FOOTBALL - AN OUTDOOR SPORT
Jim Hite

Football!

It's a great game! I have loved football since I was a youngster cheering for my favorite high school team on Friday night and for Notre Dame since my first visit to the stadium where Notre Dame hosted Northwestern in 1945 on the frozen tundra of northern Indiana. I have enjoyed football from my personal participation in pickup games on vacant lots to the more organized variety.

And thinking of all the weather in which such games were played brings me to the topic of this column.

Football is an athletic contest made for the outdoors. It is a sport to be played in all kinds of weather. That is what makes the game unique.

When rain comes, tennis players and golfers head to the locker room and baseball players to the dugout, while basketball players never get out from under a roof and often never out of air conditioning!!

But not football. Good weather or bad, the game goes on.

Just a few weeks ago, the NAIA championship game between Carroll College and Sioux Falls in Savannah, Tennessee, was played in conditions to warm a true football player's (and fan's) heart. Rain, wet grounds, mud, and obliterated yard lines combined to make it all but impossible for the kicker to kick, the running back to make that cut, the quarterback to pass, let alone the receiver to catch. And pity the center, holder, and place kicker.

The next day saw several pro teams playing in temperatures at the freezing mark and below, in snow and wind, in terrible conditions.

But hey, this is football!! (where I shivered and froze with thousands of other fans as the wind swirled snow and rain around Lakefront Stadium cheering for the Irish against Navy and the Browns against the Lions).

With that background, you can see that I have difficulty with the idea of football played in a domed stadium.

Good grief!! Indoor football!!

Arena football is a whole other topic.

Several decades ago, Francis Wallace wrote a book entitled: Dementia Pigskin. The point of the volume is simple and to the point. Football players and fans are a bit crazy. They are not deterred by the elements, no matter how terrible. Nothing can keep them from the game.

On that Sunday a few weeks ago, the TV commentators asked viewers to tell what they thought of games played in the snow. What a question! That's what football is made for!

Certainly not for domed stadiums, artificial turf, or yard lines that are straight, even, and undisturbed. Come on!! We're talking football here, an athletic contest not made for the surreal atmosphere of an air-conditioned, enclosed stadium.

Football is made for cold, rain, mud, wind, snow, frozen ground.

Real football fans know this! All others are pretenders.