Sunday, February 06, 2005

A Game of Wenches

Hey it’s Super Bowl Sunday!  I wish you all a warm and satisfying experience of vicarious violence, even if you don’t watch the game.  It’s cathartic, and as the Greeks knew, that’s good for you.  Of course, they thought a lot of stuff was good for you that we know better about now, but let’s not quibble.  Rather, let’s cast ourselves back in my memory, to a time when men were men and women kicked ass.  It’s time we remembered the day the girls played football.

Within a few years of moving to San Francisco, I actually had a crew.  That’s not what we called ourselves, being generally a bunch of overeducated ex-undergrads, working legit jobs and putting on airs of hegemony, if not conventionality.... But between my old housemates and Kel’s, and the buds we all made (or would have made had we met them) back in the day, with a couple of girlfriends thrown in for giggles, there were about 25 of us who celebrated, recreated, and inebriated together.  We shared many good times and many memories and that was enough at the time to bind us into a grinning, babbling mass.  A crew, if you will.  Not really a posse, but tighter by far than just friends. 

While we did most everything together, one thing we did not do was team sports.  Basketball, soccer, polo, curling - if it involved coordinated effort and the following of rules, we didn’t get involved.  We were free spirits, man.  We didn’t need the MAN to tell us when to run and when to stop. 

Mind you, this was the ‘90s, not the ‘60s.  The MAN was Gordon Gecko, not Frank Rizzo.  We weren’t rebels - we were just lazy.  And I thought we liked it that way. 

Then Beth opened my eyes to the true reality that lay slumbering beside us: the guys might be lazy layabouts, but the gals had a different attitude.  And it was scary. 

Beth sent word around in those painstaking pre-email days: Girls’ tackle football - who’s in?  Turns out, they all were.  The retiring princesses who had seemed content to laugh and snooze along with us, restful and relaxed, had been hiding their restive, aggressive side.  Many of them had only the vaguest sense of the rules of football; most of them rarely watched it, live or on tv; I don’t think barely any of them had played before.  But that was not going to stop them.  This was a matter of empowerment and personal growth.  Naievete only impelled them more precipitously forward. 

On the appointed day a few of the guys, curious, came along to witness the fray.  We retired to a grassy knoll, a benign spot safely out of the field of play.  Some of Beth’s other friends, and her lover’s, were there too; one of them was a big woman, broad and heavy and muscular.  She was introduced as a former semi-pro player, and she took the lead in organizing the nervous giggling gaggle into teams and setting them on a few warmup drills.  The big woman, it was decided, would play quarterback for both teams, directing the rookies against each other.  She took a moment to huddle with one of the squads, and then, with disarming suddenness, the game was on. 

There had been no stretching, no tackle practice, barely any toss-and-catch with the tricky oblate sphereoid that was suddenly their most prized possession - they just lined up across the line of scrimmage and went for it.  With a vengeance.  They ran all-out; they tackled visciously on both offense and defense.  Patterns were rudimentary, and only approximately executed, but with a competitive drive that churned the sod and made the very air shudder.  Defensive ends slashed and hacked, tripped and clotheslined - almost everything I saw seemed illegal, not only under the rules of the game but under the penal code as well.  The quarterback would hand off to a demure dove whom I’d known for years, who’d then straightarm her way through a bevy of her friends with blood in her eye until someone else took her down with a rolling block to the side of the knee.  They’d hit the dirt together in a distinctly unfeminine tangle, then leap to their feet and line up for another go.  It hurt just to watch, but I could not turn away.

I don’t know how long the game went on but it ended conclusively.  The conclusion was that every woman on the field was thrashed to within an inch of her harridan life.  As they trudged away from the theater of combat, soiled and abraded and panting with expiated bloodlust, they grinned with the grins of true competitors, those to whom the tallies under “won” and “lost” are not the primary concern.  They’d played their hearts out and left their skin and sinews on the turf behind them.  The next day, and for days thereafter, they’d be sore.  Those were mere physical infirmities, though; they faded over time.  But we who’d come to watch them battle, who’d lived beside them, kept our homes and beds with them, we who thought we knew whom we’d let into our lives - we were shocked to the depths of our souls.  These women were fearless, fierce, and immune to common sense.  The respect they earned that afternon was well-founded and it continues to the present day.  Those ladies could kick our ass and call it ice cream.  And for the record, Kel can put away her share of ice cream.