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The Overhead Bin: Unmerciful

While not a football nube – I did spend four years at CU’s Folsom Field swilling beer and making lewd comments about “tight ends”, after all – and despite the passion of my youth, I am not well-versed in the game.
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This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

While not a football nube – I did spend four years at CU’s Folsom Field swilling beer and making lewd comments about “tight ends”, after all – and despite the passion of my youth, I am not well-versed in the game.

My learning curve dips actually, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I just don’t care. I have loyalties to certain teams, based on circumstance. I’ve been a fair-weathered supporter of U of M, Da Bears, the Buffs and now the Broncos. I love when they win, I just don’t care how they do it. The nuances of the game, if there are any, elude me.

With my son having now progressed from flag football to the eagerly anticipated tackle game, my interest in the process has spiked. Maybe my level of regard for the game has increased with the addition of up-close sounds of helmets clacking and bones crunching. Maybe I take it more seriously because unlike Flag Football coaches, those at the tackle level do not send players onto the field shouting “popsicles and hugs when it’s over!” Perhaps it’s the addition of all that gear that somehow raises the stakes from recreation to vocation. From extracurricular activity to umm, full-ride scholarship?

Now that I am paying attention, as a mother, I’m on the lookout for certain things like the names and numbers on the shirts of boys who push, shove, trip, or attempt to do any of these things to my son. I watch for cheating, and tend to zero in on players who seem large for the age group. “Is that facial hair?” I wonder, squinting at a bit of face behind the helmet. “A wedding ring? Bald spots?” Mostly, I just try to follow the movement of my own child, whom I can only recognize by his shoes, once he’s tossed into the melee of a play in progress. Then the whistle blows, boys emerge from the pile and my kid reappears in one piece. They line up again to do whatever it is they do in that flurry of shoulder pads and helmets.

I’m noticing other things as well, however, and now that I’ve got skin in the game, I have license to weigh in.

In addition to wins, losses and rankings, also at stake on the “big boy” field with all the gear and no popsicles, are fledgling egos. Underneath the the helmet, pads, plates, cups and spikes are little boys who love that they’re the real deal. Sure, they bemoan practice but they love being out there playing, they love when the maneuvers in the playbook actually pan out on the field. Each of them savors their own individual contribution to a tackle, pass or run.

Occasionally, a team is steamrolled by their opponent. Just when they think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. Yet, as one does when they’ve committed to something, and as we parents endlessly encourage them to do, the boys pick themselves up, huddle up, chin up and line up for a new chance to get it right. It’s called sportsmanship, a key element of competition, both of which are generally accepted as healthy ingredients in childhood development and all around good character.

But I soon realize that getting their butts kicked isn't that simple.

Because suddenly, just minutes into the third quarter, the whistle blows and the players line up to shake hands – another long-held tradition in the name of sportsmanship. But why is the game ending so soon?

It seems the imbalance in the score combined with the remaining minutes on the clock fall within the parameters to invoke the “Mercy Rule.” Being the avid student of football that I now am, and because 12-year-olds are nothing if not grossly misinformed, I looked up Mercy Rule. After all, I hadn’t driven 40 miles, stood in pouring rain and watched our team get slaughtered for just over half of a game to then be deprived of one full quarter of hope. Suspense. Reckless fantasy, but still.

The Mercy Rule is also known as the slaughter rule, knockout rule, or skunk rule and it ends a two-sided sports contest early if one competitor “has a very large and presumably insurmountable lead over the other.” It originated in part to spare the losing team further humiliation, and also because running up the score is thought to be unsporting.

What could be more unsporting than shutting the losing team down early? Or more humiliating than having the game officially called because “Your team isn’t worth the effort of slaughtering any more?” This rule is unmerciful – a slap in the face. “We’ve enjoyed mowing the grass with your teeth, but frankly it’s gotten old and we just cannot stomach another 12 and a half minutes of your complete incompetence.”

I have never seen the losing team crying. It’s not a suicide mission. The boys aren’t hurriedly scribbling farewell notes to their mothers before they head back into the massacre. On the contrary, their expectation is that they will play to the end. Isn’t one of our favorite parenting refrains “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game?” Furthermore, this is a team that clearly needs the practice and they were having fun. What gives?

Just for entertainment, imagine the scene another way. What if the players on the losing team did start sulking, huddled up and elected a spokesperson to go talk to the coach. What if he walked up to the coach and said “Hey, Coach? Um, we’re losing pretty badly, I mean they are really wiping their butts with us and there’s no way we’re gonna be able to win, even if we do score. We look pathetic, the guys are super embarrassed, and so we were thinking maybe we could just end the game early.”

The Coach (perplexed): “What?! Are you freakin’ kidding me?! I and all these other coaches are out there on the field running drills with you for six hours a week, coming up with plays, listening to you whine about the warm-ups, finding positions you can actually play, organizing, planning, scheduling. . .”

Still the Coach (purple now): . . .”and YOU little PISSANTS want to QUIT? You want your MOMMIES? Just because you’re behind, you want out?! Get your no-pass-catching, field-goal bungling, offsides-offending butts back out there and tell your team to buck the hell up!”

It’s a fundamental rule of life. We learned it when we were 5, trying to back out of a game of Monopoly, in debt to every one of our siblings, the bank and even our mom. “I don’t feel like playing anymore” was not met with empathy, sympathy or even a loan. Another trip around the board sinking deeper in debt was more like it. A get out of jail free card would not have helped then, and in real life, there’s no such thing.

Sometimes life gives you lemons. It often feels like the odds are stacked against us. It would be great when we’ve had enough of the hamster wheel if we could hop off for awhile or forever. Could we get a Mercy Ruling on the daily calls and voicemails reminding of the overdue balance on a credit card? That’s uncomfortable, and I don’t wanna play anymore.

Could we fast forward through interminable conference calls that become more irrelevant progress is paused repeatedly for audio glitches, lost documents or poor video quality? We’d very much appreciate it if someone would just let the clock run out. Meeting Mercy could be invoked to stop the mounting loss of hours we will never recoup.

If we get to duck out of things we don’t really care for I’d like to be excused from the agony of tax time – run that clock directly from January 1 through May. Also, the indignities of economy class air travel. I would like a lifetime reprieve from the burden of wondering what is or what is not in my water. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some referee would allow us to just bow out when the going gets rough? As cool as it would be, in life, there is no supreme arbiter of a Mercy Rule.

As adults, part of our role is to protect our children from the injustices of life, from being blindsided by events they are not yet equipped to handle. Preparing them to handle life, though, involves providing both opportunities for success and exposure to failure. We introduce them to athletic, artistic and academic pursuits. Once there, they learn the nature of that experience and, in the case of sports, they experience the nature of discipline and respect, camaraderie, sportsmanship and competition. Shielding our guys from an organic consequence of competition is denying them pride in seeing a tough match through. Foreclosing on the chance that with the pressure of winning gone, one or two players pull off the play of the game, which has merit even though it doesn’t put them ahead. Officiating an artificial end robs the team of the chance to walk off the field with dignity.

Kids are resilient, bouncing back from all manner of setbacks we’d rather they didn’t have to face. At some point, they’ll inevitably encounter failed relationships, crime, war and death, and we’ll do our best to mitigate the impact while they gain the maturity to process those realities. But right here and right now, we’ve enrolled them in tackle football and outfitted them to the hilt – at no small expense. We drive them to practice all week long, and cheer them on at every game. We take pictures, videos, and jangle our cowbells from the stands. Why ever would we tell them to quit? Why deliberately interrupt an experience that by its very nature instills the qualities we’re trying to nurture in them?

Face it: sucking is part of life. Losing builds character. The opportunity to play and lose holds as much value as playing and winning. The ability to have fun and make memories in the face of the loss is remarkable. That’s a team I could be proud of.

Time’s up for the Mercy Rule.