Vol. 50 - Football. But why?

On life lessons and fearing a dead man's discipline

Back when I used to spend a lot more time playing in rock and roll bands, Emily called me “The Most Punctual Man in Rock and Roll.”

Because regardless of the event, whether a low-key hang, an important interview for work, or, these days, our kids' activity commitments, you can almost guarantee I’ll arrive five minutes early, at a minimum. Usually closer to fifteen.

Why?

Well, foremost, I think there are few greater signs of interpersonal disrespect than habitually showing up late. But that’s a whole ‘nother newsletter (maybe one I can guestwrite for John Dailey’s excellent

Think. Read. Write. Repeat.

).

But more so, it’s because I have a fear that is baked into the very fiber of my being, a fear that is intrinsic to me as my hazel eyes and my dirty blonde hair, that if I arrive late to something, my football coach is going to yell at me, going to make me run laps, going to make me do leg lifts until it feels as though the fires of the deepest pits of hell are raging in my transversus abdominis.

It’s not a fear that registers, to be clear; not something I think about in my conscious mind. Rather, it’s something deep within me that, as the clock ticks closer to go time, causes a bit of anxiety, an elevated heart rate, and an insatiable urge to get out of the fucking door already.

But my football coach isn’t going to yell at me. Why? Because I’m a grown-ass man; because I haven’t played football in over twenty years; and because my coach—Jersey Shore high school sports legend Bill Bruno—sadly passed away a year-and-a-half ago.

In addition to three seasons of football, Coach Bruno was also my track coach for seven seasons. This meant that, outside of my father, he was the adult man with who I spent the most time over the course of some of my most formative years. For a grand total of ten athletic seasons over four high-school years, I lived under the watchful and demanding eye of Coach Bruno. In fact, it wasn’t until my senior year, when I decided to forego a lot of sports in order to try theater and focus more on guitar and, you know, weed, that I didn’t spend at least some part of nearly every single day with Coach Bruno.

Like many coaches (especially football coaches), Coach Bruno was a yeller. And he was a punisher. And he would not accept anything less that absolute commitment to your commitment.

But what set Coach Bruno apart from so many other terrible coaches I had in my life is that no matter how much he screamed at you, no matter how many laps he had you run as penance, no matter how many times he made you move the pile of logs from one side of his backyard to another because you skipped track practice to take your girlfriend for root beer floats and got caught, there was never any doubt that he had your back, that he loved you.

Still, fucking around was the last thing you wanted to do on Coach Bruno’s time. And one of his essential lessons was his time. Be on time. Be in a place when you say you’re going to be in a place or else, to borrow a saying Coach loved, “I’ll tear out your fucking soul.”

(Yes. He was brutal. But for every time he said something like that to an athlete, he wrapped his arm around them tenfold and reminded them how much he loved them and how much he believed in them.)

So what? Why am I telling you about my high school football coach and wasn’t this week’s edition about being on time anyway and what does any of this have to do with fatherhood?

Because like most parents, especially those of us who played football at one point or another, I continue to wrestle with the idea of someday allowing our son to play football. And, if we chose to, at which point in his life we will allow it (I’m a firm believer that anything before middle school age is entirely too soon for kids to be playing full-contact football. And not just because of the physical dangers. The amount of work, commitment, and accountability that is required to play football is an intensity that is far too much for babies.)

This now near-constant conversation among parents of young children became especially pitched a few weeks ago as the entire country watched a medical staff try to restart Damar Hamlin’s heart on national television. Why football, so many wondered.

Football is a violent game and no amount of advances in equipment or amendments to the rules are going to change that. Violence is at the game’s core. If we chose to allow our children to play football, the best thing we can do is ensure they are well-coached (which is why, despite the previous admission that I don’t believe young kids should play football, I have coached Pop Warner teams. Because kids are gonna play football whether or not they have coaches who aren’t total boneheads.) and accept the fact that injuries are going to happen, no matter what.

But back to my being the most punctual man in rock and roll.

It was something I learned on the football field, something I would almost never dare betray while playing for Coach Bruno, and something that has become one of my defining traits. Now I’m not saying the only place you can learn to respect other people’s time is on a football field. Because that would be fucking stupid. But for me, it very much was the place where I learned that essential lesson.

However, punctuality and a general regard for other people’s time and effort is just one lesson I learned—one lesson that was so drilled into me, it is now a part of the essence of who I am—on a football field.

Community. Commitment. Accountability. Toughness. Fortitude. Belief in yourself. Belief in your teammates. Trust in yourself. Trust in your teammates. Management of fear. Management of pain and discomfort. Management of doing something you really, really may not want to do. There are so many others.

One of my favorite books in my collection is Mark Edmunson’s Why Football Matters, which extrapolates the crux of this newsletter over an entire book. I highly recommend you read it.

Why does football matter?

It matters because it teaches you things that will become a part of your life for the rest of your life. It matters because it changes who you are.

Will we let our son play football when he’s old enough? I’m still not sure. We may not. And even if we say yes, I don’t know if I’ll ever be resolute in that decision. But if we don’t, we’ll be hard-pressed to find a single place that teaches him all of those things that he would learn on a football field.

And if we say yes, I hope he has a coach like Bill Bruno. Someone who, even as he’s inches away from my son’s face, screaming about how much he hates his effort on a given day, there’s never any doubt that he loves the boy he’s screaming at.

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Miss you, Coach. Love you. And I sure hope I made you proud.