The Penalty Box: What It’s Like To Score A Touchdown
September 7, 2022 at 12:05 a.m.
The Penalty Box: What It’s Like To Score A Touchdown
By Roger Grossman-
When you go to a basketball game and the margin is wide and the home team puts in people who don’t get to play a lot, and one of them scores, the place goes crazy.
Why? Because scoring is a big deal.
If you think about it, scoring is the whole point of sports—the winner is determined by who scores the most points, right?
So, one of things I enjoy doing is asking Tiger football players during Tiger Talk on Saturday mornings (the ones that score touchdowns, anyway) what it’s like to score a touchdown during a game on Friday nights.
The way the players describe that feeling will vary and they use a variety of colorful words to express what carrying that odd-shaped object across the other team’s line of demarcation means to them.
It does, in a certain way, violate a promise I made to my mom more than almost 40 years ago when she hugged me and sent me off to college to not ask anyone “how do you feel?”
She hated that.
But the goal of having kids on the radio on Saturday mornings is for all of us to know the players better.
What do they want to do when they graduate? What is the hardest class they are taking right now? Who do they hang out with when they are not playing football?
The one common denominator that runs through all who get asked about what it’s like to score a touchdown is what happens in the three seconds that immediately follows the end of the question.
It starts with a huge smile, and then a pause.
The question forces the responder into a flashback. I am asking them to think back to a moment in their lives where they achieved their team’s goal. A moment where they did something that caused the crowd to roar as loud as anytime that night, and maybe as loud as they will ever remember in their entire lives.
I asked one of the Tiger players that question this Saturday, and his response was real and genuine, and the listening audience reacted to it well.
As I drove away from the station, I realized something. I don’t know why it had never hit me before, but my brain was aligned just right in that instance, and I had a bit of revelation.
No, I have never played a down of organized football in my lifetime. I did play a lot of football in my back yard by myself and even more in the big, empty, grassy lot behind Robert Winenger’s house in Argos.
It’s not the same.
But I did do something in my athletic life that does match the sensation of scoring a football touchdown.
As an Argos Dragon soccer player, I played left wing in the days when teams would play in a form that had four players in offensive positions. I was left-footed, so that made me a good candidate for that spot on the field.
We were very good, and my role was to cross the ball into the middle of the field where my teammates could either head it or kick it into the net.
We did that a lot.
I was a set-up guy, but I remember the night that I scored my first goal.
I was a sophomore, and we were playing at Michigan City’s Ames Field against Marquette (yes, the same site of the renovated Ames Field that Warsaw plays Michigan City at in football).
With about 12 minutes to go and the scored tied, the ball moved up the right side of the field and I saw Marquette’s players all moving over to that side. Normally, I would have stayed out wide to the left to punch the ball back into the middle should it be deflected out that way.
This time I moved into the middle, and the ball found me. Our top goal scorer saw me standing unattended just outside the penalty box in the middle of the pitch and rolled a perfect pass onto my left foot.
I took one big step and played it with my left instep past the goalie, who had shifted to the middle of the goal as the ball did.
He had no chance.
It rolled past him and across the line gently into the side netting, and then spun to the back corner.
There were a lot of Argos fans there that night, and the roar was deafening in my ears. I know my teammates were yelling their approval as they surrounded me, but I could not make out a single word of it.
That feeling, watching that ball roll across the line to give my team the game-winning goal is the same feeling that these kids have been telling me about scoring touchdowns all these years.
Argos celebrated it’s 1,000th boys’ soccer game in school history Saturday—maybe that’s why I made the connection.
I feel bad about missing that celebration, but I will never forget the fact that I was an Argos Dragon soccer player, nor will I ever forget that moment that ball rolled to me, and what happened next.
Nor will I ever not understand what kids are feeling the next time I see one of them score a touchdown.
When you go to a basketball game and the margin is wide and the home team puts in people who don’t get to play a lot, and one of them scores, the place goes crazy.
Why? Because scoring is a big deal.
If you think about it, scoring is the whole point of sports—the winner is determined by who scores the most points, right?
So, one of things I enjoy doing is asking Tiger football players during Tiger Talk on Saturday mornings (the ones that score touchdowns, anyway) what it’s like to score a touchdown during a game on Friday nights.
The way the players describe that feeling will vary and they use a variety of colorful words to express what carrying that odd-shaped object across the other team’s line of demarcation means to them.
It does, in a certain way, violate a promise I made to my mom more than almost 40 years ago when she hugged me and sent me off to college to not ask anyone “how do you feel?”
She hated that.
But the goal of having kids on the radio on Saturday mornings is for all of us to know the players better.
What do they want to do when they graduate? What is the hardest class they are taking right now? Who do they hang out with when they are not playing football?
The one common denominator that runs through all who get asked about what it’s like to score a touchdown is what happens in the three seconds that immediately follows the end of the question.
It starts with a huge smile, and then a pause.
The question forces the responder into a flashback. I am asking them to think back to a moment in their lives where they achieved their team’s goal. A moment where they did something that caused the crowd to roar as loud as anytime that night, and maybe as loud as they will ever remember in their entire lives.
I asked one of the Tiger players that question this Saturday, and his response was real and genuine, and the listening audience reacted to it well.
As I drove away from the station, I realized something. I don’t know why it had never hit me before, but my brain was aligned just right in that instance, and I had a bit of revelation.
No, I have never played a down of organized football in my lifetime. I did play a lot of football in my back yard by myself and even more in the big, empty, grassy lot behind Robert Winenger’s house in Argos.
It’s not the same.
But I did do something in my athletic life that does match the sensation of scoring a football touchdown.
As an Argos Dragon soccer player, I played left wing in the days when teams would play in a form that had four players in offensive positions. I was left-footed, so that made me a good candidate for that spot on the field.
We were very good, and my role was to cross the ball into the middle of the field where my teammates could either head it or kick it into the net.
We did that a lot.
I was a set-up guy, but I remember the night that I scored my first goal.
I was a sophomore, and we were playing at Michigan City’s Ames Field against Marquette (yes, the same site of the renovated Ames Field that Warsaw plays Michigan City at in football).
With about 12 minutes to go and the scored tied, the ball moved up the right side of the field and I saw Marquette’s players all moving over to that side. Normally, I would have stayed out wide to the left to punch the ball back into the middle should it be deflected out that way.
This time I moved into the middle, and the ball found me. Our top goal scorer saw me standing unattended just outside the penalty box in the middle of the pitch and rolled a perfect pass onto my left foot.
I took one big step and played it with my left instep past the goalie, who had shifted to the middle of the goal as the ball did.
He had no chance.
It rolled past him and across the line gently into the side netting, and then spun to the back corner.
There were a lot of Argos fans there that night, and the roar was deafening in my ears. I know my teammates were yelling their approval as they surrounded me, but I could not make out a single word of it.
That feeling, watching that ball roll across the line to give my team the game-winning goal is the same feeling that these kids have been telling me about scoring touchdowns all these years.
Argos celebrated it’s 1,000th boys’ soccer game in school history Saturday—maybe that’s why I made the connection.
I feel bad about missing that celebration, but I will never forget the fact that I was an Argos Dragon soccer player, nor will I ever forget that moment that ball rolled to me, and what happened next.
Nor will I ever not understand what kids are feeling the next time I see one of them score a touchdown.
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