Toss.O

A football in the woods is equally welcome. The Flatiron trail is the place to practice your short-range precision passing—zipping the ball below tree branches or between trunks to fellow hikers. Douglas firs are defenders. Aspens threaten to intercept. The defense is punitive: balls knocked down by branches roll halfway down the canyon. The other hikers go running down the hill to chase it.

A football in a non-football situation recalls some of the sublimest moments in history, such as the Christmas Day soccer games in Europe during World War I, held in the no-man’s land between opposing trenches. All of sports, writes the psychologist S.R. Slavson, is “an acceptable regression to more immature and infantile behaviors, where one may let down the bars of dignity, decorum and temporarily return to youthful enthusiasm, hilarity and unrestrained happiness.”

I am aware that I look juvenile. Silly. Perhaps menacing—like a toddler with a hammer, The librarian in Norlin frowns when she sees the ball tossed inside, near the stacks—she sees it as dangerous, borderline sinful. The only problem I see? Americans love to throw a football. But we totally stink at it.

The quality of our spirals is, collectively, a disgrace. Mine especially. I have wobbly UFO throws, throws that spin laterally, the oblong tip flashing out like a pulsar. “Sorry,” we all say, embarrassed by our floppy throws. “It’s been a long day.” “Sorry.” “I haven’t thrown a ball in a really long time.”

Nowadays, now that so few adults play pick-up football, our spirals have become unwound. There is no activity in America in which our professionals are so amazingly good at something and our amateurs so amazingly bad. It is as if, in France, home to the world’s greatest chefs, every non-chef ate only cold canned corn and chimney soot.

Some children—children!—have no idea how to toss a ball. A 4-year-old boy tossed the ball back underhand. I know he’s only 4 but … come on! Underhanded!? Like rugby?!

There is more at stake here than you might expect. Every culture has its marks of athletic prowess and mastery: ancient Greeks had wrestling, the Spanish have dance. The football toss was, for years, our equivalent. And now what do we have? Texting?
Carry a football long enough in Boulder, and you find yourself chastising your playing partners. “Come on!” you’ll scold a campus stranger who just dropped a pass. “We got a game this weekend! USC’s coming soon!” And you’ll mean it! You know how, if Obama and Biden and everyone else in the upper echelons of government dies in a plane crash, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell becomes president? Every Boulderite believes himself to be in a similar situation with the CU Buffs’ quarterback position.
The other problem is that I am worried I am addicted to the ball. I now feel naked and alone without it, like a teen without a cell phone. I bring it out onto the golf course, on a first date and into therapy. I cradle it like a newborn.

One last thought. Everyone in Colorado these days is into carving sports—mountain biking, skiing, kayaking. These sports are wonderful, but they’re solo. Even the simplest toss of a football on a sidewalk, on the other hand, requires that you throw where your receiver will be and not where he is, it requires you tailor your trajectory to the pace of his stride. You must be together. And that is, finally, what makes people so delighted to have a football thrown their way by a stranger. It is partly that they want to squeeze the leather, feel it in their fingers and master a simple challenge. But any successful football toss forges some small connection with some other person. In cities, in which we consistently ignore each other, averting our gaze if we run the risk of looking anybody in the eye, a pump fake and pointed finger says, “I see you. I see you’re open. Now go long.”