Just Kick It: Tales of an Underdog, Over-Age, Out-of-Place Semi-Pro Football Player
Nearing 40, standing five feet eight, weighing in at 160 pounds, Mark St. Amant was most definitely not a football player. He had never played a single down of real football in his life and even in the sports he did play, his greatest skill seemed to be choking when the game was on the line. So why on earth did he suddenly become, of all things, a semi-pro football kicker?

Fantasy football writer and self-described poster child for suburban-raised white boy Mark St. Amant tells the unlikely story of how he ditched his television and laptop to join an inner-city football squad the mostly African-American Boston Panthers, one of more than 600 semi-pro teams around the country. With warmth, insight, and his trademark offbeat, self-deprecating humor, Mark recounts the strides he made on and off the field and reveals the powerful bonds that developed among teammates young and not-so-young, struggling and successful, black, white, and Hispanic, all clinging tightly to their dreams and playing the game they love.

From couch potato to field goal kicker, Mark lived out a real-life football fantasy, discovering true teamwork, staring his lifelong fear of athletic failure in the face, witnessing testosterone-fueled hilarity both on and off the field, and achieving gridiron glory in ways he d never imagined.
"1103852008"
Just Kick It: Tales of an Underdog, Over-Age, Out-of-Place Semi-Pro Football Player
Nearing 40, standing five feet eight, weighing in at 160 pounds, Mark St. Amant was most definitely not a football player. He had never played a single down of real football in his life and even in the sports he did play, his greatest skill seemed to be choking when the game was on the line. So why on earth did he suddenly become, of all things, a semi-pro football kicker?

Fantasy football writer and self-described poster child for suburban-raised white boy Mark St. Amant tells the unlikely story of how he ditched his television and laptop to join an inner-city football squad the mostly African-American Boston Panthers, one of more than 600 semi-pro teams around the country. With warmth, insight, and his trademark offbeat, self-deprecating humor, Mark recounts the strides he made on and off the field and reveals the powerful bonds that developed among teammates young and not-so-young, struggling and successful, black, white, and Hispanic, all clinging tightly to their dreams and playing the game they love.

From couch potato to field goal kicker, Mark lived out a real-life football fantasy, discovering true teamwork, staring his lifelong fear of athletic failure in the face, witnessing testosterone-fueled hilarity both on and off the field, and achieving gridiron glory in ways he d never imagined.
13.99 In Stock
Just Kick It: Tales of an Underdog, Over-Age, Out-of-Place Semi-Pro Football Player

Just Kick It: Tales of an Underdog, Over-Age, Out-of-Place Semi-Pro Football Player

by Mark St. Amant
Just Kick It: Tales of an Underdog, Over-Age, Out-of-Place Semi-Pro Football Player

Just Kick It: Tales of an Underdog, Over-Age, Out-of-Place Semi-Pro Football Player

by Mark St. Amant

eBook

$13.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

Nearing 40, standing five feet eight, weighing in at 160 pounds, Mark St. Amant was most definitely not a football player. He had never played a single down of real football in his life and even in the sports he did play, his greatest skill seemed to be choking when the game was on the line. So why on earth did he suddenly become, of all things, a semi-pro football kicker?

Fantasy football writer and self-described poster child for suburban-raised white boy Mark St. Amant tells the unlikely story of how he ditched his television and laptop to join an inner-city football squad the mostly African-American Boston Panthers, one of more than 600 semi-pro teams around the country. With warmth, insight, and his trademark offbeat, self-deprecating humor, Mark recounts the strides he made on and off the field and reveals the powerful bonds that developed among teammates young and not-so-young, struggling and successful, black, white, and Hispanic, all clinging tightly to their dreams and playing the game they love.

From couch potato to field goal kicker, Mark lived out a real-life football fantasy, discovering true teamwork, staring his lifelong fear of athletic failure in the face, witnessing testosterone-fueled hilarity both on and off the field, and achieving gridiron glory in ways he d never imagined.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781416542414
Publisher: Scribner
Publication date: 10/17/2006
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
File size: 432 KB

About the Author

Mark St. Amant is also the author of Committed: Confessions of a Fantasy Football Junkie. Mark has regularly appeared on ESPN Classic and has contributed to The Boston Globe Magazine. He lives in Boston with his wife and daughter.

Read an Excerpt


Prologue: Outside the Lines

When I delved into the history of semi-pro football, I discovered that trying to dig up the roots of football at this level could quite possibly cause me an aneurysm. Stalin's Russia -- Winston Churchill famously described it as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" -- had nothing on semi-pro football. Records were spotty and contradictory. Accurate statistics were virtually nonexistent. But I needed to clear this up (as much as possible, anyway) and try to find out just where semi-pro football leagues came from and to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for sustaining it over the decades.

Enter Steve Brainerd.

Steve, a member of the Minor League Football Hall of Fame and the United States Football League Association Hall of Fame, is widely considered one of the foremost historians and researchers on semi-pro/minor league/amateur football (see, there are even three names for it). Whatever the name, he knows all about the approximately 800 teams and 70-odd leagues currently playing semi-pro ball from Maine to Hawaii, and where their roots were planted.

Thirty years ago Brainerd and his wife, Wisconsin natives, perhaps tired of harsh midwestern winters, packed up their car and headed for California. Along the way, they planned to visit friends in Tucson. Their car, however, had a different itinerary. Somewhere in the deserts of New Mexico, it broke down, forcing the Brainerds to use up all their money getting the car repaired, after which they limped into Tucson. "But then we thought, 'Hmm, this seems like a nice place,'" Steve tells me, "Why don't we just stay here?" So they did. And they've been there for three decades, happy with their decision not to continue on to California.

