The High Shock Of Hitting:
An Irreverent Meditation On The Sweet Licks of Football
The hit is the thing. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
It’s like a thrill-drug of the first order, that bright-sprung, nearly blinding concussion of current that’s whacked into your brain when you knock the living hell out of somebody on a football field. That sweet-spinning crack in your ears running down your spine like a lightning bolt. I remember a linebacker coach at Florida State built like a human fireplug screaming at a long, gangly snake of a boy in one-on-one tackling just before he tossed the other guy the ball: “Shit! Shit! Shit! Ring his bell, Whitehorse!” and the tackler uncoiled into the other guy’s cranium leaving him twitching on the ground as if he were jammed into an AC outlet. Talk about getting your head right. There’s nothing quite like that crazy juice shoots through you when someone unloads on you or you take the exhilarating stuff to them.
Somewhere there’s a high school game film where I had my clock cleaned pulling right from right tackle on a power sweep. You see me hit something like a stone wall, my mouthpiece flying in the air, and after I land on my back lay there eerily still. I can recall a few seconds as if I were dreaming that crowd noise, the announcer’s voice, a black marching band playing “The Horse,” voices of cheerleaders, coaches shouting, screams from the stands, a whistle blowing, believing I was standing outside it somewhere or drifting, then suddenly wondering why the hell I was flat on my back in the grass with my eyes shut; as if I’d been slapped halfway into another world and from it realized I wasn’t dreaming. I leaped up too fast and flew back to the huddle as if to prove I was more than all right.
And the funny thing is, I was.
With that hit I was a new man suddenly. I remember the rest of the night feeling high on everything, as if I’d been injected with some enlightening chemical that taught me to fly. I was up there in giddy heaven, like a kid in an altered state of grateful euphoria, the collision drug taking full effect. I’d never been so happy to be alive. It was like sex slammed into my head.
The rest of the night I played with abandon and fire I hadn’t known before, hurling myself maniacally, giddily into every play as if this was some delirious celebration of hitting, as if someone had just let me out of my cage. I wasn’t angry, though I’m damn sure I was playing like I was. I was happier than I’d ever been playing the game, insanely glad and luxuriating in it, hyperaware in some heightened sensual state, my senses crisper, richer, every moment seemed sweeter. The music, particularly the smell of the grass and cleated earth, the stench of new sweat, the aroma of conces-sions, the way the lights created a this-is-football-heaven halo over the field. I was in love with my coaches who doggedly rode me, and would’ve jumped off a bridge for them. I was in love with humanity and life in general, with every hapless, stinking player on my team, and could even care about the other guys. They had mothers and loved America and Christmas too, and though I’d do everything to beat them, we were all in this brawling, mud-slinging, knock-down, happy demolition derby because we loved to knock the living shit out of each other: we were in deep collusion. Sure we wanted to kick each other’s asses, but the sensory things were the thing itself, the unfettered joy of it. We were wild-eyed, red-blooded American boys beating the hell out of each other on a Friday night in a free-for-all chlorophyll nirvana. I was laughing inside, reeling-nuts. I played one of my finest games that night, and wished to God I could’ve bottled what getting my ass handed to me on a platter had infused in me, like some dazzling-raw hitting potion, and guzzled a few bottles before every game.
For most players the oblong sport’s all about hitting, and the speed and strength and desire to hit the hardest.
Sure there’s more to it, but if you’re not open to getting waylaid now and then, you don’t step out there. To anyone who’s never played football and had their bell magically rung, it can look like a bunch of clumsy idiots aimlessly shoving each other around. But when you’ve felt that shock through your system that changes everything you knew up to that moment, you understand the internal appeal of the game. It isn’t just the open field runs or long passes, the gang tackles that drew you to this madness. It isn’t the beautiful women in the stands, though they never hurt. It’s the pleasure of having run into someone so ungodly hard neither of you are ever quite the same again, an awakening, you might say. And the next play you get to line up and remind the same fellow or another one why he’s out there by hitting him harder than he’d ever been hit before, witnessing that identical smile of recognition and respect as he gets up slowly with his head twirling like a pinwheel, if he gets up at all.
The game can be malicious. It can be mean and nasty and vile.
But most of us who play it see it as a mere exchange of clean, hard-hitting highs where you take each other’s heads off for sixty minutes, and when it’s over it’s over, you shake hands, and the harder the licks the bigger the grins. The keepers of the game are messing with it now, making rules against head to head contact and “targeting,” chop blocks, things that were the game when I played it. They’re even talking about doing away with kickoffs, and God knows what else, and maybe it will make it “safer.” But the fact is, it isn’t a game about avoiding collisions. If they take away too many hits they might as well give them flags and call it something else. Because hitting is football, that’s what you’re there for. And if you have to think too much about how you hit someone, where you hit them, which angle you hit them from, you inhibit the natural instincts that make it what it is.
Of course there are characters who will play outside the lines if they can get away with it.
My father told me a story about a high school game he played in the fog in Sewanee, Tennessee. The stuff was so thick you could barely see the guy lined up across from you, and the right guard playing next to my father’s center, a brawny, red-haired mountain boy, was dragging opposing players off into the fog one at a time, yanking their helmets off and laying them out cold. They had no idea where their teammates were disappearing to. “I got me another one, Raymond,” he’d snicker, ducking back into the huddle. Finally there were so many opponent’s players laying unconscious or staggering around in the fog the officials had to stop the game and find them. In the second quarter the other team forfeited for lack of playable personnel. Now that’s hitting with a personal touch. I was taught to play hard but fair, have never been into cheap shots, but have taken a few. It’s what you might call “the game within the game.” You have to be ready for anything coming at you or you’ll come to with a headache in a fog some-where and not even remember you were playing a game.
Hitting can lay you out, rile you up, or giddy-illuminate you.
But whatever it does it is the passion and intensity and meat of this game, the delicious currency and marrow that tests your mettle, and without wide-open, unbridled collisions football wouldn’t turn us on the way it does. It’s how you dominate or get dominated, and the team that hits most consistently hard, particularly in the interior line, will win most of the battles and almost always the war. As a football player you learn to respect a clean, mind-bending lick. One that lands out of nowhere and makes you say, whoa, what, goddamn! There may be only one like it in a game, and not that many in a season. You have to laugh when you get smacked silly. You set yourself up for that kind of collision, to get the ever-loving crap knocked out of you, and low and behold it happened. And you say, oh yeah, I forgot about that, didn’t I? I’ve had my chin ripped open, helmets snatched off, and was blindsided so hard once going down on a kickoff I didn’t know where my sideline was. An All American former teammate at FSU reminded me once he woke up in the locker room at halftime after catching a pass across the middle against Auburn. My jaw still crackles from pass-blocking a 280 pound Mississippi steam engine one night in Tallahassee for four quarters. We were a couple of fighting rams lifting each other off the turf with our horns; every hit a dawning detonation. You have to hand it to the other guy, because without his presence you’d never experience this kind of transcendence. When blood’s drawn and the world’s lit up and singing, you know you’re in this sport, part of some grand warrior tradition where hopefully nobody gets maimed, but everyone gets an equal shot at the heady release of repeated, screaming impacts. The variations, as in good sex, are endless.
When football hitting’s incendiary enough it can set off a riot.
In one Georgia Tech-Tennessee game played at Grant Field in the Forties, my father, playing center for the Yellow Jackets, contributed to one of these. My mother, who sat on the sidelines with the player’s wives and watched him stroll past her with a few broken noses before face masks, said the brawl that erupted that day was largely attributed to how hard he was hitting people. As a boy I studied that flickering piece of football history a hundred times. It was one of the best sessions of coaching I got from anybody, and he taught me a lot about the game. If you’re going to play this head ringing sport, it said, do it with reckless abandon and passion, holding nothing back, and hit people so hard it staggers them, changes them, pushes them so far they want to fight with you or give up. It’s all a matter of will, and the conviction of your impact is how you get the message into their head.
In the film my father snaps the football from center, then explodes into the nose guard with a hit you can actually feel on film, lifting him off the ground flat on his back. It‘s one of those hits that says: we’re not messing around out here. There’s a skirmish in the backfield the camera lingers on a few seconds, swinging and wobbling back to the offensive line where my dad’s punching it out with half the Tennessee line. As both benches pour onto the field he’s in the middle of it, battling a swarm of Tennessee jerseys. As the camera pulls back to show the whole field moiling, a stout, muscular man in a light-grey suit, is scaling the fence swinging into the melee as in some Tasmanian devil cartoon. This is Paul Duke, friend of my father’s who’d been an All American center at Tech the year before and was playing pro ball. Wearing no equipment but a tie, he’s fisting it out with a pack of stunned-looking, helmeted Tennessee players. But the telling thing is when my dad’s head coach, Bobby Dodd, works his way into the center of this swirling mayhem and singles out and begins pulling my old man off the field. There’re hundreds of people fighting out there, it’s a wide-open chaotic riot in the stadium, but Raymond Smith’s the one he goes after; and with my father tugging against him, still swinging his fist back and yelling and trying to get back into it, manages to drag him toward the locker room through the crowd several times.
Watching that footage, I see the man who was my football mentor and inspiration, wired up on the timeless, bottled-up hitting juice that makes this game so strangely addictive. I hear Coach Dodd saying, “That’s enough, Raymond. Come on, son, that’s enough…let’s go…” I see an All American boy having the time of his life with the sport that hooked him early on, itching to get back into it and feel the electric rush when you personally and with great emotional velocity connect with another man’s head. He’s wound up on the giddy, smack-brained stuff, the wild adrenaline thrill-pill, wrangling with his coach to let him have another dose of it. He’s getting dragged out of a football candy store; and he’s thinking, oh yes, I know exactly what he’s thinking, as he breaks loose and fights his way back into the brawl: there’s no way I’m getting separated from this gridiron heaven, until I have someone else’s ass in my pocket.
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Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor and writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
