Football is a great sport – so great that fans of other games have stolen its name, as if they could thereby borrow its splendour and glory. I am talking, of course, about American football, that brutal game played by 11 men on the gridiron, except in depopulated small towns where Americans unwilling to let go of their ancestral traditions field teams of six.
I was never any good at the sport. I played various positions in the middle-school squad of the O’Neill Eagles, the worst team in the Nebraska Sandhills. I remember vividly every touchdown we scored. (We scored very few.) I remember the hits I took less distinctly. (I took very many.)