"LA is a great place to visit," he says, "but I now know I wouldn't want to live there. Although, if we're talking about semi-pro football, they've got it all over California. They've got teams coming out of their ears -- LA, Orange County, San Diego, up north. And they had some great minor league teams back in the thirties and forties. I hope that if LA ever gets an NFL franchise back, they call them the 'Bulldogs.'" The Bulldogs, he explains, were a minor league team who, in the late thirties, played exhibition games against NFL teams, the supposed cream of the American football crop, the best of the best, teams perpetually stocked and restocked with Heisman-winning talent from the Harvards, Yales, Notre Dames, Armys, and Navys of the eastern football world. The results? The minor league Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League won five, lost four, and tied three. "They were a very, very good football team," Steve says, with obvious admiration.

Why were they were so good? Thanks to their location, the Bulldogs and other big-name teams like the Hollywood Bears had a virtual monopoly on all the California football talent. Remember, the westernmost outpost of pro football in those days was Chicago, home of the Bears and Cardinals. There was no San Francisco 49ers, no Oakland Raiders, no San Diego Chargers. As far as football was concerned, Southern California might as well have been Neptune. This was long before ESPN and SportsCenter's Top 10 plays, scouting combines, rankings services, streaming video feeds, and other invaluable cogs in the massive, unstoppable, worldwide football recruiting machine with which today's football scouts and recruiters can find even the most obscure football talent in Mountain Goat, Oregon, or Cow Pasture, Texas, unearth that diamond in the rough, and, in minutes, deliver everything from his yards-per-carry, to his 40-yard-dash splits, to his DNA and Wunderlic scores straight to the BlackBerry of the head coach at, say, University of Miami, all with the pinpoint accuracy, speed, and precision that would make Jack Bauer and his CTU pals on 24 envious. But in Southern California, in the 1930s, as the Bulldogs exemplify, even the most talented, deserving players flew under the NFL's radar.

That said, the stockpile of local talent couldn't all be blamed on undeveloped technology. While deserving West Coast white players were also no doubt ignored or simply not discovered by what would eventually become the NFL, race also played a major role in the lack of western players in the eastern-dominated pro ranks. In 1920, the owners/representatives of 13 midwestern football teams, including future Chicago Bears legend George Halas (then player/coach of the Decatur Staleys) and Pittsburgh's Art Rooney, assembled at an automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, to form an organized league so the area could have a true champion. Thus the American Professional Football Association (APFA) was born.

The admission fee for the APFA was $100 per team. They also agreed not to use any player who still had remaining college eligibility, in part to preserve the "gentlemanly" integrity of the college game, a drastic difference from today's standards.

Mostly hoping to capitalize on his notoriety, they named Jim Thorpe the league's first president. And notoriety was the extent of what Thorpe brought to the table. "Thorpe was a terrible administrator," writes author Bill Crawford in his Thorpe autobiography, All-American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe. "He just did not give a rat's ass about finances or social niceties necessary to grease the wheels . . . in the rough and tumble new league." However, Thorpe served during more open-minded times, racewise. Initially, talented black players were commonplace in the APFA: Robert "Rube" Marshall of the Rock Island Independents; Paul Robeson and Frederick Douglass "Fritz" Pollard for Akron; Fred "Duke" Slater with the Chicago Cardinals; Jay Mayo "Inky" Williams with the Hammond Pros. After all, one of the goals of the league was to put the best product on the field, sell tickets, and make money. (In fact, Pollard became the first African-American professional head coach when he took the reins at Akron in 1920.)

But then, in 1933, in the midst of the Depression, the relatively young NFL drew the color line. Another black player did not appear on an NFL field until after the Second World War. Just like its counterpart in baseball, football had closed the door to talented black athletes. NFL owners feared they would be harshly criticized, and their games possibly boycotted, if black men were allowed to collect football paychecks while white men stood in bread lines and lived in shantytowns. (In later decades, George Preston Marshall, the innovative yet closed-minded owner of the Washington Redskins, the last team to break the color barrier, would famously remark, "We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.") This meant that even one of the biggest football stars in the country at the time, Kenny Washington, the UCLA two-time consensus All-American, was barred from playing in the NFL because of skin color. Later, another UCLA football star (who was also a pretty good baseball player) was prohibited from joining the NFL ranks: Jackie Robinson. Today these two would be no-brainer first-round NFL draft picks; in the 1930s and 1940s, however, they were forced to toil in the relative hinterlands of the minors and semi-pros for the Bears and Bulldogs.

While these are extreme examples from a distant past, one thing remains constant: there is always a margin. There will always be players who strive to "make it," whether that means making the proverbial leap from high school football to college, or college football to professional. But there are far more who fail to make it. Whether by choice or circumstance, there will always be players who end up toiling away on the gritty fields of football's most anonymous yet ubiquitous level, and doing so purely for the love of the game.

That's what semi-pro football is all about, and that's where my story begins.

Copyright © 2006 by Mark St. Amant

Table of Contents


CONTENTS

Prologue: Outside the Lines

1. No Crying in Football

2. Kicking Off

3. The Village Idiot

4. Kickoff (Sort of)

5. Practice, Practice, Practice

6. Taking on the Champs

7. White Panther

8. A Win in Sight

9. In Good Hands

10. Jenry Gonzalez

11. Taking on a Dynasty

12. Mayhem

13. Man in the Mirror

14. Pressure Kicks

15. Lights Out

16. Put Me in, Coach

17. Snakebit

18. Bitches and Apologies

19. Mudders

20. Poetic Justice

21. Bananas

22. Lame Duck

23. Lightning Strikes

24. A New Day

Epilogue: The Point After

Acknowledgments

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews