Watching the Bills and 49ers play in the snow Sunday night reminded me of a time in my twenties and thirties when a group of us got together on Sunday mornings in a public park to play touch football.
We started the weekend after Labor Day and vowed to keep going until our first opportunity to play in the snow. Since the climate was different then, that meant we usually made it to late November or early December. The game was typically four-on-four or five-on-five, but when there was white stuff on the ground — a couple of inches or a couple of feet — other friends would show up to join in the fun and we’d play seven-on-seven.
It was a friendly game, full of guys who had never played organized football, but a couple of them were pretty talented. Greg had an amazing arm. Several time when I was playing defense, I covered a receiver who kept running and running past the point I thought the ball might go. But Greg could hurl the ball over fifty yards and hit the receiver in stride while I watched in awe.
Meanwhile, Dave was a helluva kicker. We didn’t have field goals or point-afters, but he would regularly punt the ball at least as far as Greg could throw it. And that’s when I had to watch out for Murdoch, who was a beast on punt coverage. He had no qualms about essentially running me over like a cement truck at full speed. After a while, I did my best to sidestep him rather than risk the pain he’d inflict on my chest.
Plays were drawn by the quarterback on his chest or hand — you square out here, you go long over here, you two criss-cross over the middle, etc. It was what Cris Collinsworth calls “straight line football.”
When we finally had a snow game, any strategy decisions went right out the window. Because the footing was so unreliable, each man had to get open somehow while the defender tried to stay with him. And we had no reservations about diving for a ball because sliding in the snow was so much fun we’d often dive or slide for no particular reason.
The open fields we played on didn’t have yard markers, so the end zones and sidelines were designated by jackets. Instead of having to go ten yards to get a first down, you had to move the ball past midfield. No one called any penalties — even when everyone on defense pelted the quarterback with snowballs.
We moved the game around to whichever park was nearest the home of the player who was “host” that week. After a couple of hours, we’d quit and head to his house, brush the snow off and sit down to drink beer, eat pizza, and watch whoever was playing real football in the 1pm NFL game.
On the occasions when we got to see the pros playing in the snow, they looked like they were having almost as much fun as we did.