope lurking alone in a dark room hugging his dark resentments to himself in dark echoes of Grendel.

And no doubt there was some fat, cholesterol-sodden old poop in the bleachers popping off about how the pass and the catch could have been done better, but he is irrelevant. The only thing wrong with football is not football itself but with the flawless sideline quarterbacks who are oh, so quarterbackier than the young men who actually play the game.

Football is for the young athlete, not for the old critic.

Reggie did not die in the dark; he did not die watching television or idling on a street corner or doing something wrong or feeling sorry for himself. He died in the light, doing what was right, doing something he loved and doing it very well, glorious in his young manhood.

Reggie, an honor student, was to attend the University of Texas and study architecture. One imagines that the buildings he would have designed would have been filled with light.

“Eternal rest give unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.”

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Don't Cry for Me, Vuvuzela

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Don’t Cry for Me, Vuvuzela

Vuvuzela is not a South American country, nor is it an obscure anatomical term; it is a long plastic horn first associated with South African football (we unsophisticated Americans call the game soccer).

Footballers don’t play the vuvuzela in a match because it’s not actually part of the game, and, indeed, in a crush a player could risk getting one shoved up his vuvuzela. The noisemaker, a meter long (we God-fearing folks would say that it’s somewhat over a yard; real Christians don’t do metric), is employed by the fans in order to make, well, noise. Purists say that this could ruin the traditional restrained, gentlemanly demeanor that has always obtained in the stands during soccer matches.

The vuvuzela is said to make a monotone racket, a sort of buzzing sound, and so when thousands of these are blown at the same time the effect is like a stadium assaulted by an apocalyptic horde of lust-crazed uberwasps from outer space, and if that’s not a reason for going to a footie match then what is? The vuvuzela is also said to ruin hearing, so perhaps it is a C.I.A. plot to sell millions of those $14.95 bionic hearing aids as advertised by the Six Million Geritol Man.

The classic South African vuvuzela strategy is to maintain a reasonable lung effort throughout the match but to save some energy for the last part of the game and then make a sustained and concerted racket to kill the spirits of the opposition. If both teams blow vuvuzelas, a match could end up like the finale of Hamlet with all those dead bodies littering the stage.

The vuvuzela must be really cool, because it’s used in soccer matches, and nothing says cool like a few thousand drunk Englishmen throwing up in the bleachers.

Some South African patriots claim that the vuvzela is an ancient African tradition. No doubt these made-in-China plastic horns were buried as priceless grave goods in the tombs of long-ago kings, or were traded north so that Moses and Pharaoh could marvel at the Chinese craftsmanship available from merchants beyond the Nile.

The two or three Americans actually interested in soccer / footer will no doubt transplant the idea here, and this fall we can expect Ye Olde American Cowbell and the traditional Tres Elegante’ Airhorn to be augmented at our real football games by the ancient Chinese-made African Vuvuzela, which can be ordered online.

Before ordering, one might want to consider that the thrifty Chinese make their novelty products, including the vuvuzela, from all sorts of recycled plastic and latex goods, including pre-owned condom(inium)s. As your mother always told you, don’t put some things in your mouth; you don’t know where they’ve been.

The vuvuzela gives fatuous failing footers fresh facesavings for fiascos. When France tied Uruguay last week, the French captain blamed the poor performance of his team on the racket of the vuvuzelas. Yeah, that’s what happened at Buena Vista and Camerone; the Mexicans charged across the blasted landscape with massed vuvuzelas, chasing the French away.

One hopes the vuvuzela doesn’t catch on here. Called me an old-fashioned flag-waver, but there’s nothing that captures the healthy, competitive spirit of American athletics like cheeseheads, Viking helmets, cowbells, platters of toxic nachos, giant foam fingers, air horns, and giant illuminated signs that suck up more electricity than the Taco Bell in Branson, Missouri on a Saturday night.

The United States Border Patrol must be put on alert for gangs trying to smuggle undocumented vuvuzelas across the border, and British Petroleum needs to clean up all those vuvuzelas polluting the Gulf of Mexico.

Let us true Americans always keep this in our hearts: there were no vuvuzelas at Plymouth Rock.

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