As I wrote to my kids in the April 26, 2008 e-mail shown below, I was drafted too way back when, and I think about it every year on NFL Draft Day. No, it's not what you're thinking. Read on.
THE SLOW WHITE GUY GETS DRAFTED
Hello Boys & Girls,
Today is draft day in the NFL, when the pro teams get to pick college
football players to join their teams. I watch a chunk of it every year,
although this year I won't waste as much time because the Vikings
traded away their first round pick to the Chiefs. Believe it or not,
your father was drafted to a football team (no, not an NFL team), and it
remains one of my favorite memories from my illustrious (not!) athletic
career.
The Libertyville Boys Club offered tackle football for fifth through eighth graders. There were four teams: the Demons,
the Yanks, the Eagles and the Hornets. Their uniforms and helmets were
red, blue, yellow and green, respectively. There was a varsity
unit for the seventh and eighth graders, and a junior varsity unit for
the fifth and sixth graders. The draft was for the fifth graders, and
once a kid was drafted, he stayed on that team for his entire
four-year Boys Club career. The games were held on Sunday afternoons
on the Libertyville High School football field, so needless to say, this
was Big Time in our eyes. First two varsity teams would play each
other for two quarters. Then, at half time of that varsity game, the
junior varsity game involving those two teams would take place in its
entirety. When the JV game ended, the third and fourth quarters of
varsity would be played. Even though the varsity and JV games were
separate contests, there was a real comraderie within the entire team;
the JV kids watched, cheered for and learned from the varsity players,
and the varsity guys cheered on their younger teammates when the "little
guys" were playing. Of course, the seventh graders were particularly
interested in the JV contest, because they knew the sixth graders would
be on the field with them the next season. In retrospect, it was a
great, and unique, arrangement. It was particularly cool for those of
us fifth graders who did not have an older brother... now we had about
eighteen of them!
Boys
Club draft day itself was a huge moment in our lives, and I will try to
explain why. First of all, unbeknownst to the kids, the coaches must
have privately met after a few fifth grade/JV tryouts and conducted a
secret draft. Then, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in early September,
when the LHS team was not using their field, the four varsity Boys
Club teams would have simultaneous practices in their game day uniforms
on that field. Quite a colorful sight. Toward the end of that
practice, the BC President would gather the four varsity teams to sit
around in a square at midfield, each of the four teams occupying a side
of the square. The fifth graders were brought in, and sat in the center
of the square, anxiously awaiting the announcement of which team
drafted them. I was so excited to actually be drafted by ANY team that I
really didn't care who took me. The Eagles, for some reason, usually
had the best team, and the Yanks usually had the weakest. The Demons, dressed
in bright red, had the coolest unies. The Hornets were the one team I
was the most ambivalent about. The President called out each fifth
grader's name, and revealed the identity of that player's new team.
Each time, the relevant varsity players would stand, clap,
and congratulate their new team member, slapping him on the back and
patting the top of his head. One cool aspect of this process was that I
don't believe they did this in anything other than random order. In
other words, the best kids were not necessarily the first names
announced, and the worst kids were not necessarily the last ones. And
as I recall, the order of teams was not always the same for each round.
My
name was called somewhere in the middle. "John
Periolat, congratulations... You are now a HORNET!!" All the Hornets
got up and cheered, happy and excited, shaking my hand and literally
welcoming me to the team with open arms. (They must have been very good
actors!) You would think I was Bronco Nagurski joining their
ranks, instead of a slow dude who hated to run. I had the proverbial
ear-to-ear smile on my face, and even now, fifty-one years later, I
still smile when I think about that glorious day.
Postscript:
It was ironic that I ended up on the Hornets, the one team I knew the
least about. This is hard to believe, but I played right end on both
offense and defense. (They did not call offensive ends "wide receivers"
in those days.) Three of our four coaches played D-1 college football;
our head coach played quarterback at the University of Iowa, and two of
the assistants were linemen at Syracuse and Arizona State. Coach
Martin, the ASU alum, used to have a Sun Devil decal on his car's back
window, and since I thought that both Coach Martin and the decal
were totally cool, ASU became my favorite college team other than Notre
Dame. None of those coaches had sons on our team. They coached because
they loved football and hoped to impart that love and an understanding
of the game to the youngsters. How lucky we were!
Final
Postscript: In my four year Boys Club career, my mother missed only
one game. It was the one game in which I was injured. The guy who
creamed me was a St. Joe classmate and friend of mine, Ronnie Mauer, the
biggest bruiser on the Demons.
I love you all.
The Old Boy
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