Currently I am posting daily on Facebook a series of old photographs under
the theme “70 Days to 70.” As I approach my 70th birthday, I’m
providing a retrospective on some of the highlights of my life. Most of these
are brief comments, but today’s post involves a story that cannot be recorded
in the short space available on Facebook. So, I am moving today’s post to my
blog.
Beginning as a 6th grader in 1954, I played football for
Edgewood Elementary School. The football league was sponsored by the YMCA.
Players had to provide their own equipment, practiced everyday after school
under the guidance of a coach, and played a series of games against other
elementary schools in the southern suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. At the end of
the season, an All-Star game (“the Sun Bowl”) was played on the football field
at Shades Valley High School between players chosen by the coaches. All-Stars
from the schools to the east played against the All-Stars from the West. I
played on the West All-Star team as a 7th and 8th grader.
The photo I have posted on Facebook today (Day 29 in the projected 70
posts) is a football card of Rebel Roy Steiner, who became my uncle when he
married my mother’s youngest sister, Doris Richardson, in 1952. My cousin
Margaret and I at the age of 9 were included in the wedding party. You can only
imagine how a 9-year-old boy would feel to have a professional football player
marry into his family.
Years later while I was in high school, I visited Rebel’s mother. Mrs.
Steiner pulled out all of the old scrapbooks that she had kept recording
Rebel’s career from high school days through his professional football days. It
was quite a collection that disclosed a truly all around outstanding athlete.
Rebel had been chosen for the all-state team in high school, but not just in
football. He had been all-state in football, basketball, and baseball. He went
to the University of Alabama and played football for an outstanding team there.
He played offensive end with an All-American quarterback; and as I recall, this
was around the time in the mid-1940’s when Alabama was a powerhouse football
team and played in the Rose Bowl.
Rebel was drafted by the Chicago Bears but was called into military
service and could not accept that draft. After two years in the military, he
was drafted by the Green Bay Packers. He played two years (1950-51) in the
defensive backfield for Green Bay, the second year in excruciating pain from a
knee injury. He intercepted 10 passes in his career, and one of those
interceptions was a 94-yard touchdown return. The scrapbook I saw had a large
picture from the New York Times
showing the entire field and with a white line tracing his runback for the
touchdown. I believe that was the NFL record interception return at that time.
Because of the injury, Rebel retired from football. A year or so later he
married my aunt.
All of this is leading up to my football experiences in 1956. At the
beginning of the 1956 YMCA football season, Rebel came to visit me. He brought
along the hip pads and pants that he had worn as a Green Bay Packer. He gave
them to me to use as my equipment for my eighth-grade football season. I would
guess that I probably weighed about 120 pounds at that point, and the equipment
was mostly too large; but we made the hip pads work, and my Mom took up the
shiny gold Green Bay pants so that they fit enough where I could play in them.
Out on the front yard of our house, Rebel gave me a few lessons about the
importance of staying low in blocking, etc. I took those back to the team the
very next day and gave our lineman the lessons I had learned.
Edgewood School’s football team had a very good year that season, and my
year (partially equipped in the Green Bay Packers uniform) was excellent. I was
chosen again that year as an all-star to play in the Sun Bowl; and I started as
right end on the All-Star team—but I was not destined for stardom.
I mentioned in an earlier Facebook post about my discovery in my 8th-grade
math class that I needed eyeglasses. My near-sightedness made it difficult to
read items on the chalkboard from a distance. The same impact began to affect
my football playing—though it is only in retrospect that I recognized the
impact of my near-sightedness. I had an increasingly hard time seeing the
football clearly on pass plays, and that issue came to a climax in the All-Star
game—the only game we ever played at night.
I started as an end on the All-Star
team, and we were playing in a close match against the East All-Stars. Near the
end of the second quarter, my team was forced into a fourth-down punting
situation. As an end, my job was to go down field and cover the punt. The ball
was snapped to the punter, and I went down field to cover the punt. The snap was
a bad one, however; and the punter had to scoop the ball up off the ground and
tried to evade the opposing rushers. He looked up and spotted me wide open down
field, so he heaved the ball in my direction. I stopped and turned toward the
ball. I don’t know whether it was my failing eyesight, the night-time game with
artificial lighting, or the opposing player who was bearing down on me as the
ball approached my outstretched hands, but the football went right through my
hands and fell to the ground. An adult on the sidelines hollered out, “You
couldn’t catch a ball with a bushel basket!” My coach pulled me from the game
and did not put me back in the game during the second half. My All-Star career
and my Green Bay Packer pants went down the drain in one flubbed play. I tried
to play football the next year at Homewood Junior High School, but a pulled
muscle in my back and continuing sight problems kept me from even making the
starting team. So ended my football career, touched by the glory of my uncle’s
Green Bay Packers uniform and smothered by the agony of defeat. It was a hard
year for a 13-year-old, but I was a life-lesson for what I was to become.
