WALLY WORLD: Backyard Football Cures All That Ails

It was a beautiful weekend wasn’t it?

Cambridge gave us all the best parts of autumn: the freezing cold rain, muddy tracks, continual cloud cover. It just felt so unbelievably horrible to be outside. Yay!

Thank goodness for football. Man, without that old pigskin on the old telly, I would have been so bummed.

Like, imagine the waves swelling really high, but you just broke your board yesterday on some crunchy rocks. Bro, that bummed.

But last weekend was different.

Maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was the debate hangover, but Saturday was ugly. The top-25 saw upsets galore: Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, Wake Forest, all going down.

But for me, only three games mattered. Let’s approach from a communitarian perspective (big-ups to my man Michael Sandel, I know you’re reading this column, and I just want to say, you’re so enlightened, and stuff, like, I mean, wow, smart, and you’re modeled after Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, or the other way around, well, either way, you know what I’m talking about, right??).

Mikey, correct me if I’m wrong, but it works from the inside-out: my friends, my family, and then my community at large.

The weekend all started with a pick-up game with my best friends, in the mud and cold of a cool Friday September night. It continued with my family’s alma mater, the Univesity of Virginia, getting their crap rocked by previously un-victorious (?) Duke in ACC play, and it ended with “the slip felt (read, heard, who knows) round the world,” as Harvard fell to Brown, whose mascot is the Bears, whose poop smells so freaking bad. By extension, Brown smells like bear poop. Brown stinks. Logic v. Brown: logic always wins!!!!

Let’s start with the worst: Harvard’s ugly 24-22 loss against the aforementioned stinky-dinkies from Providence.

Three fumbles, a missed two-point conversion, and a missed extra point after our kicker slipped in front of the ball. Come on, Mother Nature! Come on! Give us a freaking break. You make me feel so bad when you do bad things to non-bad people. Do bad things to those bad people over in Browntown.

When that weather affects my football, I get really upset. And I just can’t deal.

Okay, so I moved on. I had my old Wahoos, the University of Virginia, led by former Jets coach Al Groh, going up against a team that had not won an ACC game in its history. 0-25. They were un-victorioused…or whatever that word would be.

So it starts out great. Good drive, get a field goal, we’re up 3-0, no worries. Thirty-one unanswered points for Duke later, and UVA effectively reaches its lowest point in program history.

We lost 31-3. 31-3!!! To a team that hadn’t won an ACC game in its program history. To a team that hadn’t won an ACC game in its program history!!! (Did you see that? That was an effect of a) repeating to empasize and b) use of the tri-exclamation point emphasis approach. Booyah.)

So I’m bummed (see fourth paragraph for surfing metaphor to show you how bummed I was). I did some work in my room, cried a little, consoled myself with some beer, and for the most part, was pretty distraught.

But then my friends came to the rescue. “Walt, pick up your head, my mate, ‘tis not all that bad,” they said.

“It is, tis,” I replied.

“Well, let’s go play some pick-up, hard-nosed, crazy-faced, dragon-inspired football out in front of Leverett,” they quipped. “Let’s play it the way god intended it to be so, be so.”

And it was so. I joined Troy “Murder” Murrell ’09, Max “Skull Crusher” Huber ’08-’09, Jake “Suck it” Segal ’09, Ryan “Hack Attack” Hackett ’09, and Clement “Rocks” Wright ’09 on the gridiron that was Leverett tower courtyard—from the two big trees to the steps.

We played, and drank, and tackled, and muddied ourselves, and slid, and fell, and caught, and charged, and frolicked, and jumped, and killed, and then, I got knocked out.

It was perfect.

It was transcendent.

And it made all the misery—of the weather, the Crimson, the Hoos—okay.

—Staff writer Walter E. Howell can be reached at wehowell@fas.harvard.edu.