I want blood. I want dirt. I want cold. I want snow.
I want old-time rock ‘em, sock ‘em football under the most wretched conditions.
I want it so cold that sweat freezes as it runs down players’ faces and the ground so hard that announcers describe it as the “frozen tundra.”
I want it so cold that you can almost feel it icing through your TV screen. I want it so cold that when the linemen get down in their stances, all you see are clouds of vapor.
I want grass-stained uniforms, ripped jerseys, clods of dirt stuck in face masks. I want middle linebackers with scowling faces, snotty noses, missing teeth, bloody knuckles.
I want players with hard, tough football names – Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke. And I want them to be as mean as their names sound.
I want Jim Taylor running over tacklers like bulls trampling amateur matadors in the streets of Pamplona, but I’ll settle for Ahman Green sprinting past them. I want confident Bart Starr quarterbacking, but I’ll glady take cocky Brett Favre.
I want George Halas and Vince Lombardi walking the sidelines dressed in top coats, fedoras and black football shoes with big, thick cleats.
I want Ray Scott in the broadcast booth, not trying to be funny or cute or clever, but simply giving me the facts. “Touchdown, Hornung.”
I want two storied NFL franchises to meet for the NFC Championship – the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers.
I want it more than I want a Super Bowl. The Pack and “Da Bears” slugging it out on the real grass of Soldier Field on a cold, sunny day in late January would be my idea of a Super Bowl.
If only we could suit up Butkus and Sayers and Nitschke and Adderley. And if only Lombardi and Halas could patrol the sidelines.
Call it nostalgia, call it old age. But I liked the NFL a lot more 30 and 40 years ago.
It was just good, tough, hard football. You didn’t have the showboating you have now. You didn’t have the over-analyzing you get in the broadcast booth today.
You didn’t have a billionaire NFL owner firing his coach after one year on the job so he could rush out and sign some sexy, high-profile college coach to a five-year contract for $25 million. You didn’t have owners axing coaches with winning records just because they couldn’t win a Super Bowl.
You may not even have known who the owners were because they tended to stay in the background which is where they belong.
You didn’t have agents, though you might have had cockroaches in the locker rooms.
You didn’t have a bunch of washed-up coaches on TV second-guessing their peers on Sunday afternoons.
You didn’t need a comedian in the TV booth to attract viewers.
You didn’t have coaching “geniuses” or quarterback “gurus.” Or West Coast offenses.
You didn’t have guys with criminal records playing the game. Nor did you have guys who played hard only when they felt like it. If they did, they didn’t have a job long.
Mostly, you didn’t have the big money. Today, rookies get signing bonuses for more money than players back then made in a lifetime.
The players are better today – bigger, stronger, quicker, faster – but I think the players back then had more fun. I think they liked playing the game more.
The linemen didn’t look like freaks of nature. They weren’t big, blubbery guys who looked like heart attacks waiting to happen. They were 260-, 270-pounders and when they blocked, they actually knocked people on their butts, they didn’t grab hold and hang on like steer-wrestling cowboys.
You didn’t have players doing dance routines in the end zone after scoring because they knew they might get killed the next time they touched the ball. Nor did players bad-mouth teammates, criticize coaches or whimper “I shoulda got the ball more.” At least not with reporters around, they didn’t.
You didn’t have opposing teams kneeling in prayer in the middle of the field at the end of a game. These guys didn’t like one another; they should pray together?
None of this is to say a showdown between the Bears and the Packers for the NFC title would be like old times.
But it would dredge up old memories. And that might be as good as the real thing.
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