Nebraska Football

Fooled you! This isn't about the Cornhuskers, but about the REAL football game in Nebraska over the holiday weekend: the Goldner pick-up game.

(If you haven't already consulted The Rules for Thanksgiving football games, I'd advise you to do so. And thanks is due to Ken for sending them along.)

Sadly, our perennial rivals, the Kully Clan, were not in Omaha this Thanksgiving so we had to make do with just ourselves. Fortunately, my siblings have been fruitful and multiplied so we can populate two respectable teams for touch football without the need for second cousins - although they always added a lot of competitive spirit to the game.

We trekked over to Westside High School (Home of the Warriors and alma mater of Nick Nolte, if distant memory and institutional folklore may be relied upon - which according to Wikipedia, in this instance it may). (Interesting aside: Wikipedia also reports that Virginia Lamp Thomas, hyper-conservative wife of hyper-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a Westside alumna. And I had forgotten that Kurt Anderson, co-founder of Spy Magazine [kids, this was published back in the 90's, when we still had to buy our humor in hard copy - yeah, times were tough], was also an alum. But enough from memory lane.)

The official football field was occupied by two games, already in progress, so Uncle Dave (who maintained that he had not had any donuts - and if you haven't read The Rules referenced above, you're not going to get why that's a joke) scooted us over to the field field. No, not a typo - given the shot-put facilities, this is where the school holds field events (as in track and field). Either that or they've started a torture yard at Westside and while I agree with the proposition that today's teenagers can't get away with the stuff their elders used to get away with, I think we'd have heard about outdoor torture. Or at least the neighbors would have heard it, and surely SOMEONE would have called Nancy Grace by now.

So we picked teams and commenced to play.
I was the first injury.

A legitimate football injury, a jammed finger. I felt somewhat like an NFL player, really - sort of like Santonio Holmes or most of the Cleveland Browns. In order to curse outside of the earshot of the children, I sat out a few plays but my team needed me, lacking as they were someone who takes the concept of incomplete passes to the next level. I can miss the ball, drop it, or have it go right through my arms - and that was uninjured. But while recovering on the sidelines, I snapped a picture of the game - something that I don't think Santonio does, if I might brag a little.

We had one other injury: Nate the Great Who is Eight hurt his ankle. He recovered nicely and after an injury time-out, was able to return to his positions of starting center and replacement quarterback - he had the Andrew Luck jersey, after all.

And a confession:  we broke one of The Rules (still haven't read them?  For crying out loud, son, just click on the link!) by switching sports to kickball once we had reached the required level of crying.  And Uncle Matt was on both winning teams, which fact he generously shared with everyone the rest of the day.

It was so much fun that we might just try it again tomorrow.

Nah, the Huskers play at 11.