Louis Roney: Competition and character

I learned firsthand that football builds “character” and “characters.” These are two distinctly different things.

With football in the air every fall, my memories fly back to the little band of players who comprised the Winter Park High School Wildcats in the late 1930s.

We Wildcats took what we were doing on the field very seriously, and our coach was, in his minute realm, a high potentate. Football was to us still a game, but a game to be played with utmost desire to win — and to win within the bounds of rules and good sportsmanship.

We same guys were pals who swam and fished together in Lake Virginia, and blocked and tackled each other with full strength on the football practice field. Most of us had played football together in some form or other since we were in grammar school, and had picked up knowledge of the game from movie news shorts and the four or five home games a season played by the Rollins College Tars at Tinker Field in Orlando.

In its own league, Rollins was a consistent winner, and had a good coach, a problematic vociferous guy who had been a first-string player on an important college team.

I loved the game and played center on our team, but never kidded myself that I would play beyond high school. At 165 lbs., my football days were limited, and I enjoyed them to the full while I could.

One player on our team, halfback Ralph Jackson, was good enough to play for the Citadel in Charlestown after graduating from WPHS.

I unexpectedly won an academic scholarship to Harvard, and when I arrived in Cambridge, I realized that I was at least 30 pounds lighter than anyone on the freshman team, and was nowhere near as adept as those fellows who had come to Harvard via Exeter, Andover, etc. Harvard was by then no longer the power it had been in football’s historic early days, when the Ivy League was creating the game we know today.

Football is a microcosmic non-lethal representation of war, I used to think. The two sides do everything within the rules to conquer each other for sixty fateful minutes. If you played a position in those early days, you played both offense and defense, period! If you came out of the game, you had to stay out for the rest of that half....

In WWII Naval training, I spent a month on the campus of Notre Dame University where football had long been adored in almost superhuman ways. One bright sunny day I walked alone out into the Notre Dame stadium to the middle of the 50 yard line and stood there in the silence. I looked around and imagined that I heard the crowds who had come to cheer Notre Dame and Army, or Ohio State, or USC, in that teeming stadium — ghosts of glorious past gridiron days.

I once had a coach who told me quite clearly to put my opponent “out of the game” if I could. I dared to tell him that I would try to put my opponent “out of the play,” but certainly not out of the game.

A few years later in the South Pacific, I was in a “game” where opponents were pledged and armed to eliminate each other from the face of the earth. That condition was a big step beyond anything that football ever suggested to us kids who played the game. War was quite another matter.

The new self-imposed limits of what one will do to be victorious over other people reversed the character of what we young boys had learned and adopted in playing football, and in living as civilized human beings.