Football
Ah, January.  Wind chill and dark nights, black ice and white outs, arctic air masses and snow days, ice melt and road salt.  What a season for evocative language– and as if all these aren’t poetry enough, consider this, gem of all January gems for those of us who love football:  postseason. It’s a rich time of the year indeed, full of nose tackles and nickel backs, wide-outs and slot receivers, signal callers, pash rushers and those pesky wild cards.  It’s deep backs and H-backs, it’s cover 2’s and man, slant routes and bombs, long squibs and hang time, end-arounds and keepers, i-formations and safeties coming on a blitz.  The end zone, the red zone, the deep threat, the tuck rule.  It’s blindsides, bootlegs, bump and runs. It’s dime packages, double teams and safeties roaming free.  Shotguns, pump fakes, quick counts, stiff arms, sweeps, draws, and the option.
Driving to work last week, I listened, as usual, to sports radio.  The morning’s gag:  the roving reporter heads to Copley Place Mall to see how many non-football fans (all of them women), know who Tim Tebow is.  Rather than grabbing my book bag and heading into the building where my students were no doubt milling about my locked classroom door, I stayed and listened as woman after woman who couldn’t identify players like Vince Wilfork, Drew Brees, and Aaron Rodgers identified Tebow.  I’ve loved football almost as long as I’ve loved poetry.  What can I say?  From watching Monday Night Football with my father in the 1970’s, to playing co-ed touch football in college, to sitting alone for hours on a gorgeous Sunday in September weeping with joy that the season was, at last, upon me, I had always worshiped the game.  Boyfriends then and my husband now had done one of two things:  taught me the intricacies of West Coast offenses and cover two’s or branded themselves football widows.  Boy, did I wish that reporter had interviewed me that day.  But I would never have been strolling through the mall even if I didn’t have to work.  I hate shopping.
[...] Ah, January.  Wind chill and dark nights, black ice and white outs, arctic air masses and snow days, ice melt and road salt.  What a season for evocative language– and as if all these aren’t poetry enough, consider this, gem of all January gems for those of us who love football:  postseason. It’s a rich time of the year indeed, full of nose tackles and nickel backs, wide-outs and slot receivers, signal callers, pash rushers and those pesky wild cards.  It’s deep backs and H-backs, it’s cover 2’s and man, slant routes and bombs, long squibs and hang time, end-arounds and keepers, i-formations and safeties coming on a blitz.  The end zone, the red zone, the deep threat, the tuck rule.  It’s blindsides, bootlegs, bump and runs. It’s dime packages, double teams and safeties roaming free.  Shotguns, pump fakes, quick counts, stiff arms, sweeps, draws, and the option. More… [...]