This is the way I remember
it. For reasons that will become obvious I might have missed quite a
few things. Feel free to comment or correct me. There might even be
film of this somewhere. I'm not sure I'd want to watch it.
When the Gothenburg Giants
split up after the 1990 season I was one of the guys who followed
Coach Voge to form the Alelyckan Sundevils. I'll not bother with the
details of that here, suffice to say that in February 1991 there were
maybe a dozen players that had played 20 snaps or more of Football in
their lives. So as our first game, we took on the Swedish National
Team.
It was the first national
team ever picked for Sweden and they were having a mini-camp in
Gothenburg, ahead of their game against Holland. The way I recall it,
there was only one local player on that team, young inside linebacker
Olle Larsson, who was still playing with the Giants. I had nurtured
some hopes of making the squad as a cornerback or free safety but I
didn't perform very well during the trials in Halmstad. When Coach
announced that we were playing the national team, I remember asking
him what the hell for, we had had maybe ten practises by that time
and it was obvious we were going to get slaughtered. He replied
something along the lines of how all the opponents in the second
division would seem easy by comparison. Well, he got that part right.
It was also decided that
it wouldn't be an actual game, instead something called a scrimmage,
where their offense would run ten plays against our defense and vice
versa. Twice. The ball would be spotted in the same spot regardless
of the result of the previous play. So there's no actual score from
this game, no note in the history books.
The game would start at
Valhalla sometime late in the evening. It was dark and also colder
than a welldiggers ass, minus 18 degrees centigrade if I remember
correctly. I arrived about an hour ahead of kickoff, prepared to play
Free Safety, when I was approached by Coach who said our quarterback,
Micke Henriksson, had decided not to come. And that I would play
quarterback in his place. I had never taken a snap from center in my
life. I hadn't even played a single down on the offensive side of the
ball, ever.
– Uh, I don't know the playbook.
– That's fine, we don't
have one. You can just draw the plays up in the huddle.
It quickly became clear that if I didn't play, there would be no game. So I said OK.
It quickly became clear that if I didn't play, there would be no game. So I said OK.
I don't remember what play I called in the first huddle. Probably a fullback dive. It didn't matter. The second the center, Pertti, had snapped the ball, I was lying on my back, my face full of linebacker. The Alelyckan offensive line, assigned to protect my skinny ass (I was 6 feet 1, 160 pounds) had two experienced players, the other three hadn't played much, if anything. And now they were up against the best the country had to offer where everyone was competing for a starting position in the real game. The second play I managed to turn my body 180 degrees before I got hit by three linemen in the back. So this time I ended up face down on the turf. And when I say “turf” I really mean a half-inch thick frozen plastic carpet on top of concrete.
And on it went. After
five, maybe six (I hilariously even called a pass play in there
somewhere) plays which all ended with me at the bottom of a four-guy
pile I remember there was a timeout in which it was explained that if
I got injured, the scrimmage would be completely canceled. The
Swedish defense was urged to just pull me down instead of going for
full-speed collisions. That call, and the restraint from the defense
that followed, indubitably saved me from a lengthy hospital visit.
So, thanks guys.
I honestly don't remember
much more about those first ten plays, except that we never, not
once, crossed the line of scrimmage. We never got the ball out of the
backfield.
So when I got helped off by Pertti the center we were talking about practicing snaps and getting the line to play a lot tighter. But as soon as I got to the sidelines I was told to get back in and play safety. So I ran back in and just stood at the back. I remember I couldn't get my body to move or my head to focus on what the offense was doing. I don't think I had a single tackle. I had just spent every single atom of energy on avoiding to get hit and now I was supposed to look for opportunities for full-speed collisions. That didn't compute. Since we had most of our experienced guys on defense, and the Swedish offense wasn't very good, I think we did pretty well, but I might remember incorrectly. Then there was a short half-time break were only fools and rookies took off their helmets. I was neither, so I didn't have to tear my ears off to get the helmet back on. That's what playing football in winter means. You keep your helmet on outside.
And then there I was, back
in the huddle, drawing plays I just made up on the turf. We said we
wanted to get a first down, that the o-line needed to play really
tight and that we would go hard. First play was a run where the
halfback (Håkan D) got taught the hard way not to run upright. It's
one of the harder hits I ever saw. But he got up afterwards and
stayed in the game.
Since we had almost
exclusively run the ball I decided it was time to try a play-action.
Well, we had tried to run the ball. We still hadn't crossed
the line of scrimmage. Now, a play-action play is a pass play that
looks exactly like a run play. You get the defense to come forward
and disregard your receivers which leaves them open to receive a pass
and hey, presto, you got a touchdown. Or so the theory goes. The
quarterback needs to fake handing off the ball to a running back and
then hit his receiver with a forward pass.
So I did. I faked the
handoff which bought me a second to spot my tight end, Mario, on some
kind of Go-route, and I zipped (ha ha, probably not) the ball into
his hands before I got buried. He got hit hard but managed to hold on
to it. We had just gotten our first first down against the national
team. Of course, had it been a real game, we would have had about a
hundred negative yards at this time. But we didn't care. We
celebrated as if we'd won a Bowl game in the huddle.
We ran two more run plays
with predictable results. Nothing there. I decided that I hadn't been
hit for a while so I called another play-action play, where I would
do a bootleg and run with the ball myself. I still don't understand
how I got the courage to run this. It involved leaving the defensive
end behind me unblocked and hoping that I could sell the fake handoff
so well that he would leave me alone. If he spotted the ball he had a
free shot at my back.
Man, I still remember the
look in his eyes when I ran past him. I had completely sold the fake,
and almost stopped after the hand-off, with the ball held casually
against my thigh in a manner that would make any coach cry. But it
made the ball impossible to see if you were, say, a defensive end
right behind me. At any moment I was expected to get hit hard in the
back. And then I just ran around him as fast as I could. Suddenly
there was space, a lot of space, in front of me and I got past the
cornerback and I could for the first time that night see the end
zone.
One of the safeties got me
before I could get very far. It was enough for a first down, maybe 12
yards. Maybe more. After that, they hit me every play. We didn't get
a yard. I refused to play safety when it was over. I know that
probably no one else even remembers this night and that I had some
decent games afterward, but I still think getting those two first
downs under those circumstances is the best damn thing I ever did as
a football player.
