I PLAYED my first organized game of football back in fifth grade. Every autumn until the end of high school I put on shoulder pads, molded a mouthguard, hated wind sprints with the fury of every angry god, and joined a bunch of other mostly un-athletic knuckleheads on the gridirons of the greater Beaverton area. I loved it. In many ways, football was how I defined myself in those years. You know, it was more okay to be a big fat kid if you were utilizing that fat on the football field.
In eighth grade I tackled a kid and broke both of his legs. Everyone on my team was very impressed and I was mad stoked about it, because we’d been trained to believe that breaking a fellow child’s legs on the football field was a rad thing to do—as long as the tackle was clean. Again, I reveled in this glory, even though I probably only broke this kid’s legs because I weighed like 300 pounds, and that kid was eighth-grader-sized… but the laudations were there nonetheless. Real caveman shit. The triumphs weren’t even hushed, it was just, “YEAH, FUCK THAT 14-YEAR-OLD.” It wasn’t the only time I hurt another kid, it was just the most traumatic/celebrated.