sports poems

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Poems Inspired by (American) Football

kencraftpoetry Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry writing


Did you know that Super Bowl Monday—the day following the N.F.L.’s championship game—is the most called-in sick day in the United States? Talk about the tail (football) wagging the dog (country)!

As for those going to work, they will no doubt burn some water-cooler time discussing the merits of Super Bowl commercials, even to the point of grading them. This culmination of the National Football League’s schedule is final proof that football is king of the hill here in the states. In college sports, football is the money-driver. And in the professional realm, it is the most watched sports entertainment on television and in-person.

For me, though, football is more a reminder of two things — the fall season and the season of my youth. Apparently I’m not alone. Here are three football-inspired poems, the last by me, and the first by people more famous than me. (For me it’s 4th and 20 with a minute on the clock—but hope, and apparently Tom Brady, are eternal!):

 

Football Dreams
by Jacqueline Woodson

No one was faster
than my father on the football field.
No one could keep him
from crossing the line. Then
touching down again.
Coaches were watching the way he moved,
his easy stride, his long arms reaching
up, snatching the ball from its soft pockets
of air.

My father dreamed football dreams,
and woke up to a scholarship
at Ohio State University.
Grown now
living the big-city life
in Columbus
just sixty miles
from Nelsonville
and from there
Interstate 70 could get you
on your way west to Chicago
Interstate 77 could take you south
but my father said
no colored Buckeye in his right mind
would ever want to go there.

From Columbus, my father said,
you could go just about
anywhere.

 

First Practice
by Gary Gildner

After the doctor checked to see
we weren’t ruptured,
the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm, and said
he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if
there were any girls present
for them to leave now.
No one
left. OK, he said, he said I take
that to mean you are hungry
men who hate to lose as much
as I do. OK. Then
he made two lines of us
facing each other,
and across the way, he said,
is the man you hate most
in the world,
and if we are to win
that title I want to see how.
But I don’t want to see
any marks, when you’re dressed,
he said. He said, Now.

 

And finally, my own entry, from my second book Lost Sherpa of Happiness:

Trip, Memory
Ken Craft

It starts with the sound of a whistle.
The smell of cigar smoke
riding bareback on October air.
The cheerleaders’ “We got the T-E-AYY-M,”
the dry prayer of their pom-poms.
Me and the boys, uniformly cool—brave
in our home whites and eye black,
our grass-scarred helmets,
our nonfunctional mouthguards,
throwing Hail Mary’s and dropping f-bombs,
our bodies bolting
and dangerous with weedy want.

That’s all it takes—a somewhere referee’s
somehow whistle. I’m 13 again.
I haven’t even begun to think about thinking.
The smell of tobacco is a promise,
nothing foreboding.
And the sight of fallen, windblown leaves
rolling toward my cleats is just that
because my veins breathe and bulge as Coach yells
and my blood hits hard to feel the bruise of pleasure
and there’s no such thing as symbolism
because death is only something cowboys
and Indians do on black and white TV.

 

NOTE: Want to read a fourth football-themed poem? Jump to this post, which includes a football poem by Al Ortolani.

Poems That Date Themselves

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football

When you say a literary work “dates itself,” you might mean it is old-fashioned or representative of another era, as in a classic work by John Donne or John Milton, maybe. It’s possible, however, for a more recent work to date itself, too, in that society’s norms change, sometimes more swiftly than we expect.

If you want to know if a poem has dated itself in this manner, there is no better laboratory than a younger generation of readers. Reading Gary Gildner’s “First Practice” to young sports lovers may lead to some surprises. Some “mysteries” for them would be easily interpreted by their parents and grandparents.

The poem details a first football practice (though the sport is not mentioned) led by an old-school coach and veteran of war. Let’s take a look at the poem first:

 

“First Practice” by Gary Gildner

After the doctor checked to see
we weren’t ruptured,
the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm, and said
he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if
there were any girls present
for them to leave now.
No one left. OK, he said, he said I take
that to mean you are hungry
men who hate to lose as much
as I do. OK. Then
he made two lines of us
facing each other,
and across the way, he said,
is the man you hate most
in the world,
and if we are to win
that title I want to see how.
But I don’t want to see
any marks when you’re dressed,
he said. He said, Now.

 

Right out of the gate, the first two lines, which reference a rather routine physical practice done by doctors to prospective football players before any season began, would perplex today’s youth. More perplexing still might be these words:

the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm

Readers might be mightily challenged by the words “under the grade school” and “in case of attack,” even in this age of nuclear saber rattling. Who can blame them? Who can conceive that people of an age familiar to me were once told to crouch under school desks in the event of an atomic bombing?

Younger readers might be given pause by the lines “if / there were any girls present / for them to leave now” if they take it literally. The thought of boys being called girls as an insult by an adult? Dated, probably. So politically incorrect in this day and age that it just doesn’t happen (and if it does, like kitty videos, it’ll “goes viral” in a hurry).

You might even find readers who are convinced this poem was about war, not sports, unless they wisely point out the words “if we are to win / that title I want to see how.” Unfortunately, the final lines might muddy the waters anew: “But I don’t want to see / any marks when you’re dressed.”

Marks? On clothes?

You see the problem. Read in the 1960s — the decade Gildner was no doubt recalling — “First Practice” is a simple and charming take on authority abused and innocence bewildered, so much so that the poet recalls it all these years later. But without the benefit of 50 years, the poem’s assumptions about its readers hits some turbulence. Kids might be intrigued by the poem, but they’re more likely to be perplexed.

Time does funny things, in other words, just as much to more recent poems as to truly ancient ones, but one purpose of poems is to become snapshots in time, historical records, remembrances–if you’ll forgive–of things past, such as of a first practice, for instance. One that becomes a lasting impression. And a very good poem.