Baseball and football have always been the big games in the United States. We have memories of the great players in both sports.
In baseball, the names that stand out to us are Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb and many, many others. In football, I lean more to college players. The ones that stand out to me are Pat Sullivan, Bo Jackson, Cam Newton and Patrick Nix. I guess it’s not hard to tell where I went to school.
In Europe, the sport they call football is actually soccer. Our friends, Basil (our friend who passed away recently) and his wife Ingrid Holmes went to one of Auburn’s football games with us. Being used to seeing soccer, he asked me several times, ‘Why do they bunch up so much?’ I tried to explain the way our football is played. But he didn’t like to see it played that way.
When I was in my last year of high school, we played a game like soccer, but we called it speed ball, if I remember correctly. The ball was slightly smaller than a soccer ball. The reason I remember this game so well was that a boy kicked a ball really hard, and being about 8 feet or so from him, that ball hit me on the right side of my face, and I went down. When I got up and felt my face it felt like it was caved in. As the old saying goes, that really smarted. Speed ball was the closest I ever came to soccer.
In the last few years soccer has become popular in the U. S. Now there are teams for the very young. Our little great-granddaughter, Emma Grace, is 5 years old and is on one of the little soccer teams.
There was a little 5-year-old boy on one of the teams. When his game was over, he said to his mother, “If it cost any money for me to play you should ask for a refund because I am not coming back.”
As the saying goes, “Out of the mouth of babes. “I don’t think this little fellow will be remembered as one of the greats of soccer.
My email is robertntidwellsr@gmail.com.
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