Are You Hurt or Are You Injured?

johnny_touchdown — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 21:07:49 +0000

“Are you hurt or are you injured?” was a question asked by Coach Dick whenever someone got hurt in practice or in game. Coach was a tall thin man who was constantly seen wearing an aged school cap and an all-knowing smirk. He believed the T formation was never improved upon, and all those other offenses were just cowboy showoff shit! He was a strong proponent of iron man football, and he had no qualms about having people play both ways all game whether they were able to or not. However, he did it in a way that left the “choice” up to you. If you’re hurt, you can still play. If you’re injured, you need medical attention. This led to a weird grey area of players mummifying their arms with white tape in order to play with broken wrists or taping their ankles into immobile stumps in order to hobble onto the field. I walked onto the team as a freshman and quickly learned the hard way what the question “Are you hurt or are you injured?” meant.

One practice, I was playing defense against the starting varsity offense. I took a hard hit from a 6’4″ 280 pound senior tackle. And something just snapped in my shoulder. Pain began shooting down my left arm and up my neck. I went up to Coach Dick and he said, “Son, are you hurt or are you injured?” I squeezed out an, “I think I’m injured Coach.” He looked at me disapprovingly and put me on the sideline. The whistle blew soon after marking the start of calisthenics. I watched from the sideline of the 50-yard line as Coach Dick lined the players up for full field suicides. Right before everyone starts running, Coach Dick turns to me and with cupped hands booms, “Son, you may have got injured, but you don’t run on your shoulder do you?!”

I had to run the suicides with my left hand dangling limp beside me. All the coaches seemed to enjoy the spectacle. That night the doctor told me I DID break a bone in my shoulder. Thanks, Coach Dick!

Shot Put Like a Girl

johnny_touchdown — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 04:28:10 +0000

I went to a small Catholic high school in rural Vermont where it was difficult filling the football roster with enough players let alone less popular sports such as track and field. The school even had trouble finding a proper coach; so they allowed the junior varsity football coach, Coach Dick, to simultaneously coach football and track and field. Coach Dick enjoyed the simple things in life such as reliving his own high school football championship 15 years past, chewing tobacco, and punting footballs high in the air in hopes of hitting unaware players during practice. During our daily lineman drills, he would regale us with his fourth quarter heroics in the state championship where with a broken arm held together merely by tape he landed the perfect block to get his running back over the goal line.
Once he became the track and field coach however, Coach Dick spent much of his time hounding myself and the other lineman about signing up for shot put. I finally relented with the promise that I would never have to attend track and field practice and all I had to do was show up for the track and field meets. At the first meet, I still had not touched a shot put. Coach Dick ran me and another lineman through the two basic shot putter techniques a half hour before the event began!
Needless to say, we did awful. But I thought a bad score was better than forfeiting for lack of players. On the bus ride home, Coach Dick made a big production out of walking from the front of the bus to where I and the other “shot putter” sat in the back. He approached with a huge smile and a sheet of paper in his hand. The whole bus listened as he loudly read off the other teams’ shot put distances of the day. Then he read our embarrassingly lower distances. Then he looked at me and said, “Ohh, I was reading shot put distances of the girls teams! You couldn’t even throw like a girl!” Thanks, Coach Dick!