By JOHN BOOTH
When I was a sports writer a few years ago, one of my first feature assignments was to write a profile on a longtime local high school football coach. After hanging out at an afternoon practice and hanging out with the guy afterwards, I went back to the newsroom, where my editor asked me, “So, what’s the angle?”
I repeated what the coach had raspily growled at me over and over: “It’s not about football.”
And my editor rolled his eyes and grinned and yanked at his face with that “hook-in-the-mouth” gesture, and went back to his work.
Here’s the thing, though: I can
bite on that old bait of a cliché because I grew up in
This year, my nine-year-old
daughter and I got up before dawn on parade day, bought fresh donuts at the
grocery, packed up some coffee and milk and lawn chairs and headed downtown.
These are essential to the ritual. We parked on a side street and lugged the
stuff out to
I’ve been doing this since
before I was her age, except for the years I lived in
I used to get that from watching my dad and my uncle when the older Hall of Famers would pass by, guys with cool nicknames like Lou “The Toe” Groza and Dick “Night Train” Lane. Even though I never saw those guys play, I remember the way my dad and uncle looked at them when they rode by in the parade, and it’s put a twinge in my gut as over the years, fewer and fewer of them are left that I remember from when I was little.
I try to clap loudest when the
older guys go by these days, because you never know when it’s someone’s last
For the last few years, though, there’s been a shift: Guys are going into the Hall that I can remember actually seeing play, and that adds a different dimension to the whole thing.
My first summer as a sportswriter was 2004, and it was my job to interview the inductees that year: John Elway, Barry Sanders, Bob Brown and Carl Eller.
And as cool as it was talking
to Elway and Sanders - guys I'd actually watched work their magic on the field
- it was chatting with Eller and Brown that really clued me in to what this
week in
I got a great snapshot of inductee Rayfield Wright this year, just beaming and clapping as he rode past; Charley Taylor (Class of 1984) too. Tommy McDonald (class of 1998) wouldn’t stop whipping his towel around in a frenzy, like he was trying to ignite the bench at a playoff game.
Seeing John Madden struck me in
a different way, because of Bob Brown. I happened to be the first
I remember him telling me how much he wanted to see Madden get into the Hall; how hard he would push for that. And seeing Madden, I thought of Bob, and imagined that thrill again.
What surrounds the Hall of Famers in the parade are typical and yet somehow wonderfully exceptional, tied as they are to this one week of summer: The high school marching bands; the enormous cartoon character balloons – although my daughter and I thought this year’s floating heads of Bert and Ernie were a little odd; the llamas and their handlers; the Shriners on their motorcycles and even the dorky “Briefcase Drill Team” sponsored by some executive staffing company; the local radio and television personalities; the senior citizens in their restored jalopies; the HOF Queen and her court, bright in cake-icing gowns and waving and smiling for mile after mile.
We come here because of football, but I still don’t think that’s what it’s about, at least for me.
It’s about being reminded by these guys what it means to find something you love to do and work at it until it loves you back with pain and beatings and blows and in the end, its own bruising glory and a spot worthy of remembrance in someone's eyes.
That’s not just about football. That’s about life.
And I’ll bite that hook every summer.
