COLUMN: Who needs Monday night football when there’s intramurals?
Pre Game:
I just finished my pre-game meal. Pasta of course. Now I grab my Gatorade and throw a half-dozen ibuprofen in my mouth. These help me to ignore the pain. These pain killers, when mixed with the adrenaline that always comes at game time, will help me ignore the pain of a bruised thumb, shin, foot and a sore shoulder. You know, the typical pains of a flag football player.
You can feel it in the brisk, autumn air. It’s tournament time. It’s about an hour now before the kickoff for my intramural game. Usually I don’t spend my last hour before a game typing a story for the newspaper. But today I have broken my routine of listening to the Rocky soundtrack, watching Rudy, banging my head against the wall and other similar pump-up techniques so that you, the reader, can have a glimpse into the life of an intramural athlete. First off, a little information about the intramural football tournament. It is broken into three different leagues, each having its own unique characteristics:
•Men’s league: This is where you will find about 150 wannabe college football players. Guys like me who played high school football and up until they were seniors in high school had plans on making a living playing in the NFL. But then, for one or more reasons, things didn’t work out. You will also find that each one has a story why they didn’t make it to the big time. For example: “Florida State had a scholarship for me, but then I broke my finger, and so … ” and other such excuses.
•Co-Ed league: You will find a few athletes mixed in here or there, but for the most part this is a league of flirts. Girls who wear short shorts and scream and giggle when they drop the ball. Guys who will throw to these giggling girls, and hope the girls will catch the ball so they will be justified in giving the girls a congratulatory butt slap (like all football players do). My personal theory about this league can be compared to pizza and ice cream. I like pizza and I like ice cream, but don’t mix them. I like girls (so much that I married one of them) and I like sports, but it’s best to keep them separate. As sexist and awful as that may sound, that’s how I feel. It’s an experience that I went through once and will never repeat.
•Women’s league: Here is where you will find the future female American Gladiators. These are the girls that really want to play and would rather skip the butt slapping so prevalent in the co-ed league. Recently, I was playing football with a bunch of guys and there were some girls playing nearby, so my friend asked if they would like to play. I gave him a look that said “now why did you have to do something dumb like that?” A girl named Misha (I forget her last name), was lined up against one of the better guys playing with us. She went out for a pass, made a quick move to the outside, I threw the ball, and she burned past the guy covering her, made the catch and scored a touchdown. Impressive. Needless to say she played in the women’s league and not the co-ed league.
The rules of the game are a little different too. Penalties like “face masking,” and “illegal man down field” are replaced by strange penalties like “flag guarding” and “uniform infraction” (if you wear jewelry or don’t tape your pockets shut). People wearing green T-shirts replace those who would wear the zebra stripes, and they take twice the abuse a normal football referee would.
Well, it’s game time. I will finish this story after our game.
Post game:
In a game that would have drawn better television ratings than Monday night’s game between the Cowboys and the Redskins, my team, The Elway Clones, won a thriller. I won’t go into all of the details, but I will say that if you weren’t one of the 13 fans on hand for the game, you missed out. Twenty-eight points were scored in the last minute and seven seconds. In that time: We scored, they returned a kick for a touchdown, we returned a kick for a touchdown, a passed ball was kicked in the endzone and caught by my teammate Pete for a two-point conversion, Pete got a little too excited and drew a penalty for celebrating, they scored again and finally we scored another time for the win. All in a minute and seven seconds. My heart goes out to The Fellas (our opponent), but this kind of insanity is an everyday occurrence in the life of an intramural athlete.
So, tomorrow our opponent is a team called The Mullets. Any of you countless Elway Clones fans out there are free to stop us on campus for an autograph, some advice or just to say hello. Just don’t bother us tomorrow from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., we’ll be listening to Rocky, watching Rudy and pounding our heads against the wall.
Clark Jessop is a sophomore majoringin broadcast journalism.He can be reached at clarkjessop@cc.usu.edu