A Game of Inches
One play in a football game. ESPN says that one game can change the season. One play can change the game. And from beginning to end, they say it’s a game of inches.
Last night at the Hawaii Union Builders (HUB) Goodwill All-Star football game, it was the East vs the West. My son played slotback for the East team.
You have to understand that he goes to a high school that rarely scores, let alone wins football games. So few turned out for his football team this year that they had to forfeit half their games. But the boys still came out to practice whether they had a game or not.
You also have to understand that my son is not the big, hulking football type. He’s small at maybe 140lbs. He’s quick. And he has great hands. Plus he’s got a great football IQ. He’s a smart player. So he made the East roster for Hawaii’s high school all-star game. It is definitely an honor that he is humbled by.
As his father, I can’t express how proud I am of him. Words aren’t enough. I hug him and tell him. So I think he knows.
With this game, he had an incredible opportunity to play alongside some players who may end up playing for an NFL team a few years from now. But he had to step up his game. And he did. I saw him in practice one day and he held his own. He proved he could play with the upper echelon of Hawaii’s high school football players.
If you read today’s papers or even search online for information about the game, you might find the roster. But you won’t find anything that says he caught a pass in the second quarter for a modest gain of about four yards. Nothing. No mention at all. It happened on the drive when the East team drove all the way down to the West’s three yard line.
If it’s true that one game can change a season. Then it’s true that one play can change the game. That one play may have been my son’s catch. But you’ll never know because it wasn’t recorded as such. If not for that play, the drive to the three may not have happened. Sure it was only a four yard catch. But if he had dropped the ball, the whole game would have been different. Who knows what might have happened.
So 10 or 20 years from now when he has his own kids and they ask him about the big all-star game, he’ll have to tell them that he caught the ball, but they didn’t get the stats right that night. He’ll have no proof that he did indeed catch that ball and it put his team in position to continue their drive.
I say all of this because I’m disappointed. I am by nature an emotional person. I am by training and habit, a detail-oriented person. I am not a historian, but I am a sentimental person who has a healthy appreciation for recorded history. It’s a perfect storm for me of something gone wrong. Emotion, training and senses were all blown apart by this error of omission.
It’s more than just, “Hey my son’s name isn’t in the paper.” If you’re going to keep statistics in a sporting event, get it right. It has to be accurate. Every play is important. If it is a game of inches, what about those four yards that my son contributed that went unnoticed?
The consolation. We know he was there. We have the pictures. We have a grainy little video of his introduction taken on a cell phone. We have the picture of his name on the Aloha Stadium scoreboard. We have our own memories. History is intact in the individual brain cells of family and friends who braved the pouring rain to watch him play. We know he caught the ball.
