American Football
My wife doesn’t understand. After a decade of courtship followed by nine years of mostly blissful marriage she still doesn’t get it. Anita and I met in 1990. If you were to ask her to recall a significant world event from that year she would likely mention either the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq or Nelson Mandela’s release from imprisonment in South Africa.
My first thought would be that 55-10 equals a very boring Super Bowl. My second thought would be that the Raiders were in Los Angeles and it just felt wrong. I’m still trying to repress the memory that 1990 was also the year the Rams began their slide into mediocrity.
One of us has our priorities all screwed up, but I love her just the same. I allow her to use the terms “obsession” and “addiction” in reference to my love for the great game of football, because I don’t expect her to understand. She couldn’t if she tried. She wasn’t there with me in Long Beach, grinning like an idiot, out of breath, chasing and being chased, getting knocked down and getting back up again, me and my friends, from dawn ’til dusk, at the drop of a hat.
She’s never seen Triangle Park.
Triangle Park
Kids today make me want to puke. I look at them wasting their youths in a dimly lit room, sitting three feet away from a TV screen playing video games and it makes me want to hurl. That’s no way for a kid to spend his days. No wonder people in this country are growing up so fat and weak. I think that one of the best things a parent can do for their children today is take a Louisville Slugger® to that PS2, shove a football in their kid’s gut and drop them off at the park. Give ‘em some sunshine and exercise. I’m forever grateful that in my youth video games were a plague yet to be unleashed on the children of the world. There was only pinball, and I’m grateful also that none of us ever had a quarter to waste on it, except for one time, and it was taken at gunpoint, then James Galloway took it back, and I’ll get to that story later.
On Spaulding Street in the heart of Long Beach’s Lower East Side there still stands a tenement row where I lived and loved the late 60’s, the entire decade of the 70’s and early part of the 80’s. Across the street from those projects still stands Triangle Park, though my brother told me last week that I would hardly recognize it were I to return to my hometown and visit. I will likely never see it again. I have no intention of returning there, nostalgia be damned. Let the past remain the past, let the future remain uncertain and let the present reveal itself as the moments allow.
The vast majority of the families in my neighborhood consisted of a single mom struggling to feed and clothe a surprisingly large amount of children. Neighbors were really neighbors back then, watching out for each other’s kids and actually spending time together. All the neighborhood boys could usually be found across the street at Triangle Park, playing football. It was our game. There were no basketball hoops at Triangle Park, nobody could afford a baseball mitt and football allowed us to beat the snot out of each other without getting in trouble with the grown-ups. Most of the time. When one of us got in trouble we were all in trouble, the game called off, the park emptied. Cue the sound of crickets chirping.
This was serious football, folks. None of that lame two-hand tag or sissy grab-the-flag girlie football. This was “momma said knock you out” football, the way the game was meant to be played. My brother Joe and I were pretty much the BMOC’s until the Galloways moved in to apartment #4.
You Can Run But You Can’t Hide
In 1970 The Beatles broke up, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Sonny Liston died, Monday Night Football debuted and four students were slain at Kent State University. More significant to the children of Triangle Park, in 1970 Connie Galloway and her five boys moved into the ‘hood.
The Galloway boys in descending order of age are Ralph, James, Perry, Alvin and Johnny. All of them save Johnny look like they were carved from granite. I wish I had a picture because words fail. Try to imagine what Shannon Sharpe would look like if he took better care of himself. These guys are built like cartoon superheroes. Note I refer to them in the present; my brother Joe still visits The Beach and the Galloways and thus keeps them a part of our lives. I’m grateful for this as the Galloways were the best childhood friends a kid could ever hope for.
I could feel the entire neighborhood shift and sway, and realign itself around these guys. We were very fortunate in that Connie raised them every bit as well as my mother raised us; they were good-hearted, friendly and great fun to be with. Alvin Galloway remains the best childhood friend I ever had. The Galloway boys would come over to our house once a week and my mom would cook dinner for them, then later that week Connie would fix dinner for us. They always drank Kool-Aid and I wondered if that was what made them so freakishly muscular (though I didn’t put it that way). I asked Connie and she laughed. She said they were strong like that because she worked their butts off. I never told that story to my mom.
Ralph, James and Perry were the oldest and the strongest of the Galloways but it was James who changed the game forever. I’ve never in my life, before or since, seen anyone who could run as fast as James Galloway. It wasn’t even funny. Once again words fail; you had to be there.
All along one side of Triangle Park there was a chain-link fence separating the park from the railroad tracks. On the other side of the tracks there was a field where the rocks were a gravel and dirt composition that would break apart on impact. These were perfect for rock fights because the enemy could never pick them back up and return fire with them. Alvin and I were in that field one day gathering ammo when two older kids just suddenly appeared and said “Give me your money.” Well, I’d found a quarter in a pay phone slot just that morning. Alvin knew I had it and said “all we have is a quarter.” It was stupid for him to say that because 99.9% of the time nobody our age in that neighborhood ever had any money. If only Connie hadn’t taught him the value of honesty.
I wasn’t about to give these idiots my quarter and told them as much. Alvin and I could both run fast. That’s when we saw the gun. That’s also when I gave the guy my quarter. Both these guys took off running with their gun and my quarter and I just looked at Alvin with a look I imagine to be one of dull shock.
Alvin recovered first. He yells at me “let’s go tell James!” Not “go tell mom” or “go tell the cops” but go tell James, because he’s the sheriff around these parts. It takes us about ten minutes to find James and another five to take him to the scene of the crime and relate our story. He doesn’t question our honesty or accuracy but instead justs asks “which way did they go?” then when we point the way he just speeds off down the track, his shadow struggling to keep up. We figure these guys are long gone.
James comes back about half an hour later with one of the bad guys in a headlock. The guy is actually bigger and older than James but still way out of his league. He’s bleeding, sweating and crying. James isn’t even breathing hard. The guy had our quarter; James made him apologize to us, give it back and sit down quietly until the police arrived. Apparently the two split up when they saw James closing on them but the cops later tracked down the guy with the gun. Alvin and I couldn’t stop thanking James. James laughed it off. He said it was fun.
James changed all of our games. When it was too dark for football we’d play a variation of “tag” and kids of all ages could play this game. We called it “Catch One Catch All” and it was just tag except that “it” stayed “it” the whole game and every time someone got tagged, they were also it, until there was just one guy running from all the “its” like Charleton Heston in “The Omega Man.”
James was never caught. Ever. We even changed the name of the game to “Catch One Catch James.”
We also found a way to make dodge ball more fun. We’d play this game in the parking lot, which was always empty because nobody owned a car. We’d bisect the “court” in two with a chalk line, choose teams and grab every large ball in the neighborhood. Volleyballs, basketballs, those red rubber kickballs and of course footballs. The object of the game is to hit the guys on the other side of the line. If you hit someone, they’re out. If they catch the ball the guy who threw it was out. When James threw the ball and it went by you, you could hear it whistle. It was a scary game when James was on the other team.
Veteran’s Park
Eventually we all moved away from Spaulding Street and Triangle Park, but we took our footballs with us and took our game to another, larger park in North Long Beach. This area wasn’t far enough North to be Compton. This was an area called Signal Hill, the park was Veteran’s Park and the Spaulding Street gang played on.
As we got older, we also got bigger and stronger and more and more often there would be casualties, mostly broken arms and legs. We were on a first-name basis with some of the ambulance drivers. Neither myself, my brother nor any of the Galloways were ever one of those casualties but a few times we were the cause.
After a while, word got out and strangers would petition to play. We’d never let them because this was our game. It’s a big park, go play with yourselves. Finally one day a dozen or so guys pulled up and basically called us out. Us against them. We had no choice.
This was going to be ugly and I was going to be a spectator. This would be first-string only. I sat under a tree from which hung my brother’s friend Andy’s pit bull, locked onto a stick tied to a rope about 20 feet above my head. He’d stay there all day, happy as can be.
The word was out on James. The other guys kicked off as far away from him as they could but James caught it anyway and started up the makeshift left sideline. Nobody on our team even moved; there was no point in blocking for James. You just got in his way. The eleven guys on the kickoff team swarmed towards the return man. Then Ralph shouts out “Show ‘em James!” and all hope faded for the challengers.
It was surreal. James suddenly shifts from forward to reverse like a motorcycle in the movie Tron. Ankles protest as eleven guys suddenly realize they’re running the wrong way. James cuts a sweeping arc to the right sideline and rockets off downfield. There are still five or six guys who have the angle on him – then suddenly it’s too late, he’s gone, untouched. All ten of the other guys on our team are either on their backs or their knees and all of them are laughing.
James actually played a little pro ball, as a cornerback with the USFL’s Los Angeles Express. He was briefly a teammate of Steve Young.
A New Beginning
It’s a funny feeling, looking back like this. It makes me feel young again yet at the same time I feel aged beyond years. A millennium has changed since that day at the railroad tracks when James brought me back my quarter. I can never have those days back, but I think about them often. I can relive them through the games I watch on TV or at the stadiums. I can relive them through my own sons. As soon as I find where they’ve hidden my Louisville Slugger.®
