To My Cousin Matt on His 42nd Birthday

The Untold Saga of Piggy LaBunk As sports stories go, Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, Red Smith and others of their ilk have their stories that will live forever in the hearts and minds of Americans as they sit in the stands to enjoy their own National Pastime, whether on the baseball diamond, the football gridiron or even the forest green of a soccer or rugby field. This story is about one player, not very big, not very fast, not even very nimble, but he made up for it on the field with the heart and soul of a true athlete. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Outlined against a darkening October sky, the stadium lights were flickering on as the football game reached the final quarter of regulation. Most of the players on both sides of the field were feeling the pangs of hunger, muscle cramps, bruises and contusions as they butted heads and slammed into a seemingly endless supply of unyielding linesmen. The home team was behind 21-3 and feeling it worse. There were no high-fives like on the opposite side of the field. As Ernest Thayer would say, there was no joy in Mudville…only a seething atmosphere of impending doom and frustration. These were smart players on the home team, smart enough to know it’s not within the confines of human nature to intentionally run into another human being, much less one who was dolled up in enough padded gear to survive a grizzly bear attack. That was one of the things that had to be drilled into you at Spring Practice and the Two-A-Days preceding the official start of the season. Some people were meant for that. I’ve known of a couple who literally salivated at the thought of a head-on collision. These quickly became candidates for the Butkus Award for the top college linebackers in the country. Right now it seemed like most of the top-rated candidates had gotten their fill of Wheaties and were working on the second course of quarterbacks, running backs and receivers. What the home team needed was someone who could run and carry a football at the same time. There is a special breed of man for this job. You had to have nerves of steel to start running in the direction of Neanderthals whose only thought was pushing men out of their was till they found the one with the ball. These men of the defense were lions with their eyes locked onto dinner and you had ‘wildebeest’ tattooed on your forehead. This is when you take what fear you have inside you and put them directly into your feet. Now, we all know it’s physically impossible to go 1-on-11, but if you could work your way through maybe two or three of them with your teammates blocking the rest as they should, you stood a chance of getting through. Tough and fast was the secret with this crowd. Unfortunately, the player being carried off the field was neither. The coach scowled. ‘Send in LaBunk!’ he roared. No one really knew what his real name was, but he wasn’t called ‘Piggy’ because of any weight issue…far from it. He was, by most football standards, a tiny thing who made the anemic place kicker look like an Apatosaurus. The largest muscle in his entire body seemed to be his head, which was precariously balanced above his padded shoulders. He was never in the starting lineup because the coach didn’t want to be accused of intentionally sending a man to his own execution. He earned the nickname because he was from Arkansas, land of the Razorbacks. His style of play harkened back to the days of UA coach Hugo Bezdek, who told the press after Arkansas beat LSU in 1909 that his team performed ‘like a wild band of razorback hogs’ (the team was still known as the Cardinals back then). By 1910 though, the fans had latched onto the Razorback name and it stuck. Piggy LaBunk did not know the meaning of the word ‘fear’. Of course he had his detractors who chided that he didn’t know the meaning of a lot of words. Piggy laughed in his good-natured manner because he knew most of those naysayers were sportswriters with the ‘loyal opposition’, i.e. the other schools in the conference. He would make sure those jibes quieted down as he did his thing on the field. You see, Piggy’s secret did not come from any diet or training regimen. He was naturally intense. He was known to give 110 percent because he always seemed to find an extra reserve of energy when everyone else was all but drained. If he wanted it, there was no power in Heaven or points below that would stop him from getting it. He went through the motions in the off-season, which sometimes got him on the bad side of the head coach. But when the whistle sounded for the opening kickoff, he prowled the sidelines like a yard dog catching a whiff of Mailman Con Carne. As soon as he heard the coach yell his name, he slipped the seemingly oversized helmet on and screwed it down tight as he lopped onto the field in place of his fallen comrade. The first play called for a slant right. The quarterback, a seasoned veteran even by collegiate standards, deftly handed Piggy the ball and whispered a silent prayer he would survive the experience. To no one’s surprise, the defense quickly crowded near the sideline to give him a greeting he wouldn’t forget. The surprise was all theirs as Piggy almost gracefully leaped into the churning mass of muscle and seemingly body surfed over the crowd for an eight-yard gain. The next play was straight up the middle in an attempt to make the first down. To see it from the stands, it looked like the entire defensive front stepped back a couple of feet as Piggy LaBunk plowed into what used to be the nose tackle’s position, picking up the first down and a couple of more yards for good measure, taking the front line with him. As one who clearly remembered the dreaded Four Horsemen of Notre Dame…Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden…Piggy LaBunk may have looked like the odd man out, but no one denied he had a firm hold of the reins. Another call up the middle and LaBunk nearly flew over the end zone, pausing long enough to place a foot down on the colored grass. The extra point made it 21-10. The visitors were startled by this diminutive player who galloped like Red Grange and soared like Lynn Swann. What was worse was LaBunk was now placed on the kicking team. He wasn’t tired. He was just starting to have fun. Sure enough, as the other team’s tight end caught the ball, LaBunk had tracked him from the side and blind-sided him, the ball squirting from his hands straight up in the air, floating for what seemed like an eternity and then falling back into Piggy’s grasp. A quick scamper and an extra point later, the score stood at 21-17 with a minute left in the game. The visiting team’s high-fives had seemingly been replaced by a row of frost-eyed men staring gloomily from the sidelines. What was a sure thing no more than a few minutes ago had vanished in the excitement of Piggy’s antics, leaving only a tenuous grasp on the score board. The ensuing kickoff landed deftly on the 15 and rolled down to the five, where it would be first and ten. As the team broke the huddle to try to run out the clock, 24 offensive eyes stared in astonishment through the facemasks. Piggy LaBunk was standing in the middle linebacker’s position, a sapling among redwoods with an insane smile on his face. Modestly prevents this reporter from stating whether or not there was a fear-enhanced scent of urine from the visitors’ front line. Nevertheless, as the ball was hiked, the tiny form of Piggy LaBunk was sailing over the center, his eyes feasting on the prize in the quarterback’s hands. The QB tried to dodge the crazy little man, but a grasp on his leg told him he had nowhere to go but down in his own end zone. The safety made it 21-19. To add insult to injury, they now had to kick the ball to the home team, the dream of a walkover victory turned into a nightmare attempt to escape with their dignity intact. The kicker made a solid contact with the ball as it sailed over the linemen of the home team and into the hands of a familiar sight. Is there a position little Piggy can’t play? Apparently not. Piggy started with a slow jaunt before kicking it into high gear at about the 35 yard line. His teammates tried to put up a solid front against the incoming horde, but Piggy sailed past them. The defensive machine tried to put up a wall before the speedster, but it was like literally trying to catch a greased pig. The final score: Visitors 21-Piggy LaBunk 25 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Kevin, Patrick, Barry and Richie were getting up from the carpeted hallway, their knees red and sore. In order to play against their six-year-old cousin Matthew, the older kids had to get down to his level. Little Matt loved to play Hallway Football. He would take the regulation football and plow into the much older cousins. The boys, meanwhile, would lift Matthew onto their feet and flip him over their own defensive line to have him land on the other side, the closet door/end zone in plain sight. Matthew’s mother was yelling to keep the noise down, a position echoed by Aunt Marian, the Grant boys’ mom. Patrick craned his neck over the brood. ‘Can we keep it down a little bit?’ he asked. Matthew looked back at the far end of the hall, the ball still in his hand and the glint of his nom de guerre, the great Piggy LaBunk, in his eye. ‘I’ll try’, it said.