Sports Briefs: The Under the Stands Games

It would stand to reason that Taylor, football without penalties, CVS products and attractive, diseased females coming together in the "Blitz" video games would be the perfect recipe for disaster.

In fact, the Taylor-endorsed games used to be known as "NFL Blitz" before the league realized having their name on the product would be akin to naming Kim Jong Il league commissioner. So after eight years sponsoring the ever-increasingly-violent and adult-themed game, the NFL absconded in 2003. (I just said "absconded.")

So what does it say about the Under The Stands Games (UTSG) at high school football games on Friday nights that the NFL never sponsored them?

Growing up, attendance at high school football games was mandatory. My parents started taking me to games as soon as I was old enough not to soil my underpants unknowingly. (This was opposed to knowingly doing so when I was too enthralled in a TV program or video game to get up to poop and simply sat on my heel.)

As soon as I was in first grade, I was eligible for the UTSG.

There wasn't a draft, teams and games weren't regulated (and were routinely broken up by authority figures) and no score was kept. But if you were a male between the ages of 6 and The Shaving Age, then you had to play.

Due to the unruly nature of having in the whereabouts of 30 kids running back and forth underneath the wooden stands during a football game, the various school principals, policemen, teachers and parents tried desperately to halt any and all recreation involving a hand-held plastic football (the only piece of equipment).

The game would usually begin midway through the first quarter (around the time Attention Deficit Disorder begin to kick in), and half a dozen boys or so would file their way down underneath the stands to start an innocent pickup game.

Slowly, new players were added to each team, as there were more warm bodies under the stands than in the stands. This was usually a hint to the authority figures that something may be running afoul.

Poor kids (read: kids overflowing with street-cred but who refused to play organized sports) mixed with above-average middle-class kids (read: those wanting to prove to the poor kids that they had just as much street-cred and money to boot), to form a virtual socioeconomic picture of America with forearm, clothesline tackles that produced dislodged appendages and blood geysers.

In an attempt to break up the contests, the authority figure would start walking over towards the field of play, at which point all 30 kids would scatter like grackles when a human approaches. And as soon as the authority figure begin walking the other way, the contest would resume.

I played in the UTSG, unbeknownst to my parents, up until my first year of organized football in seventh grade. I would casually leave the stands to "go sit with my friends" or "get something to eat at the concession stand" and return 20 minutes later either with a bleeding body part or in the midst of an asthma attack.

But in those rare instances when I was able to catch a pass, juke two older kids and one poor kid and get past the trashcans (the end zone) to score a touchdown with nothing but a bruise to show for it, it made it all worth it. And during those two or three instances during my life when the band happened to be playing the fight song when I scored ... I firmly believe I sprouted hair during those times.

Recently, I learned that two of my young cousins (age 9 and 7) have been participating in the UTSG in their hometown. And from the "What was OK for me is not OK for you" department, I became horrified . . . imagining how badly they'd kick LT's tail.