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.

A (Fairly) Good Tale

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a girl who was wise beyond her years. She was the third child of four children and the only girl. Her father was a Methodist minister, what people used to call a ‘circuit rider’ who would become pastor at whatever church he was sent to. The little girl was born in a town called Hope, Arkansas, which would become a famous place when another resident from there became President of the United States and a third resident became Governor of the state. But she was not slated for the political trail. She was of small-to-average height for a girl, with long, dark straight hair (which, if the summer was hot enough, sometimes grew a blond streak), small but intelligent eyes and a very wide smile that made you like her almost immediately. By the time she became a young woman, she also sported a ‘balcony you could do Shakespeare from’. Sometimes she wore glasses to correct her eyesight, but not for very long. Being the only girl among four boys, she couldn’t fit in as much as she would have liked. She was as tough as any boy her age, but the fact that she was a girl got in the way more times than not. She hung out with her mom, joined the choir in her father’s church and played with her brothers when she could, which was often. Sadly, she often did not have enough time to make long-lasting friends as she followed her family around the state to places with names like Decatur, Desha, Murfreesboro, Newport (where she eventually graduated high school) and Pottsville…well, for the last town, her family went there and a lot of her stuff went there, but the girl, now a young woman, did not follow. She went to college instead, in a place called Conway. Little did she know she would stay in this town longer than any place in her life. She took up several work-study jobs on campus, one of them as a secretary for the head of the Speech Theatre and Journalism Department. It was a small office that was right next to a very loud place, which was the campus radio station. Many was the time she would be typing away at some document or official paper (which she was very good at) when she would hear all sorts of whoops and hollers from the station next door. ‘What sort of person would work in a place like that?’ she would often ask herself. One day she had left the office for the short walk back to her dorm room when she spied two young men almost literally hanging out of the radio station window. One was a tousle-headed big-boned youth with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and a happy-go lucky smirk on his face. The other was a bit more austere, a tall, lanky man with as much black hair on his head as there was on his face. He looked like the end product of a relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Rasputin. “Hi…how would you like to have a deep and meaningful relationship?’ the tall boy joked. “Not today, I can’t. Catch me tomorrow.” she retorted. This was the start of a long friendship between the two. She would later find out he was born in Memphis and raised in Little Rock before moving to Conway when he was 13. He was also a Catholic, which wasn’t far from being a Methodist, but she didn’t fault him for that. He was one of seven children comprised of both brothers and sisters. She also found he was also a bit of a changeling. One day he would cavort around in cut-off military surplus, the next time he would be clean-shaven and in a three-piece suit. She preferred the latter look. For the next year or so, she went through her life in the dormitory, making friends and even a boyfriend who offered her an engagement ring. One day, she showed it to the tall boy who, for a split-second, looked like the world ended before reasserting himself to offer his congratulations. He hoped she didn’t notice his crest-fallen look for that brief moment. As it turned out, she had noticed. The ‘engagement’ didn’t last long. A short time later, the two would meet again, this time outside of the radio station. They had both gotten parts in a school play. She got the role of a teenaged waitress while he got the role of a drunken disgraced school professor who tried to pick her up for a date. The on-stage date didn’t work. Off-stage, it became another story. As time passed, they slowly became inseparable. He would visit her at her dorm room on the weekends or she would walk the long distance to his house, several blocks from campus. His mom and all his brothers and sisters took a shine to the girl almost immediately. Even his grandmother, who was very sick at the time, said she was a lovely young lady. Her parents took a little longer to find what their daughter had found in the boy, but eventually warmed to his charm and quirkiness. I’m not saying all was idyllic with the two. There had their arguments like any two people in love would, followed by reconciliation. He was also a bit slow on the uptake with his studies, preferring to spend his time either in the radio station or in the theatre. He was even put on academic probation a couple of times so that, by the time they were ready to graduate, she had caught up with him. She was there for him when his grandmother died, and later when his eldest brother tragically died as well. He would be there for her when her own grandparents and great-grandparents passed away. He even helped her family move a couple of times and was there again, this time as a son-in-law, when her own father passed away a few years later. All in all, they dated for about five years before he finally asked her to marry him at one of his sister’s wedding reception. Or she asked him…I forget. They were married a month after they graduated college in a Catholic ceremony co-officiated by her father and by the man who would become his step-father. His best man was the tousle-headed friend who first saw her walk past the station window all those years ago. By now, they were both working at a commercial radio station downtown. In fact, they borrowed their boss’ pick-up truck to drive to their honeymoon because their own car would not have made the trip. They moved into a little grey duplex between the college and downtown. She soon found a full-time job back at the college where she had graduated barely a year earlier. He stayed at the radio station. They found a community theatre group in town and kept doing plays together. Many was the time she was called to direct a show and found a place for her new husband. She became very good at directing, even through tech rehearsals she called ‘Go To Mexico Week’. They found a couple of other places to live in the interim. One was an old house where there were more mice than people. Another was on the second floor of a quadroplex they shared with a plethora of strange and unique individuals. Over the years, other family members would get married or get divorce and re-married. Eventually, they would become the oldest married couple on either side of their joined families. Shortly after he got his first full-time job, they discovered they would have a baby. This was after doctors had told them the chances were very small they would ever have children. “Ho ho”, they laughed. The first, a little girl, was born on the first day of spring before their tenth anniversary. Less than two years later, the new family welcomed a little boy. …Which leads us to the here and now. There are still the occasional disagreements, mostly over finances or raising the children, but the great love that had flourished all those years ago is still as strong as ever. They rarely end a phone call with anything but ‘I love you’. They still go out of their way to find at least one birthday or Christmas present that isn’t necessarily new, but has a special romantic or nostalgic connection. I don’t know if they will live happily ever after, but they’ve already lived happy longer than lots of more famous couples (Cruise and Kidman, for instance). Happy Birthday, Carla!