Football over baseball
…… who am I kidding?
Once upon a time, there was a little boy who loved football.
This love was somewhat preordained
– as a newborn, his outfits included several Los Angeles Raiders
T-shirts (the team had not yet found its way back to Oakland, but
the child’s family remained fans) and his stuffed toys included a
football pillow.
Football over baseball…… who am I kidding?
Once upon a time, there was a little boy who loved football.
This love was somewhat preordained – as a newborn, his outfits included several Los Angeles Raiders T-shirts (the team had not yet found its way back to Oakland, but the child’s family remained fans) and his stuffed toys included a football pillow.
But soon enough, the boy found his love for football on his own. By age 3, his room was a mixture of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and football posters. He had a mini Raiders uniform and could catch almost any pass tossed to him. He watched games with his uncle on television, asking about plays and signals.
When the boy was 5 years old, another uncle took him to his first professional sporting event – but not a football game. It was a San Francisco Giants baseball game, and a new, truer love was born. He signed up to play Little League, and when that was over, and summer started, he asked his mother to sign him up for football. She told him no.
There was no question about her child’s passion for football, or about his knowledge and skill for what happened on the field. But the boy, who had been born a month early, was small. If the 40 pound weight limit for car seats had been in effect when he was little, he would have been in a car seat until second grade.
That little boy was me. And I did love football – maybe not as much as baseball, but still, a lot. And I wanted to play. I was mad when my mom wouldn’t let me. I knew I could have played football; there were lots of kids smaller than me on that field.
But without much argument, I continued to play baseball. That is, however, until the fall of my 7th grade year at Sacred Heart Parish School. I found out that a flag football team was going to be formed to compete against other schools in the area. So I begged my mom to let me play, and she figured since it was only flag football, it would be OK.
What my mom did not know was that I would take flag football very seriously and play with just as much aggression and competitiveness as I would on the baseball field, if not more.
Both she and I soon found out that I was actually pretty good at football. She later told me that she felt kind of bad for not letting me play football at an earlier age, but that it was OK because I was a much better baseball player.
Not only was I better at baseball, I had a body built for baseball more than football anyway.
I was pretty good at football but I soon found out that I was very injury prone when it came to the sport. During the first season I received a slight concussion after being slammed into a soccer post while defending a wide receiver in a playoff game. Halfway through the second year I broke my thumb in three places while reaching for someone’s flag. Needless to say, I missed the rest of the season.
I finished two seasons of flag football with two serious injuries. I then looked back and realized that through 8 years of baseball I only got seriously hurt once.
I also realized that I was now going to high school and that there was no more flag football – only tackle.
It was then that the once 3-year-old boy whose first love was football realized that he was not fit to play football and that baseball, his true love, was the life for him.
And after 12 years of baseball, I am still not complaining.
