No Longer in High School, But Still Ready to Play the Game

“You are no longer high school students,” the football coach roared.

He had machine-gunner’s eyes beneath his cap. He was every teen-age bench warmer’s nightmare. He was the proud product of a genealogy of warrior chieftains descended from George Patton, Bo Schembechler, Knute Rockne, Clint Eastwood and the Waynes, John and Gen. Mad Anthony.

He was America.

“You are no longer high school students,” the football coach repeated, his voice suddenly husky and brave. “And don’t you forget it.”

How could they forget, the men who knelt and crouched around him in a caged area beneath the bleachers of the football field at John Burroughs High School in Burbank?

They were the Burbank High School alumni team, representing classes from 1964 to 1989. They had taken up their armor once again--blue jerseys (acquired guts straining against some of them), lampblack under eyes stark with the anticipation and frenzy of time travelers, pads for knees and shoulders and hips, those fragile intersections of bone, sinew and potential pain--to confront two adversaries:

The Burroughs High School Alumni from across town.

And the past.

The metaphor of football as warfare has taken as much pounding as Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. But people still like it.

Witness Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the ultimate head coach, when during his triumphant press briefing after the fall of Kuwait he compared the Allied attack strategy to the classic “Hail Mary” play, where you send all your receivers streaking down one sideline to glory.

So football remains a bona fide combat metaphor. And a high school alumni football game complete with middle-aged cheerleaders, in a stadium filled with a ghost legion of past adolescent dramas and traumas, has got to represent something even grimmer and weightier:

Life. Death. Suicide.

“May your efforts be noble,” the coach said. “God bless you.”

Snarling, swearing, barking, praying, they hit the field. Blue and Red. Burbank and Burroughs. The fourth annual alumni game.

There was no kickoff. The ball started from the 20-yard line for humanitarian reasons, the same reasons why some players from the last game weren’t participating. The reasons why the alumni contests take place not every year, but every other year.

“They ached too much,” said Patty Borth of Burbank, who helped organize the event.

These were no bunch of graying codgers hobbling on audibly decrepit bones, however. Most were in their 20s. Anything lost in speed or size was probably compensated for by the calculated malice athletes accumulate as they age.

And there was some very serious contact on the very first play, a brief scuffle, helmets butting in the sun, penalty flags fluttering, elaborate profanities promising it would hurt more next time.

In the front row of the Burbank bleachers, a mountainous creature resembling a male human in a blue football jersey made a satisfied noise. His glistening shaved head and the creases in his beefy neck made him look like an artillery shell with shoes. His Fu Manchu mustache curved formidably to his jawline. A leading candidate to win a competition for man-least-likely-to-be-teased-about-wearing-a-red-earring.

“You always get excited about the first tackle,” he told his girlfriend, who pouted in sunglasses and shorts.

The scoreless first half was an exercise in tearing up the middle of the field. One highlight came when quarterback Rich Strasser of Burroughs scrambled to the far sideline, found himself with nowhere to go and threw the old sandlot reverse, 21 men stopping on a dime like cartoon characters and pursuing him to the other side of the field before he went down, fear visible in his stride, fans hooting and chortling.

“Sack-that-quaaaarterback,” a white-blonde, matronly cheerleader in a wisp of a skirt urged over a microphone, her delivery straight from the 1950s. The name Lee was stenciled on her back. “Everybody. Come on, you guys.”

There were few takers among the crowd, mostly young families with babies in tow. Somebody muttered “Oh, brother.”

Lee was undaunted. “First and 10, do it again,” she called. “We like it, we like it.”

At halftime, friends and spectators watched through the fence beneath the bleachers as the coaches bellowed about the fact that there is no “I” in teamwork, while their charges compared notes.

“They got this old man out there in a green helmet,” a 20-something defenseman chortled. “I pulled it right off his head.” Burbank scored in the third quarter, and Cheerleader Lee managed to coax some spirit out of sun-stunned fans.

The man-mountain in the front row pumped his fist in the air. Presently, he noticed a fellow mustachioed baldhead of similar girth on the field, who was retreating to the bench.

“Hey Bruce,” he rumbled. “You out?”

“I got a cramp,” Bruce bellowed back. “I’m old. But I’m going back in.”

“Hurt some guys,” the man-mountain implored, looking relieved and wistful.

Burroughs managed a fourth-quarter touchdown, but blew the extra point and lost, 7-6. It was hard to tell whose fault it was amid the dust and bodies and commotion.

And it didn’t matter. That’s the beauty and the horror of the universe in which alumni football games endure. There is always the year after next year. And the year after the year after that . . .