Remembrance - Placekicker

Remembrance
By Mark Anderson

Every once in awhile,
sometimes once a day,
but rarely more than
once an hour,
I forget to breathe
and when I remember,
a tear of joy
(if that's what we're calling it)
streams down my cheek.

Placekicker
By Michael Herman

When I was a teenager, I was on the football team. My hometown was not very large and all able-bodied boys were expected to play football in the fall and baseball in the spring. Even if you were disinterested in sports and would rather be doing something else like I would’ve, our enrollment was small enough that even two or three boys not participating meant the team was dangerously close to not being able to even play at all. Therefore, no matter how you felt about it, every autumn would find you in shoulder pads and every spring would find you wearing a mitt.

The difficult thing was our school was placed in a conference based on geographical location instead of number of students. We were outmatched in every regard, playing against larger and faster teams who had fresh substitutes ready to come in. There was even one school in our district which went to the state tournament every few years. It was bad enough to be drafted into something you would otherwise want no part in. But to consistently lose to better teams made it nearly impossible to see the positive in.

Which is why I caused a commotion the first time I kicked a field goal in practice. It was one of the first practices of the year, taking place weeks before school started That year’s senior class was smaller than usual and some of the boys were still taking part in the harvest so I was one of the eighth graders who was asked to fill in for those who were missing. I was screwing around with some friends afterwards while waiting for my mom to pick me up. We were punting the ball to each other when I got the idea I wanted to try kicking a field goal.

My friend Johnny took one knee dead on to the uprights about twenty yards downfield, I stood a few steps back like I’d seen on television and he faked receiving the snap. I stepped forward, planted my off foot and swung my kicking leg. My foot made the sound of a baseball slapping your glove and the ball flew through the air straight over the crossbar. Johnny stood up and lifted me into the air as I raised my arms above my head in celebration. A coach had seen what I’d done and asked me to kick another one from the same spot. By the time my mom arrived, I was the team’s placekicker.

And I was the placekicker the next five years. I was a natural at it. Johnny would take the snap from the center, he would set it down and, like that first time, I would send it over the crossbar. At first, I would also mimic my celebration from that very first time but then my field goals became commonplace.

Since we were still the smaller school in all our games we didn’t score many touchdowns and I was called on to score most of our points. Our final scores would range from close 10-6 losses to 44-15 blowouts. Occasionally a team would let us hang around at 6-6 or 12-12 and there would be an audible murmur in the crowd. It didn’t even phase me that they were all thinking if we could just get in range with almost no time left, I could kick the winning field goal. I knew if it came to that I could and would do it. Then the bigger school would wake up and we’d be looking up at another loss on the scoreboard. I finally graduated in the spring of ‘86 and went away to college responsible for the most points in my high school’s entire football history.

Slowly the nearby metropolis crept closer and closer via urban sprawl and finally absorbed it into the megalopolis itself. My hometown went from being a farm town to a suburb and families with children moved into upright developments with cul-de-sacs. Around the time my parents finally sold their house and moved away, one of the children of one of those families broke my record. The influx of kids made our team competitive and we were holding our own against our rivals. He took a handoff from the quarterback, turned right and ran untouched into the endzone.

The game was stopped, the public address announcer asked for a round of applause for me and I walked out onto the field with the head coach and the school principal to congratulate the young man. He took off his helmet, shook my hand and someone took a picture of all four of us. There was more applause as the four of us left the field and the rest of the team went on with the game. He could take the time to hug his mother because we were now a large enough school to have fresh substitutes. Chances are he didn't even play baseball in the spring.