Play for the Right Reasons

6^th January 2015

Dear Cassi,

Being a man as large as I am it should be no surprise to you that I was encouraged to play football in high school. Never having a love for sports I agreed but it was a terrible fit. For one I was one of three white men on a team full of the kind of folks who boo the American flag and talk about how much they hate this country.

       

The players hated me for being who I was and the coach hated me because I wasn’t dedicated. Well, he felt that all players needed to have sixth period Physical Education and as I couldn’t take that class he never let me play. He couldn’t keep me off the team, though he should have, but he didn’t have to let me participate.

       

Now I was so large a man that when I did get to practice, when too few players arrived for us to scrimmage, I could stop the varsity team from moving the ball. As a freshman I was proud of myself for this fact, but it gave me no playing time. 

       

Then I would have made a poor player. I was large and bulky but slow, slow because of the depression that marred me, and slow because I was so big. If I had played I never would have been able to maintain for the game.

       

Then again, most of the players only preformed their drills when the coach wasn’t watching, and no one wanted to win so much as they wanted to play. I gained an experience from football but it was only the merest of anecdotes in my life.

Play for the right reasons, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal