“Keep your hands off my football.”

Football is kind of sacred. You don’t mess with football. You don’t say funny things about football.

Football is serious.

I was thinking the other day about how many things are a knife-edge from being something that would kind of bother us if we thought about it in the wrong light.

Like football.

If these big guys were fully lubed well moisturized* and dressed in tutus (that little dress that ballerinas use…how do you spell it? TWOTWOzzzzzzzz?), I think that it would be hard for the generally well-intentioned and mature audience to watch them go at each other.

We’d have a hard time watching that.

What if someone who didn’t know what they were talking about was describing what goes on down on the field to someone who knew even less than they did about the game?

They might say:

“OK…here’s the deal.  You have two groups of men dressed in different colored outfits. From what I understand, both groups of men want the ball.  One of the groups gets it at a time…then the other group has to try to take it away or wait for the men in the striped suits to give it to them.”

“When one group of men has the ball, they might throw it into the air…or they might try to run on the grass with it…or they might even kick it. You never know what is going to happen.”

“One thing that is sure to happen is that if you have the ball, someone from the other group will try and grab you and hold you and throw you on the ground so that they can jump on top of you. Often a bunch of the men in the group without any ball will jump on you also.”

“They will stay on top of you until the striped suit men blow a whistle to tell them to get off of you.”

“Sometimes it takes a while for the whistle to blow. When this happens, the men who held you on the ground will pat your bottom when you get to stand up. They want the ball….but they are still your friends, so they pat your bottom.”

“If something happens that is exciting, the crowd of people watching you hold each other on the ground will yell loudly.”

“People get excited to see other people grab each other or catch the ball before they get grabbed.”

“When the two groups of men stop grabbing each other, and the game is over, sometimes the people in the watching area will run on the grass and pull down the metal posts that poke up out of the dirt.”

“And that’s what we know as ‘football’ ”

And that’s why we only let people who know what they’re talking about discuss topics that matter.

Like football.

Do you see what I mean about it being creepy if the men in groups wore tutus and lubed moisturized* themselves before every game, though?

That would be FREAKING CREEPY.

It would completely change the nature of the game.

It wouldn’t be something to even think about.

It wouldn’t be right.

It wouldn’t even be AMERICAN.

*this is a postscript. “fully lubed” was too strong a choice of language….and prompted some confused and negative comments. It is a potent and scary image, though.  Unless you are talking about automobile maintenance, using the word “lubed” and “man” in the same sentence seems to provoke some strong feelings. I apologize for any psychic trauma my gaffe may have caused.  “Moisturize” is much less incendiary.