It's Sunday afternoon and the Packer game is on. I don't really watch much football anymore. But they're supposed to have a pretty good team this year so sometimes I'll tune in just for curiosity's sake if I'm not outside working in the yard or something. I won't pay much attention, though, mainly just glance at the game between chores.
Today they're playing at home, in Green Bay. And on the way through the family room with a load of laundry I hear a voice address the crowd over the Lambeau Field PA system: "Tackle by Noble, second down and six."
The voice brings me back. I know that Guy. That's Mr. Gary Knafelc. Former Green Bay Packer tight end. Father of my former best friend. Former receiver coach at Premontre High School. The person who first taught me what it means to catch a ball. I mean what it really means.
"Catch the ball," I hear him say. "Catch the ball."
That was the extent of his coaching--coaching he reserved pretty much for me among that motley lot of high school receivers. He was a proud man and a man of few words, and he wasn't much interested in kids who were never going to learn what he meant when he said something. But he could tell I had a little talent. And a lot of brains.
In practice I'd run patterns and be wide open every time. I was good at that part. But every once in a while the pass would slip through my hands. When it did and I'd be trotting back to the huddle Mr. Knafelc would signal me over to him. So I'd take a little detour.
He'd rest his elbows on my shoulder pads and lock his hands behind my head. He'd bend over--he is a big man--and put his forehead against my helmet and look me in the eyes and I'd try to hold his gaze. We'd stand that way for a moment. Then he'd say, "Catch the ball," very calm and slow, and let me go. I'd continue back to the huddle, but before I could get there he'd call, "And Mitz," he always called me Mitz for some reason, "One more thing." I'd turn, "Yes sir"
"Catch...the...ball."
Maybe it was because of his general economy with words. Maybe it was because of his ramshackle upbringing in which he never learned the right words to express what he meant. Or maybe it was because the act was so simple and so complex and the words to describe it have never been there to learn in the first place.
But I started to learn early what he meant behind the words. And he knew I did, too. That's why he'd say it, only to me.
It had nothing to do with watching the ball move into your hands. Or with cradling rather than fighting it as it arrived. Or with keeping your fingers loose as they made contact with the leather. Or with extending your hands only at the last moment lest you throw yourself off-stride. Or with keeping your elbows beneath the low passes and then rolling with the catch. Or with dragging your feet to stay in bounds near the sidelines. Or with using your body to shield the airborne spiral from nuisance opponents. Or with letting your body go limp when you're stretched out across the middle and are sure to absorb a major hit. Or with tucking it tight in a fast snap before impact. What he meant had nothing to do with any of that stuff.
What he meant had to do with attitude. With desire. Almost with religion. In fact, his coaching involved not so much how to catch a ball as why.
You catch it because it's yours and you want it.
When you are a receiver and the ball is in the air and it is intended for you, you are nothing if you don't have a powerful, exclusionary sense of that intent and that you-ness. Of merit. This is the moment you have lived for. This is the quintessential you. This is right. This is all goodness. How not to catch it?
There are no possibilities. No matter of it. No conditional sense or subjunctive tense. There is only the ball and you, and it is yours and nothing, nothing, nothing can disrupt that reality.
It is a matter of will, sometimes the ultimate act of will. I caught passes in hostile crowds or while absorbing tremendous impacts, catches in situations that were beyond what my modest physical abilities should allow. I willed the ball into my hands and my hands to the ball and I held it because it was mine and it was right.
Too many athletes confuse will with concentration, as if mere concentration can settle the ball mystically into your hands. This ain't magic, bud. It's the rigid code of good and bad, the granite dogma of body and desire. I'm reminded of the bumper stickers I see these days: "visualize world peace." Visualize? Hell, do! Seize! Gobble!
"Ya gotta want it," was the phrase Mr. Knafelc would use second most often. "Catch the ball. Ya gotta want it."
These days I find myself saying, even yelling, those very words to teammates in the basketball court at the Oconomowoc YMCA when they let a rebound slip through their fingers or they allow themselves to get boxed away from the boards. It's that kind of stuff lets evil creep into the world.
Ok, so I was too small to hold the occasional glances of pro scouts. And probably not fast enough. But my senior year at Brown University I caught over forty passes and dropped only one. One. In an insignificant situation. And you know what happened when I dropped it? The entire moral structure of my world turned upside down. The foundation of what was me and what was true cracked a little and trembled. And I was driven, driven to seek redemption, to make the world right again. And I did. It happened a little the next pass, and the next, and the next week when seven came my way and I seized them from the air and from my opponents and from the jaws of chaos, and life seemed clean and good again. Ya gotta want it.
Anyway, that's what Mr. Knafelc meant I think. I wonder if he still means it and if he still teaches it to kids on the football field or to adults off it, and if they learn it. Me, I'm not so into salvation and redemption and moral imperatives anymore, or football. As I say, I just watch the games in passing because the chores need to be done. Maybe it's a sign I've grown up. Or given up.
- Editor's Note: I continue to be haunted by the life transforming possibilities of the phrase, "Catch the ball." Our thanks to Mitchell for another evocative article. He is author of "Marbles" in the April-June 1998 issue.
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