BY STEVE JANOSKI
As a vicious hater of the winter season, I can't pretend that I'm happy the temperatures are cooling off. Fishing season's over, working out outdoors is more brutal, and baseball season winds down (although being a Red Sox fan, one might call that a blessing this year.)
One of the only good things about the death of summer is that it means that football season begins. It's been my favorite sport since I was a kid, and though its recently been usurped by boxing, it still has a strong place in my heart.
A lifelong Giants fan, I'd wake up early and watch all of the NFL shows on the sports networks when I was young, and curse them all when they picked the Giants to lose during the dark days of the early 90s (as they invariably did).
I read all of the magazines and every article in the papers that even mentioned the team, and knew their roster inside and out along with the strengths and weaknesses of each player.
I put a lot on that team back then, but that changed.
I'm not sure what happened. Maybe I learned the lesson early that you never put too much on something you can't control, like a sports team, and once I began working on Sundays, I rarely got to watch the team with any regularity.
It's also been disheartening in the past two decades to watch the impact that things like free agency have had on football- in an era when players sometimes play for a team for only a year or two before departing, you find yourself rooting more for a uniform color than for a team.
But New York Jets Coach Rex Ryan said something during the last episode of HBO's "Hard Knocks" series that struck me.
The show, which follows the Jets through their preseason training camp, gives an inside look at all of the trials and tribulations of the prima donnas that are so often found littered on the football fields these days, and while it is intensely interesting, it's often disappointing to see some of the attitudes of professional players.
When you've got enough money to fill a swimming pool and an entourage of nobodies telling you how spectacular you are, I guess it's easy to get a little… "self-important."
But when Ryan's son's high school team came to the Jets camp, he began to talk to one of the other coaches about how seeing high school players always "brings him back," and that no matter how far up he goes, he always looks at the young kids and thinks that once, "that was us."
"Look how far we've come…" he said.
As a former high school football player and as a reporter who spends many cool autumn nights on the sidelines of various teams from our local area, I can tell you that Ryan really gets it.
I never went anywhere playing football, but being on those sidelines brings back a slew of memories myself. The bright lights, the electricity in the air before a big game, the coaches walking through the lines as their players stretch, shaking hands and talking to the key guys.
Because the sport is taken very seriously by those that play, it's sometimes easy to forget that for many of them, this will be the last time that they're playing football…just because.
Most will never play again. They're not good enough, or they'll get hurt, or they'll have other responsibilities that will take over their lives.
The ones that do go on to play in college, or to the pros, might accomplish the world…but the world is watching. It's not just "for fun" anymore. It's for contracts, for money, for status, for fame; all of those things that lead men to their downfall.
But for a few years, when they're very young, it's not a whole lot different than playing out in the fields around their elementary schools.
And those years, that's when the football is worth watching- when they've got their hearts and souls in it with nothing to gain except victory, and it's still some time before they'll be ruined by the flashing lights of this greedy world.
So do yourself a favor this weekend, football fans. Turn off the TV, and don't worry about how the pros are doing. Go down to your local high school, and watch those kids beat the hell out of each other on the gridiron.
The pros don't care whether you go to the game or not, whether you watch or not. But the kids will notice that there's more people, and they'll play harder for it, appreciate it.
And to watch that kind of purity in a sport these days… that's something that's worth paying the price of admission for.
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